An Impostor Among Us

The expectation vs reality of programming career progression! First year: bright-eyed, hopeful, thinking you'll build the next billion-dollar app. Fourth year: slightly chubbier, dead inside, realizing you're just fixing the same bugs in legacy code while your IDE slowly consumes your RAM. The title "Made Alot Of Money" is the ultimate ironic cherry on top—because the only thing that's grown is your caffeine tolerance and collection of Stack Overflow bookmarks. The real money was the existential dread we accumulated along the way!

The only thing worse than being shot at? Someone pitching their "revolutionary app idea" with zero budget and expecting you to build it for exposure and a mythical share of future profits. That moment when you'd rather face armed soldiers than another person who thinks their "Uber but for dog walkers" concept is worth billions, yet they can't afford to pay you actual money. The best part? They always say "it's simple" right before describing something that would require a team of 20 engineers and six months of development. But hey, they're "idea people" - the hard part is already done!

Every dev who's ever deployed their first monetized side project knows this pain. You spend 300 hours building a SaaS app, celebrate making your first $20, and suddenly your entire family thinks you're the next Zuckerberg. Meanwhile, you're hiding in the attic calculating that your hourly rate works out to about 6 cents, wondering if you should mention the $200 you spent on AWS credits. The classic "ramen profitable" stage where the only thing more fragile than your codebase is your ego.

The classic "it's not what you think" programming conversation. JavaScript developers nodding smugly while every other language user is screaming internally. Nothing like spending 3 hours debugging only to discover your number was secretly a string the whole time. That moment when you realize your entire app is crashing because "5" + 1 = "51" instead of 6. The ultimate gotcha of loosely typed languages!

The Olympic sharpshooter progression we never knew we needed! First, we've got the elite marksman with VS Code - the precision tool for developers who want intellisense and pretty colors. Then there's Sublime Text - for the speed demons who think waiting 0.2 seconds for an IDE to load is basically eternity. But then... Notepad++ enters the chat. It's like bringing a Honda Civic to a Formula 1 race - somehow still has a cult following. And finally, the punchline - regular Windows Notepad. The coding equivalent of shooting with your eyes closed while facing backward. No syntax highlighting, no plugins, just pure text and tears. The weapon of choice for those who enjoy suffering or have a production emergency at 2 AM on a server with nothing else installed. And yes, we're deliberately not mentioning a certain editor that requires a PhD to exit. You know the one.

The eternal product development paradox in four panels! When a product manager demands a flashy new feature, developers ask the reasonable question: "Do our users actually need this?" Then comes the power move—the PM dramatically declares "Look at me. I am the user" with the intensity of someone who's never opened the app outside a demo. This is basically every feature prioritization meeting where actual user research got replaced by executive gut feelings. The "I am the user" declaration is the software development equivalent of "because I said so" from your childhood.