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

You haven't fallen out of love with programming, you have grown disenchanted with The Love of the Toolchain. The almighty toolchain, long and powerful, and you Cannot Program Without It (nevermind actual history). The check-in, check-out. The issues and the Jira boards, or any kind of boards. And then there's probably a lot of Agile junk to go with it.

I shifted into a job where programming enhanced the role. Now I expend mental effort on coming up with novel algorithms. My struggle is to express how I think in terms a computer will understand, rather than wrestling with the Jormungandr of what the profession has turned into.

I was working on my own project. Medium-sized, a full-stack web application that I'll release somewhere this year. It's a Next.js front-end, I did all my own CSS and optimisations, semantic HTML, accessibility, load performance, TTI optimisations. The CMS is a headless one that I use Next.js to connect directly to the database with. It's hosted on a server I manage myself, and I set it up so that a git push to the main branch would build and deploy the entire thing.

Setting all that CI/CD stuff up took me maybe 6 hours. Building the website (front and back-end) took me a few weeks. It's a complicated piece of software, but fun to build.

I avoided using unnecessary tools. I only added what was absolutely necessary. And based on my 22+ years of experience (including some FAANG companies and the likes), in any professional setting, this project would've taken 5 front-end developers, 3 back-end developers, 2 testers, 1 project manager, 1 scrum master, 1 product owner, 1 UX and 1 UI designer, and perhaps one or two interns.

And it would've taken 2 years or longer.

I've done projects with teams like that in the past where trivial work was drowned in red tape, office politics, endless opinions and meetings, weekly time-wasters (Scrum... fuck I hate Scrum!), endless "documentation" that nobody reads...

And I remember being put on a dashboard page. The team was taking 4 hours to plan all the stories. During that time I just started working (remotely, muted, camera off) and I finished the entire dashboard completely to specs, no bugs, in the time it took them to write the stories and tasks and estimate them.

"Done."

"What?"

"I'm done. It's all done. I pulled all 18 tasks to myself, verified them, and the entire story and epic is now done."

"What?"

"I also wrote all the e2e-tests."

"What?"

"Scrum is a huge waste of time."

"Actually, I disagree, because..."

Yeah, consultant who is paid by the hour. It makes perfect sense to pull all 20+ people into a 6-hour long retrospective every single week. Because 12 of those people are from your employer, and that's a lot of money for doing fuck all.

When I worked at Apple, we had a small team and we just did standups on Slack. Just write "I did X, I will do Y, no impediments," and that's it. No scrum bullshit, no sprints, no retrospectives. We just communicated using words (written, preferably) and got shit done.

Now I'm working for a large corporate company that follows all the things by the book. And the book sucks. I counted: 16 hours per week in unnecessary meetings. Then another 10 hours in meetings where most people are unnecessary. And when I speak up against it, people don't trust me. Scrum is their God.

I hate my job so much.

I met a guy in the forests of Canada who was riding around on an ATV with his dog close behind.

We talked for a bit, he works in Forestry for the provincial government there.

He was going around gathering data from wireless water temperature logging devices, data which would enable analysis of the effect of logging and other extraction operations on trout migration patterns.

He left me with a hot tip - versus the groundwater fed ones, surface-fed rivers are clear and cold, perfect for taking a dip on a hot July day.

One of the things that bothers me lately is that the "tools" (libraries, frameworks, documentation, toolchains, baked-in enforced brogrammer conventions, questionable service lock-ins, etc.) are usually in many ways poor-quality, poorly-designed, and inferior to what I've used in the past.

I won't itemize all the ways here, because I started, and had to delete them, because it would take hours and ruin my day (and some communities would never speak to me again).

Another thing that bothers me is that Web search hits are mostly SEO, posturing, or otherwise low quality or negative.

It's no wonder, if a lot of people are seeing software as an unpleasant and poorly-effective corporate BS activity that one only does for income and ladder-climbing/job-hopping. Because that's what it's being made into.

Another thing that bothers me is mostly symbolic: so many open source projects now base much of their communities and support around Discord. Despite nominally being about open source, it seems they've somehow missed the ongoing lessons of the last few decades in that space.

There was a time when this would be glaring sign of bumbling corporate effort that didn't "get it"; now it just means ordinary programmers or brogrammers who're just mimicking what they see around them (which is self-perpetuating).

If you're feeling discouraged, I don't have a good answer right now, but I guess look around for like-minded people, and how to carve out a less-BS oasis.

How do you sustain yourself in the meantime? Or do you already have a business?