Ask HN: Software devs with 10 years experience, what do you still love about it?

- I still love the feeling of finality when you mark a Github PR as ready for review. It's like you let out a breath you've been holding in for a day or more. The fruit of all that thinking all that pondering, now in tangible form. Ready to make someones life better. (I think this is why I don't see myself working at an enterprise - I enjoy having high impact in products)

- I love guiding younger engineers around trade-offs to solutions. I tell them my recommendation and then I go through my reasoning and because I have 14 years I have first-hand accounts about what went wrong and why. It feels good. I remember in my early days having a senior show me the ropes was very interesting and very fun.

However I dont like how most workplaces are still really inefficiently managed and full of politics and bad decisions.

Making things nobody ever saw before (current role). Inventing a new kind of service nobody saw before that allows farmers to do things that were impossible.

Taking a boring, time consuming part of somebodies day and making it disappear so they can do more interesting things.

Occasionally hiding something fun in code that makes somebody smile.

Mastery over things. Knowing how to hook up devices and make them work together.

Not every day is great, but being able to create software is like being an actual wizard, especially if you are lucky enough to work where software and hardware hit the physical world.

Digging into new challenges, learning and creating still tick the boxes. I’ve found I increasingly need to partition work and “hobby” CS though.

Currently working through 3D graphics in the “hobby” category and having a blast.