It Ain't Much, But It's Honest Work

The greatest heist in tech history nets you... $49.99. That's the reality of supply chain attacks. You hack into an NPM package with billions of downloads, gain access to millions of dev machines, and what do you get? Enough for a mediocre dinner and maybe parking. The real kicker? Those NPM maintainers aren't even making that much themselves. The entire JavaScript ecosystem runs on unpaid labor, prayers, and the occasional GitHub sponsor who feels generous after their third coffee. Thank god most hackers are as underpaid as the rest of us, or we'd all be doomed.

The dictionary definition we all feared but never admitted. Turns out "full stack" just means you've successfully convinced HR you can fumble your way through both sides of the application. It's that special talent of being equally mediocre at everything instead of exceptionally bad at just one thing. Job security through diversified incompetence.

That ambitious learning roadmap you made when starting out? Pure fantasy. Three years later and you're still trying to figure out why your promise chain is returning undefined. The JavaScript rabbit hole has no bottom - just increasingly bizarre ways to shoot yourself in the foot. Meanwhile, those other languages you planned to learn are collecting dust in your bookmarks folder labeled "Weekend Projects" since 2019.

On the left: "CS is dead!" crowd screaming into the void on Reddit. On the right: Developer proudly using array.sort()[0] in an interview when asked to find the smallest number in a list. Turns out the job market isn't dead—it just doesn't want people who think built-in methods are algorithmic brilliance. Who knew interviewers wanted to see you actually understand sorting algorithms instead of calling JavaScript's magical sort fairy?

The eternal web development dichotomy in one perfect image. Spend 80% of your time crafting a backend masterpiece with elegant architecture, comprehensive test coverage, and beautiful documentation that would make your CS professor weep tears of joy. Then slap together some CSS and JavaScript that looks like it was written during a power outage, because "the user can't see the backend anyway." The dilapidated house frontend is basically just Bootstrap with 47 custom overrides and that one animation you copied from Stack Overflow at 3 AM. But hey, ship it – we'll fix it in v2!

The user sits there blissfully unaware that the pretty interface they're interacting with is just a transparent facade hiding the gremlin doing all the actual work. Frontend gets all the compliments while backend silently prevents the entire system from imploding. Tale as old as TCP/IP.