Be Kind, Rewind: How AI Became Every Junior Dev's Emotional Support Animal

Oh, the sweet sound of hypocrisy hitting every programmer right in the Stack Overflow! This meme perfectly captures that moment when we realize our entire career is basically professional Googling. While doctors spend 8+ years in med school, we're over here with 47 browser tabs open, frantically copying code snippets and praying they work. The monkey's side-eye is literally every developer when someone asks "how did you figure that out?" and we have to decide whether to admit it was a random GitHub repo we found at 3am. The truth hurts, but at least we have dark mode to hide our shame in!

Content Macro Nerd Macro Nerd Guys, assuming we we record temperature in K, we can fix global warming with an unsigned integer overflow! All we have to do is get the world super hot and then it'll become super cold. Ez pz! 11:07 AM Jun 26, 2019 Twitter Web App

Content 7402 225 Share TSDano 23h Stack overflow. 1 Reply 4 1.3k I bryterlayter76 23h Better check the logs. 4 67

Content oh look a parrot Stop copying me Stop copying me I watched sou ask a question on stackoverflow then 2 his later close it with comment of "I figured it out" YOU don't deserve love. Oh look a parrot I Love You

Let's be honest here. My entire career is just me aggressively Googling stuff with increasingly specific search terms until I find that one Stack Overflow answer from 2014 with 3 upvotes that somehow solves my exact problem. After 15 years in this industry, I've mastered the art of copy-pasting with style. My IDE is just a fancy middleman between Google and my git commits. The real skill isn't remembering syntax—it's knowing exactly what to search for and recognizing the right answer when you see it. Junior devs think we have all the answers. Nope. We just have better search history.

The eternal workplace hierarchy in action! Junior devs naively approach seniors with what they think are simple questions, only to be met with the sacred incantation: "Just Google it." The senior programmer isn't being cruel—they're performing the ancient rite of passage that transforms helpless code babies into self-sufficient engineers. Remember the first time you mustered the courage to ask about that NullPointerException only to be redirected to the holy shrine of Stack Overflow? That's not gatekeeping—that's tough love wrapped in efficiency. The cycle continues, and someday that junior will be the one refusing to explain what a callback function is.