Wish Granted: Be Careful What You Ask For

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?"

The recruiter promised you a tech paradise of Python, C++, SQL, and embedded systems. Six months later, you're a broken shell of a human manually copying data between Excel sheets. The thousand-yard stare says it all. Your CS degree is collecting dust while you're becoming a human VLOOKUP function.

Look, we've all been on that project where the tech stack is dead serious business... and then there's SQL. While the combat-ready languages are out there doing the heavy lifting with their compiled efficiency and type safety, SQL's just vibing in its clown outfit, joining tables and dropping databases with the same energy as someone who brought snacks to a SWAT raid. The irony? That colorful weirdo is probably the one keeping the whole operation running. Ten years of optimizing queries will do that to you.

Kid: "Can we stop and get some C++?" Mom: "We have C++ at home." The C++ at home? Rust with its infamous borrow checker slapping you with unsafe fn main() warnings every time you try to do literally anything fun with memory. It's like asking for a sports car and getting a tank with 47 seatbelts and a breathalyzer. Sure, it'll get you there... after you fill out the proper paperwork in triplicate and promise not to touch anything shiny.

Oh boy, the classic bait-and-switch of coding course ads! The top shows this pristine little C++ snippet promising "Success" if you just set c_foundation_course = true and Focus = 100 . Meanwhile, the Drake meme below tells the actual truth - rejecting the fantasy that coding = success and embracing the harsh reality that coding = false (aka "why is my code still broken at 3am?"). It's the perfect representation of what happens when expectation.js meets reality.exe and throws an uncaught exception: Error: Promised_Career_Not_Found .

The paranoia is real. Nothing says "trust issues" like wrapping your calculator in parentheses just to make absolutely sure it calculates 2+3*4 as 2+(3*4) instead of (2+3)*4. That's the difference between getting 14 and 20, and I'm not taking any chances with my code logic. The calculator says it follows PEMDAS, but do I believe it? Absolutely not. Those extra parentheses are basically the programming equivalent of wearing both a belt AND suspenders.