Roleplaying At Work

When your tech lead says "this should only take an hour" but you're still getting paid for the full seven. Suddenly, that impossible legacy codebase doesn't seem so bad when you're collecting a senior dev salary to stare at your IDE for 6 hours and 50 minutes after making one tiny commit. The sweet satisfaction of being overpaid for underdelivering - the true developer dream.

So you picked up a Scrum book thinking it'd be all sunshine and productivity improvements. The poster promises magical collaboration and efficient sprints. You open it with hope in your heart. What you actually get: an endless hellscape of daily standups that take 45 minutes, retrospectives where nothing changes, sprint planning meetings that could've been an email, and story point debates that make you question your entire career path. The book forgot to mention that "ceremonies" is just corporate speak for "meetings that will drain your soul." The real kicker? You still have to write code between all these meetings.

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!

The corporate-to-English dictionary nobody asked for but everyone needs. After 15 years in this industry, I've developed a finely-tuned BS detector for job listings. "Cutting edge technology" just means you'll be using React like literally everyone else. And that "fast-paced environment"? Translation: your hair will be on fire while management keeps asking why you're not coding faster. My personal favorite is "urgent need" – code for "our last developer rage-quit and left zero documentation." The whole "rockstar developer" thing is particularly rich... sure, I'd love to work 80-hour weeks for the same pay as 40! And don't get me started on "self-starter" which really means "we have absolutely no idea what we're doing, but we'll blame you when it fails." Print this out and keep it next to your desk for the next time you're job hunting. You'll need it to decode what you're actually signing up for.

That moment when your vacation brain fog clears and you suddenly remember why you needed that vacation in the first place. Two weeks of sun and relaxation didn't fix that legacy codebase—it just gave you enough mental clarity to fully appreciate the horror that awaits. The look of existential dread as reality sets in: "I've spent a week forgetting about that unmaintainable microservice architecture, and now I have to pretend I'm excited about 'tackling challenges' in our morning standup."

When your entire job is testing one new feature per year at Apple! 😂 The meme shows the legendary "waiting" Pablo Escobar meme format but reimagined for Apple's QA team who supposedly have the cushiest job ever - just chilling around all year waiting for that single new feature to test. Meanwhile at other tech companies, QA engineers are drowning in sprints and backlogs! That's what I call work-life balance taken to the extreme!