Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

Explore switching development focus away from front-end.

I recommend trying Swift/iOS/macOS development. No more editor or framework hopping or megatrees of unmaintained dependencies spewing dependabot hell. You will be using Xcode with Apple's APIs to build exciting things that often weren't possible with web tech alone. SwiftUI is easy to learn if you know React. The skills are in demand. The Swift/iOS communities are mature and supportive. Apple's hardware isn't going to become less interesting or less popular any time soon (Apple VR/AR products are on the horizon). Swift is a very nice language; much more fun to use than JS/TS.

Downsides are ecosystem lock-in, general lack of openness when you run into bugs with Apple's APIs, having Apple as a gatekeeper between you and your customers, and not being able to use latest Swift language features or APIs due to minimum OS versions, but if you're prepared for all of that it's a satisfying ecosystem to work in.

Others here are recommending backend, but having been in a similar position to you I get the feeling you might not love it. Large modern backend services are often just as over-engineered and prone to cargo-culting as frontend. You will likely spend more time writing YAML than you feel you have the emotional energy for. The cloud certificate courses people will send you on will feel like sales and marketing systems designed to lock you into building end-to-end solutions with a provider's stack; not satisfying education that promotes personal growth. You will probably have to be on-call, which is not as common for frontend or mobile/Swift devs. By all means explore it, but I'd be a little more careful on that path.

Good places to start are:

https://exercism.org/tracks/swift to learn Swift.

https://www.hackingwithswift.com/100/swiftui to learn SwiftUI.

This is been the sanity-saving solution for me. I roll 100% of my own stuff in TS and web components. It sounds awful -- unless you compare it with fighting someone else's dragons.

This way, the only dragons I have are ones I created and ones I can slay. The more I write my things in functional style and build only exactly what my application needs, the company's "framework" continues to evolve AND our apps continue to work!

No one is going to change any of the "ecosystem" out from under me because there isn't one. Everything is compiled in Vite (automatically and hot reloaded) and I only ship a minified, static, single index.html file with my entire app in it. There are no globals that I didn't make, no functions that are required unless I required them, etc. It's a HUGE timesaver when debugging or adding new things the team requests.

I'm able to continue to write new, cool stuff in both our public-facing web app and in our internal web tool (game dev), both on the same framework.

Maybe try to transition into a different corner of the industry. E.g. Something like embedded programming. The tools there have become much better over the years. And it is not as much of a moving target as JavaScript. Totally possible to understand every aspect of a microcontroller (or at least know where stuff is in the documentation).

I doubt you hate coding. You probably just hate your job, I know I do. In fact, while it has taken me 8 years, I have come to the realization that I hate all jobs. I hate that someone is getting richer off my back while at the same time destroying any passion I have for something that I have always been passionate about. I hate the entire industry. I hate working with other software engineers. I hate having a manager. I hate having OKRs. I hate everything about having a career.

That’s why I’m going to get out of it, I’m going to make sure of that.

The day I opened my own business and started doing C2C work was the day I was able to deal with the whole "red tape" thing.

Burnout doesn't come from working hard, it comes from there being a dichotomy between the level of effort you're putting in and the reward you get back. Programming itself is very rewarding but dealing w/pedantic micromanaging bosses, writing emails, etc sucks.

As a consultant, I bill by the hour and I get to command a certain rate within my niche. My employers can inhibit my progress as much as they like, I'm going to bill them either way. The amount of fun drives I've taken in my Porsche while waiting for a blocker to get unblocked or a product to compile is hilarious.