Haters We Are

Nobody tells you the truth in engineering school. We don't implement CI/CD because it's "industry best practice" or because some architecture astronaut said so. We do it for that sweet, sweet dopamine hit when all the build checks turn green. It's basically developer cocaine. The satisfaction of seeing five successful builds in a row might be the only thing keeping some of us from switching to careers in gardening.

Ah, the battle-hardened senior dev vs. the fresh-faced junior. The senior is literally taking arrows from all sides—office politics, changing requirements, and those ever-looming deadlines—while still finding time to compliment the junior's CSS button. It's the perfect metaphor for tech career progression. By the time you reach senior level, you're not just writing code—you're a human shield absorbing corporate chaos while trying to mentor the next generation who think their biggest achievement is centering a div. The junior has no idea what's coming. None of us did. One day you're excited about button styling, the next you're in eight hours of meetings discussing "synergy" while your Jira tickets multiply like rabbits.

The modern developer's immunity to recruiter spam has reached legendary status. After years of "Hi {first_name}" messages and "exciting opportunities" that pay in exposure and free snacks, we've evolved strict filtering criteria. Six figures? Remote work? No agile ceremonies where I pretend to care about story points? Suddenly the recruiter has our attention. It's not that we're difficult—we've just been burned enough times to know exactly what we want. That awkward silence when the recruiter realizes they can't offer any of those things? Priceless. Almost as valuable as the 4 hours of my life I'll never get back from that "quick technical chat" that turned into implementing a binary tree from scratch.

Ah, the special hell of long-running PRs. You started that feature branch with such optimism three months ago, and now it's a fossil record of your coding journey while the main branch zooms ahead like it's running from your merge conflicts. 342 commits behind master is practically a different timeline at this point. Your branch isn't just divergent—it's practically in another dimension where Git's merge algorithm will eventually have an existential crisis. The only thing more painful than the inevitable rebase will be explaining to your team why you're still asking about the health of a branch that should have been merged or euthanized months ago. But hey, at least you've got a sense of humor about your impending Git disaster!

The existential dread of Git merge conflicts perfectly captured! The top panel shows the classic "two buttons" dilemma with "Current Change" (HEAD) and "Incoming Change" (develop branch), while the terminal shows the dreaded merge conflict markers. The bottom panel reveals the true horror—a sweaty developer in full panic mode facing the impossible choice of which code to keep. Nothing turns a confident developer into a nervous wreck faster than those <<<<<<< HEAD markers appearing in your previously pristine codebase. The real skill isn't writing code—it's surviving merge conflicts without having a complete mental breakdown!

The classic software development hierarchy of attention! While developers lovingly cradle shiny new features like a precious baby, documentation and testing are barely kept afloat, gasping for air. Meanwhile, accessibility, internationalization, and localization? Those poor souls have been dead at the bottom of the ocean since the project kickoff meeting. Product managers be like: "We'll definitely prioritize i18n in the next sprint!" *Narrator voice*: They did not, in fact, prioritize it in the next sprint.