Screw You Broadcom

The quintessential DevOps paradox! First panel: angrily complaining there's not enough coding in your job while dreaming of elegant algorithms and beautiful functions. Second panel: absolute terror when faced with actual coding tasks because you've spent the last 8 months writing YAML files and debugging Jenkins pipelines. It's like training for a marathon by exclusively eating energy bars, then being shocked when your legs don't work on race day.

You set up a cute little home server to host your personal projects, maybe run Plex, store your files, tinker with Docker containers... and suddenly everyone at the family gathering wants you to explain what it does. Next thing you know, Uncle Bob wants you to "fix his Wi-Fi" and your non-tech friends think you're running a crypto mining operation. The swear jar stays empty because you've learned to keep your mouth shut. But that "telling people about my home server when I wasn't asked" jar? That's your retirement fund. Every time you can't resist explaining your beautiful self-hosted setup, another dollar goes in. The worst part? You know you're doing it, but the urge to evangelize about your Raspberry Pi cluster is just too strong. Pro tip: The moment someone shows mild interest, you're already mentally planning their entire homelab migration. Nobody asked, but they're getting a 45-minute presentation anyway.

Oh honey, someone said "microservices" in a meeting and suddenly the entire engineering team went feral and split their beautiful monolith into 47 different services that all call each other synchronously. Congratulations, you've created a distributed monolith with extra steps and network latency! 🎉 The unmasking here is BRUTAL. You thought you were being all fancy with your "microservice architecture," but really you just took one tangled mess and turned it into a tangled mess that now requires Kubernetes, service mesh, distributed tracing, and a PhD to debug. When Service A needs Service B which needs Service C which needs Service A again, you haven't decoupled anything – you've just made a circular dependency nightmare that crashes spectacularly at 2 PM on a Friday. The whole point of microservices is LOOSE COUPLING and independent deployability, not creating a REST API spaghetti monster where changing one endpoint breaks 23 other services. But sure, tell your CTO how "cloud-native" you are while your deployment takes 45 minutes and requires updating 12 services in the exact right order. Chef's kiss! 💋

The tech industry's time paradox strikes again! Imagine helping create Kubernetes and still not having enough experience for a job requiring Kubernetes skills. The recruiter wants 12 years of experience for a technology that's only 10 years old – classic tech hiring logic. It's like asking for swimming experience before water was invented. Next they'll want 5 years of experience with tomorrow's framework.

The gradual descent into clown makeup as you troubleshoot a connection issue that was self-inflicted all along. Nothing quite captures the soul-crushing realization that you wasted hours debugging when your VPN was silently sabotaging everything. First you try random commands like sudo pacman -Syu (the Arch Linux equivalent of "have you tried turning it off and on again?"), then restart Docker, then consult colleagues who suggest the classic "sudo reboot" fix... only to discover your Sweden VPN was the culprit the entire time. The real joke is that we've all done this. Multiple times. And we'll do it again next week.

You know you're in trouble when the entire company's infrastructure is basically a Jenga tower held together by one senior dev who knows where all the bodies are buried. Dave's the guy who wrote that critical bash script in 2014 that nobody dares to touch, maintains the deployment pipeline in his head, and is the only person who remembers the prod server password. He's on vacation? Good luck. He quits? Company goes down faster than a poorly configured load balancer. The best part? Management keeps saying they'll "document everything" and "reduce the bus factor," but here we are, three years later, still praying Dave doesn't get hit by that metaphorical bus. Or worse, accept that LinkedIn recruiter's message.