First Day In Job Be Like

When someone innocently asks why you know Romanian geography so well, and you have to explain that implementing A* pathfinding means you've traversed every possible route between Bucharest and Cluj-Napoca about 47,000 times in your test cases. The chess board with the AI textbook is chef's kiss – because nothing says "I'm a normal person" like having Russell & Norvig's brick of a book memorized while your pathfinding algorithm treats European cities like graph nodes. Sure, you could just say you like geography, but where's the fun in hiding the fact that you've optimized heuristic functions using Romanian cities as your dataset? The Traveling Salesman Problem hits different when you're actually trying to visit every Romanian city in minimum time.

The face every senior dev makes when some kid who just discovered "Hello World" starts dropping hot takes about the industry. That classic list of naïve programming opinions is what we veterans call "peak Dunning-Kruger." Sure, LeetCode will definitely prepare you for building enterprise systems that handle millions of users. And yes, we senior engineers just type "how to code good" into Google faster than juniors. Nothing says "I've never built anything real" quite like claiming backend is just "hitting APIs." Eight years of experience? More like eight minutes on a JavaScript tutorial.

When everyone's out here treating ChatGPT and Copilot like their personal coding assistants, and you're just... not. You've somehow made it through an entire year writing actual code with your actual brain, and now you're wearing that smug superiority like a badge of honor. While your coworkers are prompting their way through PRs, you're out here manually typing semicolons like it's 2019. The look says it all: "I still remember what a for loop looks like without asking an AI." Whether that's admirable or just stubborn is up for debate, but hey, at least your GitHub contributions are authentically yours.

The classic "change my mind" format gets an AI twist. Guy's sitting there with his coffee, confidently declaring AI won't steal jobs—but with that crucial asterisk that people who actually know how to integrate it will be the ones doing the stealing. Meanwhile, there's literally an "Eden AI" paper on his table and a robot lurking in the background. The irony is thicker than legacy code comments. It's the perfect representation of the current tech landscape: those panicking about AI replacing developers versus those quietly building automation tools that make three developers do the work of thirty.

The tech industry's collective amnesia is truly spectacular. First, we survived the video game crash of '83, then the dot-com implosion, followed by crypto's rollercoaster of disappointment. Now we're watching the AI hype train barrel toward the same cliff while techbros insist "but this time it's different because GPT-5 and 6!" It's like watching someone confidently build a sandcastle below the tide line for the fourth time. History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme... with a neural network-generated beat drop.

Someone just discovered ChatGPT and thinks they're a full-stack developer now. They proudly announce they've built "an entire website" and when asked to share it, they casually drop a Windows file path like it's a URL. Because nothing says "I'm a web developer" quite like sending C:\Users\ben\Downloads\index.html as if everyone has access to Ben's laptop. The skull emoji really sells the confidence here. They genuinely believe they've replaced an entire development team with a chatbot that probably generated a centered div with Comic Sans. Meanwhile, actual developers are sitting there wondering if they should explain localhost, deployment, or just let natural selection run its course. The AI revolution is here, folks—and it's stored locally in someone's Downloads folder.