How Does It Keep Happening

Romance is cute and all, but have you ever spent 96 hours straight hunting down a missing semicolon? That compiler error keeping you up at night, chugging energy drinks while your bloodshot eyes scan 2,000 lines of code for the fifth time. And then—at hour 97—you find it hiding between two perfectly innocent statements. The sweet relief is better than any relationship could ever be. Until the next syntax error shows up tomorrow.

C++ developers writing 1000 lines of memory management and pointer arithmetic just to shave 3 milliseconds off execution time while Python devs accomplish the same task during their coffee break. Sure, your code is 100x faster, but I've been home for 6 hours already.

The CS freshman starter pack is brutally accurate! They write "Hello World" once and suddenly have 4 programming languages on their LinkedIn. Their entire development environment consists of VS Code and GitKraken because the terminal is "scary." Their idea of deployment? Submitting assignments through Canvas. They'll spend hours hunting for that missing semicolon while sharing Boromir memes, and their entire personality revolves around the Minecraft-inspired "noob vs pro" dichotomy. The gatekeeping begins before they've even built anything substantial!

Visual Studio's autocomplete turning a simple comparison operator into a bitshift monstrosity is the digital equivalent of asking for a hammer and receiving a nuclear warhead. The editor's overzealous "helpfulness" transforms if (a into if (a > b) faster than you can say "undo." Nothing like watching your innocent conditional suddenly become a bizarre bitwise operation that'll have your compiler laughing at you behind your back.

When you make that "tiny, insignificant" change to your code and suddenly your compiler lights up like a Christmas tree on steroids. The car dashboard warning lights are basically the compiler screaming "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!" in binary. We've all been there—changing a single semicolon and somehow breaking 47 seemingly unrelated functions. That moment when you realize your "quick fix" just turned your elegant codebase into a dumpster fire that would make even Stack Overflow veterans weep.

The irony of Bjarne Stroustrup—you know, just the guy who created C++ —having only one green square on his GitHub contribution graph is chef's kiss material. Recruiters everywhere are frantically updating their "red flags" documentation. Meanwhile, the person who invented the language that powers half the world's critical infrastructure would probably get auto-rejected by the ATS systems he helped make possible. Next interview question: "So, Mr. Stroustrup, what would you say you actually do here?"