It used to be one of the best paying professions, so there is plenty of people who aren't meant to be software developers, but they tried to get money and now suck at it.
Now that standard of living increased by a lot there are other specialists that do not require this much education or talent (but still you need to be decent) and pay comparably or even more, because there is just so much demand for them if they are high quality (people wait for months). Those are mostly people who build, finish or otherwise improve houses and cars. Even unqualified labor got decent pay now, tho still about 1/3 of what average dev will make.

I sent my resume to our subsidiary company that evidently pays more and are looking for someone with exactly my skills. They weren't supposed to tell my boss about it but they did and he gave me substantial rise. Not really promotion, but I don't want to be manager (yet).

We have this important product with deadline closing in. Dev who was working on it for months went on vacation. Bugs came out, no comments in the code, no docs, some of the variables are as verbose as var abc = "some weird shit"; and I'm tasked with trying to test, fix algorithms and instruct on how to use it.

This isn't first time happening, so I'm dusting off my CV this weekend.

I used some kind of application on a compact disc (don't remember what it was) and it asked to reboot in order to do some stuff before Windows loads. Apparently in order to do so it overwrote MBR along with my TrueCrypt loader. Didn't make rescue disc, so lost about 300GB of stuff.

This new dude who would change status of tickets to "resolved", thinking that it actually fixed problems reported in those tickets.

As my first dev job, I took over role of solo programmer maintaining all kinds of custom-made software used by local ISP. It was about 10 years ago.

My first question was where can I find test environment and repo. Apparently there was none and I should learn and develop on production.
My sin was to quickly give up on setting up both test and repo.

My second sin was to continue using the same copy&paste PHTML with register_globals enabled, building over it without attempting to refactor it with templates. I did not use globals in any new code at least.

And I suppose my third sin was that I was playing games when I was done with my tasks. I could have used that time to refactor a bit.

But I think in the end I was absolved from them since I was the only one suffering from this. I stayed with company until it got sold and helped migrate data over (along with myself).