Ask HN: Slowly Losing Interest in Software Engineering, should I be worried?

I write programs at work. I don't do a lot of coding at home. I have a "Cybersecurity Esq" type job, which involves coding about 75% of the time, and the other 25% of the time is boring work. When I don't get enough coding time, I usually find myself working on projects at home. If I'm not coding, I work on fixing up some vintage computers, or soldering together small projects (that I can then code later). I don't think "hmm I haven't done enough coding this week" I just do what I want, and generally if I do a lot of coding at work, I'm not so interested in coding at home. If you're spending your coding energy at work and not at home, is that a problem for you? Get a hobby, it doesn't have to be coding. One thing I like to do is practice DJing (I suck at it, but I try), or fix up old game consoles. I think it goes back to why you got into programming in the first place - was it instant gratification, or did you think you could make things work in new ways, infinite possibilities, optimizations, or what? For me, I like the problem solving aspect of it, and it turns out I can get my 'problem solving' fix from repairing broken electronics as well.

> Would I enjoy coding more if I didn't do it as my full time job [deleted]

For me, the satisfaction of building hardware and software is solving a problem that someone has. I'm ok with that "someone" being myself or a friend, as a hobby... or being a stranger, via some commercial product I help develop.

Corporate work doesn't have to be soul-crushing. BTW, is the "20% project" concept actually a thing anywhere? (Either as 20% out of 100% or 120%)

My parents were college professors, English teachers, and two things they kept pounding into my head all my life was to one, learn to write a sentence and two, college is not there to teach you a trade it's there to expand your mind. I think it's unfortunate that companies feel that they no longer have to invest in their employees and teach them the job, they have pushed this off on the employees. Sadly, people think college will teach them a job and except for a few degrees Medicine, Law, Engineering it doesn't.

> "don't work with your passions" > I think the world really needs to stop telling people that they need to do what they love

I think there is a difference between using one's skill doing something they don't enjoy and doing what one loves (with or without the use of said skills).[*]

I would probably also stop enjoying playing video games if that was all I did at work, but that is because I would want to do more with that. Maybe be more involved in the creation. What we love doing usually evolves and I see no reason why someone should simply tolerate something for 30 years when they could instead evolve what they do with their personal growth. Whether that involves their trained skills or not I don't think should have much weight. I think of it as more of a starter pack to help point you in your direction, even if that means you find all the items you acquired to not be of much use and go off in search of something else. It still helped get you to where you are headed. I think the 'do what you love' is finding work that does not feel like work, with or without your passions/skills.

[*] an example from a talented designer I know who was miserable from spending 2 years basically adjusting a single web widget then moved on to other work being involved in the overall design of a product and loves it.

Sure, but this is just my opinion.

Part of it is what diarrhea said in a sibling response: Having minimal meaningful human interaction. Scrum meetings with your owners and such don't really count. If anything, those are worse than not having social interactions, lol. We're cloistered plumbers working in the dark crevices of systems most people don't want to touch or know about, and it's pretty much always a conversation killer to tell regular people outside of tech bubbles that you're a programmer.

But more than that, often our work is itself devoid of purpose or meaning. We make ad tech and crypto and marketing pages for these big soulless corporations that only enrich a few shareholders, often at the expense of everyone else and sometimes society and democracy itself. I don't think Meta, Twitter, etc. are a net good for humanity. Maaaaaybe Netflix and Google are arguably less evil to some degree, but even that's debatable. And that's just the products and services they make, not even counting the knock-on effects of tech bubbles killing livability across the USA, for example.

My first tech experience was as an intern, and the anti-spam startup I worked for in the early 2000s decided to sell their tech to the Chinese government to censor dissidents instead. I noped the heck out of there and tried to stay away from evil tech since then, instead working for small solar businesses and nonprofits. But even then, I'm under no illusion that I'm any sort of rebel, rather, just someone living on the fringes and feeding off the leftovers. All my work is still directly developed by Google (Analytics, GCP, etc.), Meta (React and FB ads), AWS, etc. -- the same companies that make their billions exploiting people.

At the end of the day I think it's just run-of-the-mill capitalism, not that dissimilar from bankers, railroad barons, newspaper owners, mine owners, whatever... profit-driven and rent-seeking overlords that always put their own interests ahead of society's.

It's a very different world than people who work in civil service, or as a professor or a rural teacher, or a nurse, or a dentist, or even a civil engineering, etc.

Not only is it often a lonely and asocial job, it's also often an anti-social job that actively makes society worse in order to enrich a few people.

I know it's not a popular opinion since this is a community of startup entrepreneurs, after all, but it's the hacker side of things that interested me at first. Big tech killed little tech, and I think it's also making our lives worse, offering more convenience at the expense of community. I often miss the pre-smartphone, pre-Amazon era when you'd still have to go out and interact with people and get to know them, instead of just WFH and getting everything delivered, for example. I often yearn of moving to less capitalist societies whose cities and towns are more walkable, more local, and generally more intimate.

After twenty years of doing dev work, I feel like my impact on the world has been exactly zero, or maybe slightly negative, lol, and I can't wait to find another career. (Working on going back to school).

But again, that's just me. Maybe someone like Sam Altman can look back in two decades and think "wow, we really changed the future of humanity for the better, huh?" Or not. We'll see, lol.