Ah, the classic "we want to exploit you but make it sound like opportunity" post. This CTO thinks wanting a guaranteed salary is a red flag, but his actual red flags are waving harder than a windmill in a hurricane: ✅ "Lines of code" as a performance metric ✅ Gamified "leaderboard" to pit devs against each other ✅ Mocking stable income as "playing it safe" ✅ Expecting "tens of thousands of lines per day" (physically impossible) ✅ Belittling testing and maintainable code Translation: "I want desperate coders who'll work 80-hour weeks chasing a bonus they'll never quite reach while I pay them peanuts." After 20 years in this industry, I've learned that any company measuring productivity by line count is where good code goes to die. The truly elite developers I know write less code, not more.

Oh, the eternal job security of dealing with clients who say they want a "simple website" but actually mean "Facebook but better" with a budget of $200. The AI apocalypse might be coming for some jobs, but programmers can sleep soundly knowing that no robot will ever decipher "make it pop" or "I'll know what I want when I see it." Our superpower isn't coding—it's somehow building functional software from requirements that change faster than JavaScript frameworks.