How Programmers Brag to Each Other (Film, 6 Minutes / Humor!)
Fireship in his latest video humorously and ironically guides viewers through the world of programming, exploring the concept of 'flexing' among developers. The narrator recounts a personal experience where a colleague pointed out a small bug in the code, leading to an unexpectedly profound reflection on how programmers often exhibit superiority complexes or feelings of impostor syndrome. He discusses various methods of flexing on others, such as adding unnecessary complexity to simple code through TypeScript, or bragging about higher salaries among peers in the industry.
Among the presented techniques is the 'money flex', where the narrator compares the earnings of a junior developer to various salary levels in the industry, ranging from $50k to $900k. This comparison prompts viewers to think about how their self-esteem is influenced by the context of their surroundings and comparisons. Fireship emphasizes that the amount of value we bring to the world is directly related to our income and position in the industry.
Another interesting point is the 'Vim Flex', where the narrator praises the benefits of this text editor while mocking users of more complex applications like VS Code. In this light, the competition of various operating systems emerges as a new battlefield, where using Linux signifies superiority. Ironically, he concludes that real programmers use Windows, suggesting they can lead normal lives outside of coding.
Fireship also touches on the significance of GitHub, where appropriate achievements in the form of commit history can impact how one is perceived by others. He highlights the importance of having a high number of contributions and obtaining appropriate badges as a programmer. The humorous concept of the 'Chainsaw PR' is presented, where individuals submit pull requests with dramatic corrections, often resulting in the abandonment of projects by their founders.
In the end, the narrator reflects on the 'ultimate flex' and the philosophical contemplation of life's value and a programmer’s place in the tech world. When a programmer decides to abandon their computer for traditional farming, they begin to see the true beauty in nature. Observing nature serves as a reminder of how insignificant their daily existence is in the grand scheme of the universe. It's worth noting that at the time of writing this article, Fireship's video had already garnered 2,802,912 views and 137,719 likes, indicating a tremendous interest and value of this content among the programming community.
Toggle timeline summary
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The speaker recalls a fictional story about being an architect of scalable infrastructure.
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A staff engineer compliments the speaker's VS code theme.
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The speaker insists on having 100% test coverage while the engineer proceeds to submit a pull request.
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The speaker realizes they have been flexed on after seeing the engineer leave.
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The speaker mentions the two states of programmers: imposter syndrome or superiority complex.
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The video promises to share 10 ways to flex on fellow programmers.
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The first flex introduced is the 'complexity flex'.
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The speaker talks about making simple code complex to impress others.
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The speaker discusses the 'money flex' and the correlation between income and value.
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The speaker describes the hierarchy of flexing based on income.
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The speaker mentions flexing by owning YouTube Premium.
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Using Vim is highlighted as a way to flex superior coding skills over those using other editors.
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Real developers are said to use Linux, while Macintosh users are humorously labeled.
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The 'GitHub flex' is introduced as showcasing a robust commit history.
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The 'Chainsaw PR flex' is a method of simplifying others' code to demonstrate superiority.
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The speaker discusses the influencer flex for those who can't code.
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Past experiences at top tech companies enable a unique way to start conversations.
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The speaker mentions domain investment as a form of flexing.
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The ultimate flex is described as learning to farm and disconnecting from tech.
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The speaker reflects on the insignificance of existence while connecting with nature.
Transcription
Many years ago in a story I just made up, I was architecting some highly scalable infrastructure when a staff engineer walked into my cubicle and said, Hey buddy, that's a cute VS code theme you've got there. Oh thanks, it's a synthwave with power mode enabled. Before I could explain more though, he cut me off and said, You see that bug on line 234, right? I said, no, that's impossible, sir. We have 100% test coverage on this code. Well, I'm going to pull it up in NeoVim on my Arch desktop, and I'll send you a PR for that. Five minutes later, I get a notification in Slack that the PR came through. All tests are passing, with 469 lines of code removed, and just one commit message that read, Optimized suboptimal code. I then looked out the window and saw him driving away in his Tesla. It was at that moment that I realized I had been flexed upon. If you're a programmer who's feeling down, one of the best ways to boost your ego is to flex on other developers. For programmers, there's only two states of being, imposter syndrome or superiority complex. In today's video, you'll learn how to become the best programmer the world has ever seen by looking at 10 practical ways to flex on your friends and colleagues. First up, we've got the complexity flex. The world's greatest programmer once said, an idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity. Luckily, most people are not geniuses. Think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are stupider than that. So what you can do is take something simple, like a perfectly functional JavaScript function, then add TypeScript to it while preaching the virtues of end-to-end type safety. From there, refactor it into an abstract factory singleton adapter decorator proxy, and when nobody understands that, just tell them they've never seen clean code before and should have read The Gang of Four book, making them think you're some kind of programming god. The CTO who doesn't know how to code will be so impressed that you'll get a huge raise. And that brings us to the money flex. The amount of money you make is exactly tied to the amount of value that you bring to the world. The level one money flex is the junior developer making $50k a year who shows off to his old colleagues at Arby's who are only making $45k a year. The dude in the cubicle next to him though did a better job negotiating his salary and makes $225k a year. That dude's got a cousin though who works at Netflix who flexes on him for making $900k a year. That dude's landlord though was one of the first engineers at Uber who has a net worth of $25mil, who now flexes on social media about being a genius technology investor. But then he gets flexed on by the billionaire crypto bro who made all his money by rug pulling all the level one flexers. The circle of life is truly beautiful. If you subscribe to the link in this post, I may get a commission. I'm not quite a billionaire yet, so the way I like to flex is by owning YouTube Premium. As a lazy developer, I'm obsessed with optimizing my time, and by owning Premium, I don't have to watch ads on any YouTube videos, and I can download all the JavaScript tutorials I want to watch offline when I travel. On top of that, it provides access to YouTube Music so I can listen to Huey Lewis and the News on repeat while I code, which actually saves me money because I don't need to pay for other music streaming services. What's really awesome though is that YouTube has allowed me to offer you one month of YouTube Premium for free. I've actually been paying for it myself for years, and it's well worth it if you value your time. But another great way to demonstrate your superior value is with the Vim Flex. When you use Vim, it elevates you to a higher plane of consciousness where you can look down upon the poor lost souls using tools like VS Code, IntelliJ, and Emacs. If you're the real deal, you won't even have a mouse at your computer. Now normally this is the point where I should make a joke about not being able to exit Vim, but I've never really understood those jokes because I don't even know how to exit VS Code. But an even more potent flex is your operating system. If you want to tell people you're rich, go with a Macintosh, and combine it with the Apple Vision Pro to also tell people that you're a clown. Real developers though use Linux. You can impress most people by simply using Ubuntu, but if you really want to impress people, you should pay a bunch of money to IBM to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux. That's pretty baller, but eventually you'll find yourself alone at a urinal. A man will walk in. He'll turn his head and look at you, then say these three words. I use Arch by the way. You'll immediately feel smaller, like your distro is just not as well endowed as you thought. Not to worry though, you're just getting flexed on by someone who doesn't have a life, who can spend countless hours configuring their OS. Everybody knows that the ultimate distro is Windows, because that tells people that you actually have a life and maybe even a girlfriend outside of programming. But nothing says I don't have a life better than the GitHub flex. If you don't have a GitHub commit history that looks like this, then you're not a real programmer, and you don't care about open source, and your profile should have enough awards and badges on it to make you look like a North Korean general. You can achieve these badges by flexing on other open source projects. The Chainsaw PR flex is a great way to show the world that you're the top G of JavaScript. What you want to do is find new small projects from young enthusiastic developers, then fork their code and remove every line possible, while making sure that all the tests still pass. Then send a vague pull request, explaining how you cleaned up the code to use best practices. If you did it properly, the project will soon be abandoned, because no programmer can face that amount of flexing. We're losing him! We're losing him! He's dying! Now that one is kind of hard to pull off if you're a terrible programmer, but that shouldn't hold you back from flexing anyway. There's an old saying that goes something like, those who can't code become influencers. What you do is pay your $8 to post on X, formerly known as Twitter, then make outrageous hot takes that nobody could possibly agree with. If you give advice that's so egregiously bad, you might even get a reply from Elon Musk himself, which you can then flex about on your YouTube channel. And yes, that is a real tweet. Elon and I are pretty much best friends at this point. Now, you should never take technical advice from someone on Twitter or YouTube, but instead only take advice from people who flex their past experience. If you've ever worked at a fang company, it gives you the privilege to start every sentence with, as an ex-Facebook engineer, I recommend that you make x bad decision. Working at a fang company is like being in a special club that everyone wants to get into, even though some people say they don't want to because their moral compass is too well calibrated. But in reality, they're just hating because they didn't grind on leet code enough. If I ever got a job at fang, I would tattoo it on my forehead. If you're not in the club though, another way to flex as a web developer is with your domains. My GoDaddy account is more valuable than my Robinhood account. Domains aren't just for failed side projects, they're investments that you'll one day hand down to your grandkids. Like best-seo-backlink-tool.net is a valuable asset that any developer would love to get their hands on. The ultimate flex a programmer can do though is learn to farm. The programmer who blows up his computer and joins the Amish is invincible to all the flexes we've looked at throughout this video. As he milks his cow and tends to his crops, his identity is no longer tied to these superficial things, like code quality, GitHub stars, likes, followers, and even money. As he looks at the spiderweb reflecting the sun, it reminds him of a silicon chip. He recognizes the inherent intelligence that permeates all of nature. Its beauty is so overwhelming that he begins to cry. In that moment, he's connected to all the people that lived and died before him. Soon enough, he'll be dead and forgotten just like them. The complete insignificance of his own existence is both terrifying and liberating. And it was at that moment that he realized that the spider was just flexing on him.