Unemployment Is The New Retirement

New software engineers out here experiencing the full spectrum of imposter syndrome and gratitude simultaneously. You're fresh out of bootcamp or college, looking at senior devs pulling in $300k+ at FAANG companies thinking "man, I wish I had that life," but then reality slaps you with a dose of perspective: that senior dev is probably drowning in on-call rotations, legacy code debt, and existential dread about whether their entire tech stack will be obsolete next quarter.

The grass is always greener until you realize the other side has to deal with production incidents at 3 AM and explain to non-technical stakeholders why the "simple feature" will take 3 sprints. Meanwhile, you're just happy to have a job in a market where companies are laying off engineers faster than they can deprecate their APIs. The current tech job market has junior devs feeling blessed just to merge their first PR without getting roasted in code review.

Plot twist: both of you are one restructuring away from updating your LinkedIn to "Open to Work" and grinding LeetCode again.