Nothing triggers a real senior dev quite like seeing some fresh-faced 21-year-old on Instagram claiming "Senior Developer" in their bio. Kid probably just finished their bootcamp last Tuesday and suddenly they're out here acting like they've survived production incidents at 3 AM, dealt with legacy code from 2003, or had to explain to management why "just make it work like Facebook" isn't a valid requirement. Senior isn't just about knowing React hooks or writing clean code. It's about the battle scars—the time you accidentally dropped the production database, the merge conflicts that made you question your career choices, the technical debt you inherited from three developers ago who all quit. You earn that title through years of pain, not by watching YouTube tutorials and calling yourself a "10x engineer." But hey, LinkedIn influencer culture has everyone speedrunning their careers these days. Next thing you know, teenagers will be listing "CTO" because they deployed a Next.js app to Vercel.

Ten years in the industry and the only visible progress is a slightly fancier mousepad. Same grumpy expression, same outdated monitor, same existential dread—but hey, at least the desk accessories got a minor RGB upgrade. The real kicker? You're probably making 3x the salary now but still feeling just as dead inside. That's the senior developer lifecycle for you: more money, same problems, marginally better peripherals. Some call it career growth, others call it a slow descent into comfortable misery with better lighting.

The eternal question that haunts every developer's soul. Someone asks if you enjoy programming, and suddenly you're having an existential crisis staring at your laptop. "Fun" implies joy and satisfaction, but when you're knee-deep in debugging, dealing with legacy code, fighting merge conflicts, and questioning why your code works in dev but not in prod... "complicated" becomes the understatement of the century. It's like asking someone in a toxic relationship if they're happy—the answer requires a therapist, not a yes or no. Programming is that special blend of creative problem-solving, soul-crushing frustration, euphoric breakthroughs, and wondering why you didn't become a gardener instead. You love it, you hate it, you can't live without it, and you definitely can't explain it to non-programmers without sounding unhinged.

Computer Science curriculum: carefully designed courses covering fundamental algorithms, complex data structures, and enterprise database systems. Reality: you barely stayed awake through those lectures. But programming memes? That's where you're suddenly a PhD candidate. Every recursive joke, every "works on my machine" reference, every semicolon tragedy - you're fully engaged, taking mental notes, probably contributing your own material. Turns out the real education was the memes we collected along the way. At least those taught us that production always breaks on Friday at 4:59 PM.