Process Over Progress

Being the "debugging wizard" on your team is a curse disguised as a compliment. Sure, you're respected for your skills, but now you're drowning in everyone's nightmare tickets while they work on the shiny new features. Your reward for competence? More pain. The ultimate programming career trap—excel at something difficult and that's all you'll ever do again.

That beautiful moment when you've closed all your IDE tabs, pushed your commits, and are mentally halfway to happy hour... then your Slack explodes with "Critical update: ALL HANDS ON." The universe has a special talent for waiting until you've mentally checked out before dropping production fires in your lap. It's like the code knows you're smiling and decides "not today, friend." Freedom was so close you could taste it. Now you're being dragged back into the trenches for an emergency that will inevitably be traced back to someone's "minor change" that "shouldn't affect anything."

The formal frog has entered a new circle of development hell. That moment when a senior dev slides into your DMs with a "quick question" about your PR, and suddenly you're staring at 13,000 downvotes worth of technical debt that someone wants YOU to fix. The green +2,533 represents the handful of sympathetic souls who understand your pain, completely dwarfed by the red sea of "nope" from everyone who knows better than to touch that radioactive codebase. Welcome to git blame roulette, where the prize is becoming the new owner of legacy code nobody has understood since 2014.

Ah, the classic developer self-deception pipeline! First stage: "Clean code? Pfft, that's for people with time to spare." Second stage: "It's just a prototype, don't judge!" Third stage: "I'll definitely refactor this... someday." Final stage: "Well, this spaghetti code is now a load-bearing wall in production and my boss wants new features yesterday." The transformation from confident developer to technical debt clown is complete! The greatest fiction in software isn't science fiction—it's the myth of "I'll clean it up later."

The career progression of programmers, as told by burial containers. From wooden coffins to ancient Egyptian treasures – the difference? Documentation that doesn't make your colleagues want to mummify you alive. Let's be honest, writing clean code is one thing, but those who take the time to explain why they implemented that bizarre regex pattern at 2AM deserve pharaoh-level treatment in the afterlife. The rest of us? Just toss us in a pine box when we inevitably die from caffeine overdose.

Ah yes, the infamous "I Promise To Cleanup After The Refactor" bridge. Just like how every developer swears they'll come back and clean up their temporary hacks after shipping the feature. Five years later, that "quick fix" is now a load-bearing monstrosity that nobody dares to touch. The bridge is still standing though, so technically it works in production! And just like legacy code, it's covered in the vines of technical debt that keep growing while management insists on building new features on top. Remember folks, temporary solutions are the most permanent architectural decisions you'll ever make.