The brutal reality of career progression in software development. You start out getting absolutely wrecked by slop code, unrealistic management expectations, and the ever-growing comprehension debt from that legacy codebase nobody wants to touch. But then you discover the ultimate coping mechanism: going home and working on your own projects where YOU make the architectural decisions, YOU set the deadlines, and YOU actually understand what the code does because you wrote it last week, not some developer who rage-quit in 2014. It's the developer's version of "I'm not stuck in traffic, I AM traffic" – except it's "I'm not avoiding work problems, I'm just solving BETTER problems." The irony? You're literally doing more work to escape work. But at least your side project doesn't have 47 layers of abstraction and a build process that requires a PhD in DevOps to understand.