The Scary Part

The evolution of a developer in its natural habitat. Junior devs naively believe documentation exists somewhere in a mythical folder. Meanwhile, senior devs have transcended the need for written instructions because they've internalized every painful bug, every midnight hotfix, and every legacy codebase nightmare. After years of trauma, they've become one with the code. They don't read documentation—they remember the mistakes that led to its creation. The knowledge isn't written down because it's etched into their souls alongside their will to live.

The moment your boss asks you to revisit that legacy codebase you abandoned six months ago. You swagger in confidently, only to discover your tests are as broken as your promises to "document everything properly next time." Red error messages as far as the eye can see. Time to mysteriously develop a sudden case of food poisoning.

Remember pulling all-nighters to code that entire e-commerce platform from scratch for your "final project"? Fast forward to your professional life where writing a simple validation function has you like: "I've contributed enough to capitalism today." The greatest scam in tech is that we wrote entire operating systems for free as students, but now get paid six figures to update a button color and call it a sprint. Work smarter, not harder – that's what the salary is really for.

Nothing quite like standing on the beach of responsibility while a tsunami of work priorities crashes down on you. Meanwhile, you're just there thinking, "But what if we rewrote everything in Rust though?" Every developer knows that critical bugs, customer requests, and pending tests are important... but have you considered the dopamine rush of starting a completely unnecessary rewrite in a trendy language? Sure, the codebase works fine now, but imagine how elegant it could be! The backlog may be crushing you, but that rewrite will definitely solve all your problems. Trust me, I've abandoned this exact project six times already.

The eternal programmer's fantasy: "uninterrupted deep work." This poor soul finally carves out time to enter the mythical flow state, only to be immediately bombarded with notifications from every department imaginable. Manager needs an "urgent" call (it's never urgent), QA has an "ASAP" request (it can wait), Design wants a "quick call" (nothing is ever quick), and HR needs "5 mins" (which is corporate-speak for "30 minutes minimum"). The final panel showing the programmer banging their head against the laptop is the most realistic code documentation I've ever seen. This isn't a meme—it's a documentary of our daily suffering.

Day 1 of a project: "I'm going to write beautiful, clean code with proper documentation and test coverage." Day 30 of the same project with 7 new requirements and 3 shifted deadlines: "Just make the damn thing work and we'll fix it in version 2." The customers don't care about your elegant architecture—they just want to see something flashy that doesn't immediately crash.