Expectations vs. Reality: The Programming Experience

Hollywood sells us the fantasy of glowing screens with floating code and Matrix-style binary. Meanwhile, real programming is just staring into the void – sitting on a bench questioning your life choices, slouching at a desk at 3AM wondering why your function returns undefined, or pacing around an empty pool trying to mentally trace that recursive algorithm that's eating all your memory. The glamorous digital future they promised vs the existential crisis I signed up for.