When the incident fixes itself and they still ask me to explain the root cause

When they added me to the project for “a quick hand” and I end up owning it

When I find out the email column in the database is full of nothing but phone numbers

When I learn our product’s release date from the company’s LinkedIn post

When I’d planned to leave before 5pm and a critical security patch is scheduled for 4pm

When the client tells me his nephew who knows computers will review my code

When screen sharing dies and I have to describe my code out loud

When the internal form asks for my employee ID and I find out I have an employee ID

When the bug only shows up at 3am and I set an alarm to catch it in the act

When my boss says “we” for the successful demo and “your code” for the bug

When the old monolith we’ve wanted to replace for 4 years outlives all our new services

When TypeScript won’t compile and I fix the problem with a sneaky little any

When I deploy at 6am to keep things quiet and the one user online crashes everything

When I leave the office Friday after making a query 40 times faster

When the AI summarizes our one-hour meeting and the recap fits in 2 lines

When I write the tests after the code and everything just happens to be green

When the auditor asks who knows the prod password and 9 hands go up

When I’ve started at a new company and my access shows up 2 weeks later

When the junior fixes in one afternoon the bugs I’ve been dodging for 3 weeks

When management announces its big AI transformation and we get 5 Copilot licenses for 200 people