> I wish I could go back to the days where I spent most of my day in the IDE and at the end produce something that was (to me) amazing.
Then go do that bro. Life is short.
Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
221–230 of 301 posts
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you sustain yourself in the meantime? Or do you already have a business?
From his comment it sounds like he does jobs driving commercial vehicles (such as trucks or passenger transport). I got this from the mention of a "CDL", commercial driving license.
That's just my backup plan.
My wife is currently the breadwinner, and I'm the housekeeper, gardener, handyman, etc.
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#223I feel the same way when I'm in a position like that.
It's why I gravitate toward small pre product market fit startups as either one of the first employees or founder. There is only process where I make process and everyone is executing as quickly as possible. I get to learn a ton and feel productive. I'm much more motivated by intrinsic factors than things like a large salary so it works for me.
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fun to read this comment, as I'm part of the team that deployed the exact same measure as for your wife: we now shutdown dev environments each day at 8PM. We decided to do so because over the weeks, we saw that a lot of devs "forgot" about their dev envs and they were up & running for 6+ months for absolutely nothing. On the other side, we are constantly requested to reduce infra costs, and dev environments (even unu…
Not only would they be forgotten about, but without forced downtime/reset, they start slipping into production use. The dev asks someone to “try it on my server”, then the word gets out about this other server that works better and has more features. Before you know it 2 years have gone by and this “dev” server is a critical system the business needs to function.
In our case, those dev envs are actually feature envs: they are a copy of staging with only the microservice they are working on that differs. So it is impossible for those env to end up as prod stuff for us.
However, each FE is an almost exact copy of staging, and each dev has 1-2 running FE, so it requires a lot of compute and stopping them has a real impact
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#225This reads much like "I like welding, but I hate working on an assembly line". Those things you find annoying are things that help make the process streamlined, trackable, repeatable, and you fungible. Of course things are more fun when you are guided by your own flow and direction... but how does that scale to hundreds of employees? It's the independent flow of programming that I fell in love with, and that I now re…
Assembly lines are for robots/automation...if you need more time to organize the assebly line then to weld...well better then dont use a assembliline. Over all your example is flawed.
Sorry but you are the robot, just with wetware instead of firmware. The robots on the assembly line spend more time moving than they do welding.
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds so much like my company. Add in that management will make commitments to customers without having any idea what it will take to execute, schedule 20 hours of meetings per week, expect us to work a total of 60-80 hours a week to meet the arbitrary schedule, and also change priorities seemingly at random based on which customer is making the most noise. The best part is HR regularly talks about how we are a…
schedule 20 hours of meetings per week Have had this problem so much. The problem is managers and analysts are productive through meetings. Software Engineers are productive in blocks of 4-6 hours of focused concentration. Many managers don't realize this and forward FYI meeting invites to developers all day long.
Just ask if you should be focusing on anything other than your important project and if they could help with the communication around pushing the deadline out a day to attend this meeting.
Or just skip it and say you are working on x or y.
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#227Consider that "being in love with programming," is an odd thing to say. Love is an emotion best reserved for the people in your life that you could never live without. The act of programming is a means to an end. The act of creating art is a means to an end. It doesn't keep you up when you're down, it doesn't check in to see how you're feeling; creating something is often emotionally draining. You have to dig deep in…
I agree with you when it comes to programming-as-work, but hard disagree about not being in love with a process/activity. People fall in love with playing/creating music, writing, gardening--whatever it is that nourishes their creative and nurturing spirit. In fact I would say that if you don't love the process and are only interested in the outcome, you're doing it wrong. "The journey is its own reward" and etc.
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#228Take this as constructive advice: stop expecting your job to be fulfilling.
Yes, most jobs are filled with corporate drudgery. Business doesn't generally require tough (technical) problems to be solved. The point of business is always to make money by serving the customer.
You need to find a way to thrive in that environment otherwise you'll just drown.
I work on boring-ass bank payment stuff. I spend my days writing google docs and convincing PMs that their ideas are totally out of whack and hold their hands as I explain how things need to be done to not code ourselves into a corner. I barely code and when I do it's mostly some stupid API calls and shoving that from one DB to another.
Instead I look at my job as a way to make loads of money and get better at my social skills, and outside of work I do the hard cool technical work I want to do.
And I am able to do that because I really, really want to code. I don't waste time on social media, games, etc. Coding is more fulfilling than that for me so I do that instead.
If you can find a job that lines up with your interests, great! Go for it! But there's no ideal job and there will always be stupid work that someone needs to do.
As someone told me early in my career: different company, same shit
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds so much like my company. Add in that management will make commitments to customers without having any idea what it will take to execute, schedule 20 hours of meetings per week, expect us to work a total of 60-80 hours a week to meet the arbitrary schedule, and also change priorities seemingly at random based on which customer is making the most noise. The best part is HR regularly talks about how we are a…
> I'd quit but equity... From what I've seen, those golden handcuffs are usually gold-plated handcuffs with the same steel underneath.
Meaning, the eventual payout is rarely what you think it is?
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#230[deleted]