First day optimism vs battle-hardened reality. You show up ready to slay the legacy codebase dragon with your shiny best practices sword, only to eventually join the "if nobody touches it, nobody gets hurt" cult. The transformation from idealistic code hero to pragmatic survivor is the most reliable deployment pipeline in our industry.
Fun fact: Studies show 94% of refactoring initiatives die quietly in Jira, labeled as "technical debt" until the heat death of the universe.