Career change Memes

The programmer's career trajectory - a four-part tragedy: From innocent childhood dreams of sports stardom, to the teenage engineering phase (where calculus hasn't crushed your soul yet), to the reluctant "fine, I'll try coding" compromise at 18... it all culminates in the inevitable YouTube channel where you explain why you're quitting tech to pursue your real passion: making videos about quitting tech. The silent screams of a thousand Stack Overflow searches have led to this moment. Your IDE is now Final Cut Pro, and your only function is the subscribe button. The ultimate exception: career expectations unhandled.

Startup devs are basically the dark side of the coding force. After two years of being the entire engineering department, security team, DevOps specialist, and occasional office plant waterer, you emerge with a chaotic skillset no bootcamp could ever teach you. Then you strut into a corporate job with your janky battle scars and unholy knowledge of duct-tape solutions that somehow work in production. The big company HR thinks they're getting a "Junior Developer" but what they're actually getting is a chaos wizard who's seen things no developer should see and lived to tell the tale. Your powers have indeed doubled—along with your caffeine tolerance and ability to fix impossible bugs with zero documentation.

Ah yes, the classic "$800,000 bootcamp" that promises to transform you into a software engineer in just 3 months by teaching you *checks notes* approximately 87 programming languages, including some that barely exist anymore. Nothing says "legitimate education" like cramming Fortran, COBOL, and Assembly alongside React and TypeScript into 90 days. The "if you can't find a job you can spit on our faces" guarantee is the cherry on top of this scam sundae. Spoiler alert: The only thing you'll master in 3 months is how to lose $800K faster than a startup with free snacks and ping pong tables.

SWEET ESCAPE ROUTE DETECTED! When the code has finally broken your spirit and your soul is as fragmented as your codebase, there's only ONE SOLUTION! Abandon ship! Flee the trenches of actual programming and ascend to the promised land of project management where you can torture others with deadlines instead of torturing yourself with debugging! Just trade your keyboard for a Gantt chart and POOF – suddenly you're the one asking "why isn't this done yet?" instead of sobbing into your energy drink at 3 AM. The ultimate developer career hack – if you can't fix the bugs, manage the people who will!

The only documented case of a developer experiencing genuine happiness at work - submitting their resignation letter. That moment when your coworker notices you're smiling for the first time since you inherited that legacy codebase with zero documentation and 8,000 TODOs. Nothing sparks joy quite like typing that final git commit with the message "Someone else's problem now" and knowing you'll never again have to attend those 2-hour sprint planning meetings where the product manager keeps saying "how hard could it be to add just one more feature?"

The four horsemen of tech career desperation! When the code stops compiling and the paychecks might follow suit: Plan A: Become a crypto day trader. Because nothing says "stable income" like watching green and red candles while having seven heart attacks before lunch. Plan B: Professional gambling. Trading Stack Overflow reputation for actual poker chips. The odds might actually be better than debugging that legacy codebase. Plan C: Find a rich elderly partner. Swapping "dependency injection" for just "dependency." Hey, explaining what an API is for the 47th time is still easier than explaining why your PR broke production. Plan D: Become a drug kingpin. From distributing packages via npm to... well, distributing "packages." At least the user feedback is more consistent.