Good Devs Are Expensive Until Disaster Strikes

That suspicious side-eye moment when your coworker who normally submits PRs titled "fixed stuff" with zero comments suddenly delivers a masterpiece of documentation. Either they've been replaced by an AI, they're interviewing elsewhere, or management finally threatened to fire them. Nobody transforms into a model contributor overnight without ulterior motives. Trust issues activated.

The true mark of seniority isn't writing complex algorithms or architecting scalable systems—it's the art of staying silent during meetings that could've been emails. That awkward monkey face perfectly captures the existential crisis of realizing you're paid a small fortune to occasionally unmute and say "sounds good to me" or "I'll circle back offline." The real six-figure skill? Knowing when your input adds zero value but still collecting that direct deposit. Silent wisdom is apparently worth its weight in gold.

The glossy corporate brochure vs. the employee handbook they don't print. That "global team" really means "you'll be on Zoom at 3 AM explaining to people 12 timezones away why your code broke production while the VP who insisted on the deadline sleeps peacefully." The smile in the first panel is the same one you'll practice in the bathroom mirror before each all-hands meeting where they announce another "exciting global collaboration opportunity."

Adding more project managers and consultants to a sinking project is like adding more people to the top deck of a sinking boat. "Why aren't we moving faster?" asks the clueless executive as the poor dev in the water desperately tries to paddle. Classic corporate solution: throw more management at the problem while the actual workforce drowns. The Brooks' Law special – adding more people to a late project just makes it later. But hey, at least there's plenty of people to document the failure in a retrospective PowerPoint!

Ah, the eternal DevOps dilemma! On the left, we have fancy cloud services with their shiny logos and enterprise pricing that makes your CFO cry. On the right, those dusty beige towers sitting under someone's desk that were "temporarily" put there in 2003. The beauty of those floor desktops? They're practically free if you raid the storage closet, they're ALL YOURS (no AWS outage notifications at 2am), and that sweet, sweet fan noise that sounds like a jet engine during compile time. Who needs expensive white noise machines? Sure, cloud gives you scalability, but nothing scales quite like the pride of telling management "we saved $10k this quarter by using Dave's old gaming PC as our build server."

Day 1 of a project: "I'm going to write beautiful, clean code with proper documentation and test coverage." Day 30 of the same project with 7 new requirements and 3 shifted deadlines: "Just make the damn thing work and we'll fix it in version 2." The customers don't care about your elegant architecture—they just want to see something flashy that doesn't immediately crash.