It Should Be The Highest Priority

OMG, the CRUSHING REALITY of tech jobs in four tiny panels! 😭 First day: you're dragging a BOULDER of responsibilities while sweating buckets. Then the team lead introduces the shiny new hire who's all "excited for opportunities" while you're LITERALLY DYING. They promise the newbie will "help with your load" and what happens? Now you're BOTH crushed under separate boulders! The tech industry doesn't distribute workload—it just finds more rocks to drop on innocent developers! The circle of suffering continues, and the only thing getting lighter is your will to live! Welcome to software engineering, where your reward for hard work is... MORE HARD WORK!

Ah, the classic "promotion" trap. You're happily coding away, solving problems, delivering features, when suddenly management decides your reward for being competent is... more responsibility with barely any compensation increase. That moment when you realize "great opportunity" translates to "we need someone to handle all the meetings while still doing their regular work." The cat's face says it all - from peaceful contributor to panicked manager in four panels flat. The real kicker? Six months later they'll wonder why your code output has decreased. Pro tip: sometimes the best career move is staying exactly where you're happy.

The universal law of programming nobody teaches in CS degrees: "If it works, don't touch it." That moment when your janky code with 17 nested if-statements and zero comments somehow passes all tests, and you back away from the keyboard like you're defusing a bomb. The code is held together by digital duct tape and prayers, but hey—ship it! Future you can deal with that technical debt... or better yet, whoever inherits your codebase after you've conveniently switched teams.

The robot overlord declares AI will replace programmers if it gets "clear customer needs and detailed specs" while below, a product manager sits calmly stating "the customer want a button that does stuff." Plot twist: programmers' job security isn't threatened by AI but protected by the eternal vagueness of requirements. The mythical "detailed spec" is rarer than a bug-free first commit. Even quantum computers couldn't parse "make it pop" or "just like Amazon but better."

The emotional damage of hearing "that feature won't be deployed" hits harder than any dog bite. You spent 3 days optimizing that algorithm, refactoring legacy code, and writing pristine documentation... only for management to casually toss it in the digital trash bin because "users won't notice it anyway." The dog might not bite, but management's casual dismissal of your work is the real psychological doberman attack. Somewhere in a parallel universe, there's a git branch with all our rejected masterpieces, living their best lives.

When I'm coding alone, I'm Patrick in a lab coat - sophisticated, focused, methodical. But the second I share my screen for pair programming? Suddenly I'm beach Patrick - frantically smashing at the keyboard with a hammer, forgetting basic syntax, and typing with the confidence of someone who just discovered computers yesterday. The duality of dev life is real. It's like my brain has two git branches and I can't merge them properly.