The Startup Equity Trap

VS Code just delivered the most savage code review in history. When your editor straight-up terminates your session because your code quality is so bad, you know it's time to reconsider your life choices. The irony of Microsoft's premier IDE just giving up on you is peak developer humiliation. That moment when even your tools are like "nope, I refuse to participate in this atrocity." Just imagine explaining to your team lead: "I can't push my commit because VS Code deemed it unworthy of existence."

Congratulations, you were born at the perfect time to experience the thrilling adventure of... tracking bugs in Jira, sending desperate emails in Gmail, taking notes in Notion, coding in VS Code, chatting in Slack, and designing in Figma. Meanwhile, our ancestors got to ride horses into battle and our descendants will get cool mech suits. But hey, at least we have dark mode.

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!

Government agencies finally entering the digital age but making the worst possible tech choices? *Chef's kiss* Nothing says "we hired consultants from 2003" quite like rejecting clean, lightweight JSON in favor of bloated XML files that require a PhD to parse. The kind of decision that makes developers contemplate career changes to literally anything else. Fun fact: Some government systems still use COBOL, a language older than the moon landing. At this rate, they'll discover JSON around the same time we colonize Mars.

Who needs relationship dopamine when you can experience the pure ecstasy of closing 100 Chrome tabs after a 14-hour debugging marathon? That moment when you've finally conquered that elusive bug that had you questioning your career choices, and you get to perform the sacred ritual of tab cleansing... It's basically the programmer's equivalent of crossing the finish line at the Olympics, except your medal is just more RAM and the ability to hear your laptop fan stop screaming.

Ah, the eternal programmer's dilemma – our brains are basically just self-sabotaging meat computers running on contradictory code. When we're coding, our brain screams "you're wasting your life!" But when we're relaxing, it's all "you lazy bum, get back to work!" And then we just stand there, holding our malfunctioning brain, screaming "WHAT DO YOU ACTUALLY WANT FROM ME?!" This is why programmers drink so much coffee – not for the energy, but to drown out the constant mental merge conflicts. The real bug was in our heads all along.