It's An Open Secret

The eternal corporate blame game in its natural habitat. Nobody actually knows how the feature works because the documentation disappeared into the same void where missing socks and project timelines go. QA points to Product, Product points to Engineering, and Engineering points right back because that's how we roll in software development. Meanwhile, the customer is sitting there wondering why they pay for this circus. The real documentation was the friends we made along the way.

The career progression nobody warns you about: from actually building stuff to just talking about building stuff. Junior devs naively spend most of their day coding and learning, blissfully unaware of their future. Senior devs still manage to code but sacrifice learning time for meetings. And then there's the final boss form - Lead Dev - whose entire existence is just back-to-back meetings where they reminisce about "the good old days when I used to code." The teeth-gritting bear at the bottom is every lead dev internally screaming while scheduling yet another "quick sync" that could've been an email. Career advancement is just trading your IDE for a calendar app.

The circle of AI delegation is complete! Senior dev thinks they've discovered a brilliant management hack by treating juniors like neural networks and writing detailed prompts for them. Meanwhile, the junior is just copying those prompts straight into ChatGPT and letting the actual neural network do the work. It's basically prompt engineering inception - the senior dev is unknowingly prompt engineering for an AI through a human middleman who's adding zero value to the process. This is peak 2023 software development efficiency!

The one-person army known as "indie game developer" in their natural habitat. While AAA studios have entire departments for each role, indie devs are sitting there with name tags for Producer, Director, Actor, Editor, Writer, and Creative... because that's just Tuesday morning before coffee. The other 37 job titles didn't fit on the table. Budget? What budget? Sleep schedule? Never heard of her. But hey, at least no one can reject your pull requests when you're the entire git history.

Developer: "This task will take 3 months to complete." Project manager: "Best I can do is 8 story points." The classic time-estimation standoff where developers give realistic timelines and management responds with arbitrary story point allocations that somehow translate to "finish it by Friday." Agile was supposed to save us, not destroy us.

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!