The Types of Senior Developers, Ranked by How Much They Hate Everything

• 2025-06-17 code reviewsdeveloper culturehumor
A colorful cartoon illustration of several developers gathered around a cluttered desk, each with exaggerated, playful expressions ranging from frustration to amusement, surrounded by laptops, coffee mugs, and sticky notes, set in a lively modern office environment.

The Types of Senior Developers, Ranked by How Much They Hate Everything

From the Terminal Hermit to the ‘Rewrite It in Rust’ Evangelist, meet the seasoned veterans who’ve seen things… and want you to suffer too.

Welcome to the Senior Developer Zoo

There’s a moment in every software engineer’s life when they realize the true purpose of senior developers: to serve as living, breathing warnings. Like radioactive canaries in the coal mine of tech, they radiate a potent blend of wisdom, cynicism, and a deep, unyielding hatred for everything you hold dear. If you’re lucky, you’ll survive your first code review with only minor psychological scarring. If not, you’ll be left clutching your Jira ticket, wondering why your self-esteem is now a deprecated dependency.

But not all senior developers are forged alike. Some have simply seen too much. Others have seen everything—and want to make sure you do, too. Here, for your edification and existential dread, are the types of senior developers, ranked by how much they hate everything.

1. The Terminal Hermit

Defining Traits:

  • Communicates exclusively via cryptic shell scripts and passive-aggressive commit messages.
  • Hasn’t opened a GUI since the Clinton administration.
  • Believes Vim is for dilettantes who can’t handle ed.

Hatred Level: 9/10

The Terminal Hermit’s loathing is pure, distilled, and piped directly into /dev/null. They hate GUIs, IDEs, and anything that can’t be configured with a dotfile. Their idea of onboarding is a 400-line Bash script that only runs on Solaris. If you ask for help, they’ll send you a man page—written in Latin.

2. The ‘Rewrite It in Rust’ Evangelist

Defining Traits:

  • Has rewritten the company’s core service in Rust. Twice.
  • Uses “memory safety” as a threat.
  • Thinks garbage collection is a moral failing.

Hatred Level: 8.5/10

This developer’s contempt is reserved for anything that isn’t Rust. They see your Python microservice and raise you a 2,000-line macro. They’ll explain, at length, how your code is a ticking time bomb of undefined behavior. Their pull requests are less about collaboration and more about conversion.

3. The Agile Nihilist

Defining Traits:

  • Has a thousand-yard stare whenever “standup” is mentioned.
  • Refers to Scrum as “theater for the damned.”
  • Once tried to automate Jira, then gave up on hope itself.

Hatred Level: 8/10

The Agile Nihilist has seen the Kanban board become a Kanban graveyard. They know that velocity is a lie and that “MVP” stands for “Mostly Vaporware Product.” Their only joy is watching the sprint retro devolve into a group therapy session.

4. The Microservices Skeptic

Defining Traits:

  • Remembers when “monolith” wasn’t a slur.
  • Has a spreadsheet tracking the number of services that have failed this week.
  • Believes Kubernetes is a conspiracy by YAML lobbyists.

Hatred Level: 7.5/10

This developer’s hatred is distributed, just like your architecture. They’ll remind you that every microservice is a new opportunity for distributed failure. Their favorite phrase: “Have you tried turning it back into a monolith?”

5. The Stack Overflow Oracle

Defining Traits:

  • Answers questions with links to answers they wrote in 2012.
  • Has a sixth sense for duplicate questions.
  • Hates your question, your code, and your Stack Overflow reputation.

Hatred Level: 7/10

The Oracle’s patience is measured in milliseconds. They’ve seen every possible error message and have a macro for each. If you dare to ask a question, prepare for a withering reply and a link to a closed thread.

6. The ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ Survivor

Defining Traits:

  • Flinches at the word “pivot.”
  • Has PTSD from the Great Production Outage of 2019.
  • Keeps a flask labeled “Legacy Code Antivenom.”

Hatred Level: 6.5/10

This developer has lived through the startup trenches. They know that “disruption” is just another word for “on-call at 3 a.m.” Their code is battle-hardened, their optimism long since deprecated.

7. The Documentation Skeptic

Defining Traits:

  • Believes documentation is for the weak.
  • Writes comments like “// TODO: explain this later.”
  • Hates Markdown, Confluence, and the written word.

Hatred Level: 6/10

The Documentation Skeptic’s hatred is silent but deadly. They’ll refactor your README into oblivion and insist that “the code is the documentation.” If you ask for clarification, they’ll point to a function named doThing() and walk away.

The Circle of (Developer) Life

In the end, every senior developer is a mirror reflecting the industry’s collective trauma. Their hatred is not personal—it’s a survival mechanism, honed by years of tech debt, shifting requirements, and the existential horror of legacy code. So the next time a senior developer sighs at your pull request, remember: they’re not mad at you. They’re just disappointed in everything.

And if you’re lucky, one day you’ll join their ranks—hating everything, but with impeccable technical accuracy.