Adam Piotrowski's closing talk at wroclove.rb 2025, delivered as a last-minute replacement for another speaker. Deliberately non-technical — no code samples, no new tech — roughly '70% hashing, 20% reflections, 10% realization sadness of the universe'. Framing: after days of inspiring technical content, attendees often return to 'shitty projects' feeling deflated; Adam counters with worse stories to remind them their situation is 'either bad or decent — so if it's decent, it's great'. Seven main vignettes: (1) a senior developer secretly moonlighting across three of 2NIT's partner projects at once, surfaced via LinkedIn stalking and git blame; (2) the collapsing definition of 'senior' — a three-year solo-project developer rebranded as senior tech lead because the consultancy could bill double for seniors; (3) a partner company forced on them by a big pharma-adjacent insurance client who threatened to fire both teams if they didn't 'handle it together', culminating in a 200-file no-tests PR merged from a phone at a party on 28 August; (4) a project handover to an Indian team where six attendees sat through a two-hour technical presentation without a single question ('I'm not technical but it will be recorded'); (5) a Chinese cryptocurrency client whose on-site subcontractors agreed in Slack to update docs, then asked 'what are those docs?'; (6) a pharma client's CTO left and kept the AWS billing contact email — AWS quietly charged €10,000/month for a year for an outdated Postgres extension before anyone noticed; (7) a SOAP integration with an insurance API estimated at 160 hours that ran to 700 hours because nobody mentioned the response went through a broken secondary server; bonus stories include a developer claiming 'our code is so good we don't have errors' and a Norwegian magazine that blamed him for Heroku's unrelated CentOS/Ruby upgrade the day after rejecting his estimate. Lessons drawn: ask for employee references, pay more at the start and be transparent about suspicions, be assertive as the rate grows, sign more paperwork so you can actually sue, recognize cultural communication norms (some cultures won't admit not knowing), read your AWS emails and watch cloud costs, never estimate integrations until you've verified the vendor's API and SLA, and support your local community and conference sponsors. Closes with the 'bad or decent' mantra and an invite to his sailing trip.