I Am A Developer (Just Not During Interviews)

Content My code at 2:30AM deciding it wants to work now: You can rest now.

Behold! The MOST REALISTIC tech success story you'll ever see! 🙄 Just learn JavaScript, and BOOM—instant millionaire by 17! Swimming pools! Mansions! All from a $20 book and some if-else statements! Meanwhile, the rest of us are debugging the same error for 6 hours straight and celebrating when our CSS centers a div correctly. The audacity of these LinkedIn fairy tales is the true masterpiece of fiction—more creative than any code I've ever written! Next week: "How I became a trillionaire by copying Stack Overflow answers!"

The senior developer generation humoring the Gen Z developers who won't stop evangelizing about Rust and Go. "Yes dear, memory safety is revolutionary. No, we don't need to rewrite our entire codebase that's been running fine for 15 years." Meanwhile, the production server running on a 2005 PHP script held together with duct tape and prayers continues to outperform everything else.

The C++ Committee hands out medals for printing "Hello, World!" while every other language stands on the podium looking dignified. Meanwhile, C++ guy is busy screaming, flipping everyone off, and spraying champagne like he just discovered fire. Nothing captures the spirit of modern programming quite like watching C++ celebrate basic functionality that other languages implemented without needing therapy afterward. The committee's slogan might as well be "We'll make string handling intuitive by 2053, we promise!" The real joke is all of us still writing C++ in 2023 while explaining to management that memory leaks are just "giving back to the operating system."

Nothing quite like spending 60 hours a week coding your own obsolescence. The snake eating its tail is the perfect metaphor for us building AI tools that will eventually replace us. "Just one more automation script and I'll have more time to work on important things" – said right before automating yourself out of a job. It's like sawing off the branch you're sitting on, but with better version control.

Olympic shooters aiming for gold, C++ developers aiming for a version that actually compiles. Both require steady hands, nerves of steel, and the acceptance that something will inevitably explode. The difference? One gets a medal, the other gets to go home before midnight. The countdown from C++26 to C++11 is basically the developer equivalent of counting down the bullets you have left before resorting to throwing the gun at the bug.