Working as a developer in a Silicon Valley startup feels a bit like living inside a caffeine-powered simulation where time doesn’t behave normally. Days stretch, nights blur, and your entire sense of accomplishment somehow hinges on whether a semicolon was missing or not.

I joined the startup thinking I would be building “impactful products that change the world.” What I actually build, most days, are hotfixes for bugs that appear five minutes before a client demo. Our office is a renovated warehouse with neon lights, standing desks, and beanbags no one actually sits on. Everyone carries a laptop like it’s an extension of their body.

The weirdest part? I love it.

My mornings usually start early—not by choice, but because our CEO thinks 7 AM standups create “momentum.” Half the team joins from their beds with cameras off, trying to sound awake while the project manager passionately discusses sprint velocity.

Once standup ends, the real chaos begins. A typical workday looks like:

fixing a bug that breaks three other things,

merging a pull request only to find merge conflicts you swear didn’t exist an hour ago,

reviewing code so complex you question the author’s sanity (or your own),

and pushing a final commit that magically works minutes before everyone logs off.

But there are moments that remind me why I chose this life:
those rare days when a feature works on the first try,
when the team celebrates a successful deployment with overpriced sushi,
when you walk out of the office at dusk and feel, just for a second, that you’re building something meaningful.

And yes—there are the infamous “startup emergencies,” like the night our servers went down because someone (not saying who) tried to optimize a query at 2 AM. We spent three hours on a Zoom call, half debugging, half trying not to cry.

Silicon Valley has its stereotypes, but here’s the truth: it’s messy, unpredictable, exhausting—and weirdly addictive.

Every day, I learn something new.
Every week, I break and fix something important.
And every month, I wonder how we’re still running on this much chaos and hope.

But that’s startup life.
You don’t just write code; you survive it.