Good Devs Are Expensive Until Disaster Strikes

That face when the product owner describes a completely vague feature, you have zero clue how to implement it, but somehow everyone agrees it's a "5-point story." In Agile planning poker, story points are supposed to measure complexity, but they've become the universal "sounds complicated but not too complicated" metric. It's the software equivalent of answering "fine" when someone asks how you're doing while your code is silently burning in production. The best part? Next sprint, that innocent 5-pointer will mutate into a 13-point monster with seven undocumented dependencies and a legacy system integration nobody mentioned in the planning meeting.

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!

Oh. My. GOD. The eternal nightmare of Agile development in one soul-crushing image! 😭 Some poor, innocent developer asking when they can FINALLY stop these never-ending two-week sprints, only to be told the most horrifying truth in software development: YOU NEVER ESCAPE! The sprint backlog is basically Hotel California - you can check out any time you like, but you can NEVER LEAVE! Just an endless cycle of standups, story points, and sprint retrospectives until you either retire or your keyboard crumbles to dust from your tears. Welcome to development hell, sweetie! 💅

The evolution of trust in software development: Regular Pooh: Not sharing code at all. Suspicious. Probably hiding something terrible. Fancy Pooh: Publishing source code. Ah, a developer of culture and transparency. Demonic Pooh: Creating a GitHub repo with just an executable. The digital equivalent of saying "here's a mysterious candy, stranger, just put it in your mouth."

That single stick propping up the entire infrastructure stack is what we in the business call a "load-bearing hotfix." Sure, we've got Kubernetes clusters, microservices, and five layers of abstraction, but it all hinges on that one bash script written by an intern who left three years ago. The stick is labeled "vibe coding" because that's literally how it works—nobody understands it, but it has good vibes, so we don't touch it.

Classic case of "let's solve the problem by creating another problem." You've got 14 competing auth tools causing chaos, so naturally the galaxy-brain solution is to build a 15th one that'll somehow unite them all. Spoiler alert: it won't. Every senior dev has lived through this nightmare. Some architect gets promoted, reads one Medium article about "unified authentication layers," and suddenly you're spending six months building Yet Another Auth Tool™ that'll be abandoned halfway through when they pivot to microservices or whatever's trending on HackerNews that quarter. Meanwhile, the 14 existing tools continue doing their thing, your new "universal" solution gets adopted by exactly one team (yours, begrudgingly), and the cycle continues. But hey, at least someone got their promotion out of it.