"years of experience" basically means nothing, both for people and organisations. You can work with someone who has 30 years experience who knows nothing, and someone with 1-2 years who's practically an expert.

Joined a large multi-national fresh out of college, that had been around for +90 years. I expected them to know software development inside and out. Didn't expect to see so many failed projects for stupid reasons, so many over sights, so many .... morons, to be honest.

Worked for a startup company where most only had 1 or 2 years more experience than me and learned so much.

Worked for a small company where everyone had 1.5 - 2 times my experience, where I learned the meaning of "bewilderment".

Never feel small, or less valuable because of a number. Theres a good chance you are working with jackasses - practiseSafeHex

Step 1: Run to the store to buy a USB card reader because all of a sudden you have a need to use a 16Mb CF card that was tossed in a junk drawer for 20 years (hoping it still works, of course), but that was the easy part...

Step 2: Realize that the apps - your own - you want to run on your new (old) Casio E-125 PocketPC (to re-live "glory" days) are compiled in ARM format, not MIPS, which is the CPU this device uses, and the installer packages you have FOR YOUR OWN APPS don't include MIPS, only ARM (WHY DID I DO THAT?!), so, the saga REALLY begins...

Step 3: Get a 20-year old OS to install in a Hyper-V VM... find out that basic things like networking don't work by default because the OS is so damn old, so spend hours solving that and other issues to get it to basically run well enough to...

Step 4: Get that OS updated so that it's at least kind/sorta/maybe (but between you and me, not really!) safe online, all without a browser that will work on ANY modern site (oh, and good luck finding a version of Firefox that runs on it - that all took a few hours)...

Step 5: Okay, OS is ready to go, now get 20-year old dev tools that you haven't even seen in that many years working. Oh, do this with a missing CD key and ISO's that weren't archived in a format that's usable today, plus a bunch of missing dependencies because the OS is, again, SO old (a few MORE hours)...

Step 6: Get 20-year old code written in a language you haven't used in probably almost that long to compile, dealing with pathing issues, missing libs, and several other issues, all the while trying to dust off long-dormant knowledge somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of your brain... surprisingly, it all came back to me, more or less, in under an hour, which lead to...

Step 7: FINALLY get it all to work, FINALLY get the code to compile, FINALLY get it transferred to the device (which has no network capabilities, by the way, which is where the card reader and CF card came into play) and re-live the glory of your old, crappy PocketPC apps and games running on the real thing! WOO-HOO!

Step 8: Realize it's 3:30am by the time that's all done and be VERY thankful that you're on vacation this week or work tomorrow would SSUUCCKK!!!!

Step 9. Get called into work the next day for a production issue despite being tired from the night before and an afternoon of errands, lose basically a whole day of vacation (7 hours spent on it) and not actually resolve it by after midnight when you finally say that's enough :(

Talk about your highs and your lows.

I'm literally in pain right now and not a thing I can do.

If I eat whatever the fuck is wrong with my jaw (cracked tooth or cavity) starts throbbing from the chewing action, in addition to coming on for no reason at all. vision-blurred-waves-of-nausea levels of pain. Enough that I'm alternating between laughter and almost tears.

I've downed four aspirin and it's still just barely enough WITH the numbing gel.

Got lock jaw something aweful.

Barely convinced a dentists office, which is supposed to be closed (and cancelled all it's appointments due to corona), to come in during quarantine. But thats monday. Dont kno how I'll make it. They do payment plans but I'm flat broke because I decided to pursue programming right when all this fucking bullshit went down.

And all I can think of while im typing this is the pain.

And fuck me I cant do weed because my backup plan if I fail at coding is the military.

And this stray dog that the neighbors 'adopted' but leave outside WONT STOP FUCKING BARKING.

Fuck me. Just kill me now. Do it.

Gonna go watch comedy because I read a research paper that says genuine laughter raises pain threshold by up to 10%.