Please Backlog It (Until I'm On Vacation)

The fresh-faced programmer, high on caffeine and optimism, wonders why features take so long. Meanwhile, the battle-scarred veterans watch in silence, knowing the eldritch horrors that await—legacy code, unexpected dependencies, and the inevitable "just one small change" from marketing. The manager stands between them, blissfully unaware they're about to lead everyone into the technical debt abyss. That new dev will learn soon enough that in software, time estimates are just elaborate fiction.

The duality of programmer confidence is brutal. Solo coding? You're basically the Hulk of software engineering—unstoppable, crushing bugs with your bare hands, refactoring entire codebases before breakfast. But the moment someone peers over your shoulder? Suddenly you're typing with your elbows, forgetting how to declare variables, and googling "how to exit vim" for the 500th time. The cognitive processing power required to both code AND maintain the illusion that you know what you're doing is mathematically impossible. It's like Schrödinger's developer—simultaneously brilliant and clueless until observed.

The painful truth nobody warns you about in bootcamp! You dream of crafting elegant algorithms and building the next revolutionary app, but reality hits you with 8 hours of meetings, documentation, and explaining to project managers why adding that "small feature" would require rewriting the entire codebase. Meanwhile, your actual coding time has been reduced to those precious 15 minutes between the "quick sync" and the "end-of-day check-in." The modern developer: part therapist for legacy code, part translator between business and technology, and occasionally—if the stars align—allowed to write a few lines of code.

The five stages of code review grief, compressed into four panels. First, you're riding high on that dopamine rush when your code actually works. Next, you swagger into the senior dev's office like you've just solved P=NP. Then comes the inevitable soul-crushing "You did it wrong" feedback, followed by the final stage: complete existential collapse as you realize your approach was fundamentally flawed and those 8 hours of work were essentially a very educational waste of time. Classic senior dev move—they don't tell you HOW it's wrong, just that your entire existence as a programmer is questionable.

The well-dressed manager stands confidently at the front of the boat, sunglasses on, looking important... while the engineering team frantically rows in the back, doing all the actual work. Ten years in the industry and nothing changes—managers taking credit for demos they didn't build, presentations they didn't make, and features they couldn't code. Meanwhile, we're drowning in technical debt and midnight deployments. But hey, at least someone's there to tell us we're "not meeting expectations" during performance reviews!

The modern tech company hierarchy in one perfect image. Junior dev happily letting AI do the heavy lifting while the senior dev is stuck reviewing 500 lines of algorithmic word vomit. Meanwhile, the project manager is just pointing a gun at everyone's back screaming about deadlines. And there sits the CEO, blissfully unaware in his ivory pew, dreaming about firing the entire dev team because ChatGPT told him it could do their jobs. Ten years of experience just to babysit robot output – exactly what we all went to college for!