Gatekeeping Memes

The hill I'll die on: self-proclaimed "vibe coders" who just copy-paste from Stack Overflow without understanding the fundamentals are the tech equivalent of people who put "school of hard knocks" on their LinkedIn. These are the same folks who call a function 27 times in a loop because they don't know what a parameter is, then wonder why their app crashes when more than three users log in simultaneously. Sure, anyone can make blinking LEDs with ChatGPT nowadays, but when your production server catches fire at 2AM, no amount of ~aesthetic~ VS Code themes will save you.

The eternal CS degree debate, summarized perfectly by Ron Swanson's energy. Self-taught devs showing their GitHub profiles to gatekeepers like "I can do what I want." Meanwhile, bootcamp grads and Stack Overflow power users are nodding vigorously in the background. The industry's obsession with credentials is hilarious when half the senior devs can't remember their algorithm classes anyway. Your ability to Google error messages and understand the docs is the real certification here.

Ah yes, the mythical "Real Dev" – that legendary creature who apparently needs a NASA supercomputer to run VS Code. Nothing says "I'm a serious programmer" like convincing yourself you need specialized hardware for "heavy compiling" when cloud services have been handling this for years. The gatekeeping is strong with this one! "Real devs use different machines" – meanwhile the person who wrote this is probably compiling their Hello World program on a gaming rig they convinced their parents was "for school." Pro tip: The best code is written on whatever device you have when inspiration strikes. Some of the world's most successful software was built on "consumer products" by "codemonkeys" who were too busy shipping to worry about their dev cred.

The CS freshman starter pack is brutally accurate! They write "Hello World" once and suddenly have 4 programming languages on their LinkedIn. Their entire development environment consists of VS Code and GitKraken because the terminal is "scary." Their idea of deployment? Submitting assignments through Canvas. They'll spend hours hunting for that missing semicolon while sharing Boromir memes, and their entire personality revolves around the Minecraft-inspired "noob vs pro" dichotomy. The gatekeeping begins before they've even built anything substantial!

Ah yes, the mythical "real programmer" – that elusive creature who apparently codes everything from scratch using nothing but pure brain power and cosmic vibes. Meanwhile, in reality, the rest of us mortals are over here frantically Googling syntax, copying from Stack Overflow, and begging AI to fix our broken code at 3 AM. The gatekeeping is strong with this one! Next thing you'll tell me "real programmers" only code on punchcards while standing barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways.