We Should Probably Have Another Meeting

The startup dev experience in one image! That moment when you realize you're not just writing code—you're also the DevOps engineer, QA tester, product manager, and somehow also handling customer support tickets. Nothing says "we're scaling fast" like having one developer frantically juggling the entire tech stack while the founders are busy pitching to VCs. The mythical "full-stack" developer finally revealed: it's just one sleep-deprived person with 17 different Slack channels open and an IV drip of espresso.

Task estimation in software development is basically just high-stakes gambling with your career. "Shouldn't take long" is the biggest lie in tech, right after "we value work-life balance." The range between "an hour and 11 months" perfectly captures that moment when you know the requirements are vague, the codebase is a nightmare, and three different managers are asking for status updates. Meanwhile, the product owner is already telling clients it'll be done by Friday. Pure fiction, just like those story points we assign in sprint planning.

The AUDACITY of my brain to get hyper-fixated on some random side project while my main project gasps for air like a drowning child! Meanwhile, the company's revenue-critical project? HONEY, that's a full-on skeletal remains situation—decomposing at the bottom of the ocean while I'm over here coding a useless Chrome extension that sorts my bookmarks by color! The project manager is sending increasingly desperate Slack messages, but I simply cannot be bothered when I'm THIS close to optimizing my side project's loading time by 0.03 seconds! PRIORITIES, am I right?!

Ah, the mythical code review in startup land! While established companies have rigorous PR processes with multiple approvers and nitpicky comments about your variable naming conventions, startups operate in the "move fast and break production" paradigm. Your code gets merged straight to main with zero eyeballs on it because there's no time for pesky quality checks when you're disrupting industries and burning through Series A funding. The best code reviewer you'll get is the exception that crashes the app at 2 AM, forcing you to debug your own spaghetti code while chugging energy drinks. Remember: in startup world, it's not a bug—it's an undocumented feature waiting for the next hotfix!

That moment when the entire dev team is discussing some trendy new paradigm and you've been nodding along for 45 minutes straight. Vibe coding isn't real—it's just what happens when you're six meetings deep and everyone's using buzzwords that weren't in the documentation yesterday. The real programming technique is looking confident while frantically Googling under the table.

Developer: "The interface is super intuitive." Meanwhile, the user is trying to enter the doghouse through the roof because nobody bothered with a user manual or tooltips. Happens every sprint when UX design is an afterthought and the PM is breathing down your neck about deadlines. The real intuitive interface was the friends we confused along the way.