Programmer salary Memes

The classic delusion of programmer exceptionalism, beautifully illustrated by Buzz Lightyear's character arc. At the top, we have the confident declaration "I'm a programmer, I am rare, pay me more" – the battle cry of every dev who just learned their first framework. Meanwhile, the bottom shows the harsh "Reality": shelves stacked with identical Buzz figurines, representing the actual job market flooded with programmers who all think they're special snowflakes. The tech industry's favorite fairy tale: believing you're a unique space ranger when you're actually mass-produced in a factory called Bootcamp™. Your "rare" skills? Yeah, there are about 10,000 Medium articles teaching those exact same skills to everyone else right now.

Someone's been checking their bank account after buying that new M2 MacBook Pro and 4 different mechanical keyboards this month. Let's be real—the closest most of us get to being "sugar daddies" is splurging on premium GitHub tiers and paying for IDEs we could technically get for free. The brutal reality check that your $120K salary feels like minimum wage after rent in San Francisco and those AWS bills you forgot to turn off. Nothing says "wealthy bachelor" like eating ramen while debugging at 1AM because you can't afford both DoorDash AND that new RTX graphics card. Now get back to optimizing those algorithms instead of your dating profile. The only thing getting any attention tonight is your pull request.