50 Junior Developer Jokes Every Junior Has Lived

My first pull request had 47 review rounds. The final comment was "actually let's just revert."

I prefaced every question with "this might be a stupid question." My tech lead eventually said the prefix was the stupid part.

I spent three days on a bug. The senior fixed it in fourteen seconds and asked if I had tried turning it off and on again.

I googled my error message. The top result was a Stack Overflow post I had asked two weeks earlier.

I used == for two months before learning about ===. The entire app was held together by coincidence.

I ran an UPDATE without a WHERE clause once. I now run every UPDATE inside a transaction, even SELECT.

I pushed straight to main on my third day. My manager learned my name on my third day.

I deployed to the wrong AWS account. It was a client's. I still flinch when I open the console.

I read the documentation once. It felt illegal, like cheating.

I wrote my first test. It asserted that true equals true. It passed. I felt powerful.

I nodded in standup when the architect said "microservices." I did not know what microservices were. I still nod.

Day 1 imposter syndrome: "They will figure out I don't belong here." Day 1,000 imposter syndrome: "They figured it out and they're being polite."

I learned what useEffect actually does in year three. The first two years I just added more dependencies until the warning went away.

I asked my senior how he debugs. He stared at the screen. Five minutes later he said "oh." That was the entire lesson.

I cloned the repo, ran the install, and watched 4,000 errors scroll by. The README said "setup should take five minutes."

I wrote a function called doStuff. It's still in production. It does a lot of stuff.

I asked the senior for help. He said "what have you tried so far." I had tried nothing. I tried things. I solved it. He never even looked up.

I committed my .env file. I learned about git history, force push, and rotating credentials in the same afternoon.

I named a variable temp. Three years later it is load-bearing.

My first estimate was two hours. It took eleven days. The senior nodded like he had seen this exact thing before, because he had.

I joined the company Slack and typed in the wrong channel. "hey can someone unblock me" went out to all-staff. The CEO replied with a thumbs up.

I asked what the build was doing. The senior said "nobody knows, we just wait."

I read a function that was 800 lines. I asked who wrote it. Git blame said me, last month.

I opened a PR titled "small fix." It was 4,000 lines across 62 files.

I learned what a stack trace was. I had been scrolling past them for four months looking for the part that mattered.

I copied a snippet from Stack Overflow. It worked. I cried. The senior asked if I was okay. I said yes.

My first code review comment was "why." I didn't have an answer. I still don't.

I asked what TDD was. The team had a forty-five minute meeting about it. We did not adopt it. We have never adopted it.

I spent a week refactoring the file. The senior reverted it in one commit titled "don't."

I added a console.log to debug. It shipped to production. It is named "hi." Customers have seen it.

I asked what the difference between staging and production was. The room went very quiet.

I learned recursion. Then I learned recursion.

I broke the build. A Slack bot named me in a channel I didn't know existed.

I asked the senior to pair. He typed faster than I could read. I learned nothing. I felt great.

I joined the on-call rotation. The first page came at 3 a.m. I called the senior. He answered on the first ring and was already laughing.

I asked what "works on my machine" meant. The senior said "it means we are about to spend three hours figuring out what's different about your machine."

I wrote my first migration. It ran for forty minutes in production. The senior said "that's why we test migrations." I asked where. He said "on your laptop."

I learned what a foreign key was. Every prior table I had designed was a crime scene.

I asked the senior if my code was good. He said "it works." I have replayed that sentence in my head for years.

I closed my first ticket. The PM moved it back to in-progress. She said the bug was now in a different place. I think about that ticket every day.

I set up SSH for the first time. I now have two keys, three configs, and no idea which one GitHub actually likes.

I discovered git stash. I have a stash from 2023. I am afraid of it. It is afraid of me.

My commit history is forty-one commits. Thirty-eight of them say "fix." Two say "fix fix." One says "please."

Day four of standup. "Still on the same ticket." The senior nodded with the patience of a man who once spent two weeks on a CSS bug.

My push to production worked. I did not change what I thought I changed. I do not know why it works. I have not touched the repo since.

The ticket said "good first issue." Two weeks later I had rewritten the auth layer and discovered a bug from 2021.

I read the senior's code. I did not understand it. I did not ask. It has been six months. I still do not understand it.

I called it magic for a year. Then I opened the library. It was a for loop and a regex. I have never recovered.

I added a console.log to debug. The bug went away. I removed the console.log. The bug came back. I put it back. I have shipped this.

I opened my first PR. The title had a typo. The senior approved it anyway and said "we all do that one."