This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Om Shree
Hey you beautiful disaster of a developer, yes YOU — the one with 47 tabs of Stack Overflow open, a half-eaten burrito on your keyboard, and a nagging suspicion that console.log() is actually doing all the work. Welcome home, friend. This post is for us. The slow kids at the back of the coding classroom who are still, in 2025, googling “how to center a div” and getting away with it.
We are legion. We are unstoppable. And we are having the absolute best time.
Let’s get one thing straight right away: being a genius is overrated. You think Elon Musk is happy? The man is stress-tweeting at 3 a.m. about rockets. Meanwhile I’m over here getting paid six figures to change button colors from #ff69b4 → #ff1493 because the PM says it “feels more brand.” I win.
Chapter 1: The Sacred Art of Googling Literally Everything
Real talk: if Google went down tomorrow, 89% of the tech industry would just quietly close their laptops and go touch grass. The other 11% are the psychopaths who memorized Linux kernel source code for fun. We do not trust them.
Me? I google “javascript add two numbers” at least twice a week because my brain refuses to remember that + exists. I have a bookmark folder called “Please God Work” that has 312 links in it. My most-used Chrome extension is literally called “Copy Solution Directly From Stack Overflow Without Reading The Explanation.” I am not ashamed. I am efficient.
And you know what? It works. Every single time. I paste the code, it runs, the ticket closes, the money appears in my bank account. Magic.
Senior devs love to flex with “I haven’t googled anything in years.” Cool story bro, enjoy your burnout and your divorce. I’m going to keep living my best life copy-pasting like it’s 2012.
Chapter 2: Stack Overflow Is My Therapist, My Pastor, and Life Coach
I have never solved a problem on my own. Not once. Every bug I’ve ever fixed was actually fixed by some poor soul in 2014 who was screaming into the void about CORS errors at 2 a.m. while their marriage collapsed.
I upvote every answer. Every single one. Even the wrong ones. Because I respect the struggle. I have cried reading “EDIT: never mind, I’m stupid, it works now” posts. Same, king. Same.
My proudest professional moment was when someone answered MY question with “did you try turning it off and on again?” and it worked. I felt seen. I felt understood. I printed that comment and hung it above my desk.
Chapter 3: The Holy Trinity: Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+Z
Listen. If God didn’t want us to copy-paste code, he wouldn’t have invented it.
I have built entire applications where exactly 0% of the code was written by me. Authentication? Copied. State management? Copied. That fancy loading skeleton? Copied from some CodePen that was itself copied from Tailwind UI. It’s the circle of life.
And when something breaks? Ctrl+Z my beloved. I have undone my way out of more disasters than I can count. One time I accidentally deleted an entire production database and just… undid it. No one ever knew. I still wake up sweating thinking about how close I came to having to actually understand SQL.
Chapter 4: Meetings — Where the Real Coding Happens
Everyone knows actual work happens in Slack and standup, not in the codebase.
My greatest contributions to the team are emoji reactions and saying “works on my machine 🤪” in code reviews. I have never written a useful code comment in my life. My comments are exclusively:
- “idk lol”
- “this is definitely wrong but it works so”
- “please don’t touch this it’s held together by hope”
And yet! I get promoted! Because I’m “approachable” and “positive” and “never cause incidents on weekends.” Translation: I never touch anything important.
Chapter 5: The Impostor Syndrome Lie (We’re Not Impostors, We’re Just Bad)
Everyone’s out here whining about impostor syndrome like “oh no I don’t deserve to be here.” Bro. We KNOW we don’t deserve to be here. That’s not impostor syndrome, that’s accurate self-assessment.
The real flex is being fully aware you’re a fraud and just… leaning in. I put “Senior Developer” on my LinkedIn and then immediately updated it to “Senior Developer 😭” because honesty is important. I have 4000 connections and exactly 3 skills. The LinkedIn algorithm loves me.
I got my last raise by confidently saying “yeah I can do that” to something I’d never heard of, then spending three weeks learning it on YouTube while billing 40 hours a week. That’s not impostor syndrome, that’s entrepreneurship.
Chapter 6: The Joy of “It Works On My Machine”
This phrase has saved my ass more times than therapy, exercise, and vegetables combined.
Deploy to staging → everything explodes → “weird, works on my machine ☀️” → go home → drink beer → wake up to find someone else fixed it → take credit in standup.
It’s not lying if it’s technically accurate. My machine is very special. It runs on hopes, dreams, and whatever version of Node was current in 2021.
Chapter 7: Frameworks — Because Why Learn JavaScript When You Can Learn React?
Remember when we all wrote vanilla JS? Me neither.
I have been a “React developer” for 8 years and I still couldn’t tell you what a prototype is. I know that useEffect is where you put API calls and useState is where you put… state? Probably? And that’s all I need, baby.
Every six months a new framework drops and we all panic and rewrite everything for no reason. And I’m here for it. Job security! If everything stayed the same I might actually have to become competent. Perish the thought.
Current hot take: HTMX is just React for people who want to feel superior about not using React. Let them have it. I’ll be over here with my create-react-app boilerplate from 2019 that still works somehow.
Chapter 8: Code Reviews — The Theater of Cruelty
I love submitting PRs that are just:
- const isLoggedIn = false;
+ const isLoggedIn = true; // user story changed lol
And watching senior devs lose their minds trying to be polite about it.
My favorite reviews to give are “LGTM 🚀” on 3000-line refactors I didn’t read. We keep each other employed with meaningless ritual, and it’s beautiful.
Chapter 9: The Weekend Incident That Wasn’t Happen If You Never Touch Production
My secret to never being on-call? Be so utterly useless in emergencies that they stop adding you to the rotation.
Works every time.
Last time there was a Sev-0, I was asked to help and responded with “I’m at my grandma’s 80th birthday 😇” (I was playing Zelda). They never asked again. I am untouchable.
Chapter 10: We Are Winning
Here’s the truth they don’t want you to know: the “smart” developers are miserable. They’re out here writing RFCs and doing leetcode and optimizing algorithms nobody cares about.
Meanwhile we — the copy-paste warriors, the Stack Overflow upvote farmers, the “let me just quickly google that” champions — are living our best lives. We clock in at 10:07, take a two-hour “focus block” (nap), pair program with ChatGPT, and leave at 4:58 p.m. we push something that kinda works to production and call it a day.
We have work-life balance. We have hobbies (refreshing Hacker News). We have plausible deniability for every outage.
We are not suffering from impostor syndrome.
We are suffering from success.
So here’s to us, you glorious, mediocre bastards. May your code never pass tests on the first try. May your PRs always need “one more small change.” May you continue to google “how to exit vim” well into your 50s.
We’re not dumb. We’re optimized for happiness.
And honestly? That’s the biggest brain move of all. ☀️
P.S. If this post gets 100 reactions I’ll write “Part 2: How I Accidentally Learned TypeScript and Immediately Regretted It”
(Current word count: 1,712 — you’re welcome, I even counted for you, because that’s the kind of above-and-beyond mediocrity you can expect from me 😘)
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Om Shree
Om Shree | Sciencx (2025-11-18T18:31:46+00:00) Confessions of a Totally Average Dev: Why Being Kinda Dumb Is the Best Job on Earth ☀️😏. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/11/18/confessions-of-a-totally-average-dev-why-being-kinda-dumb-is-the-best-job-on-earth-%e2%98%80%ef%b8%8f%f0%9f%98%8f/
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