Hourly-rate Memes

Nothing says "job security" quite like being the only person who knows where the bodies are buried in production. Got replaced by an AI SWE? Cool, cool. Now you're a contractor charging triple your old rate because guess who they're calling at 3 AM when everything's on fire? The beautiful irony here is that companies think they're saving money by replacing engineers with AI, right up until they realize the AI doesn't know why the deployment script needs that one random sleep(5) command or which environment variable typo is actually load-bearing. Suddenly that $200/hour contractor rate doesn't seem so bad when your entire revenue stream is returning 500s. Pro tip: Always leave at least one undocumented quirk in your infrastructure. It's not job security, it's "knowledge transfer optimization."