41–50 of 124 posts
I've recently joined a project in a language (to be left nameless) with limited abstraction, and thus limited means to perform these trade offs, with the result being noisy code.
My interest has consequently waned.
I've been coding for 37 years now, counting what I did in childhood. I can remember getting a real charge out of doing it. It was a real thrill to be able to tell the machine what to do and see things happen on the screen. But I don't feel that thrill any more. I know I can build things; I've done so many times before. And frankly, figuring out how to fit new functionality into messy legacy systems isn't much fun. Oc…
Blacksmith. If it was possible to go back in time, I would be a blacksmith. This is my conclusion after working several years as consultant. The last project was horrible, hundreds of thousands of lines in C++ wrote by monkeys in ten years, layers of layers of crap. When I say layers I'm not speaking about architectural layers, but geological layers, like the sedimentation that trap the skeletons of dinosaurs. They i…
My experience taught me that we sometimes tend to be obsessed with code aesthetics, way beyond a healthy reverence that any code deserves. I have learnt to forgive myself of the past coding mistakes and now I try to journal them. I hope you get the strength to forgive those other developers.
First of all, I would say it is absolutely normal to fall out of love with coding, and I wouldn't worry about it! If you're enjoying what you are doing, that's a good thing. Unlike the top comment, I don't think this has to be a sign of burning out (although it can be) - humans are complex beings. The world changes, and we change as well. What was enjoyable to you 15 years ago may not be as enjoyable now, and what yo…
This is a point far more general than coding. As we grow, some of our tastes change, and that's fine. "I will always feel this way about X" deserves to be labelled as some sort of common logical fallacy if it isn't already.
12 years ago I moved away from a pure coding job because it lacked other things I was seeking. Nowadays (as a 38yo academic researcher) I don't get enough of it so I code a bit outside of work to keep me motivated, but I'm seriously considering moving back to a coding job despite many other upsides to what I currently do. Having done some networking in that job market I don't see that being a problem, should I choose to go that way.
Maybe if you stop altogether you'll end up missing it like I do, maybe you won't - doesn't matter - go with what you want to do. Like Spolsky says there are great rewards out there for developers who fully understand software but can work effectively with people who don't.
However, I never doubt that I'm in the right profession, but I do know that, as a human, I'm bound to have ups and downs with any topic that I'm involved in for longer periods of time just like relationships have ups and downs.
What I chose for myself is to have some activity that is completely different yet very enjoyable for me and I acknowledge that I do it as a balance and reward.
In my case, it's playing the guitar. I reward myself with the occasional gear purchase and generally enjoy studying+playing.
Sometimes, I'm super focused on my job and go slow with music. Other times, I'm super into music and I'm fine with sinking less effort into my job. The idea is that I have where to bounce to when I get a bit disenfranchised with one or the other.
Solving complicated issues at work is satisfying but I still find the most pleasure in my own projects solving little life issues using the tech stack I'm most comfortable with (older, less trendy platforms like Heroku/ExpressJS/Postgres). I love the feeling of an elegantly solved problem that works in a reliable and efficient way. When I invent the projects I am working on, I feel the most control to getting to that point since I can somewhat anticipate my own future feature requests.
What I have been missing lately is having my own home server and tweaking with the server configs and having more control over how my own projects are hosted. S3/Cloudfront are incredible but I miss having an apache server at home doing it for me. One consequence of the laptop age, I guess.
Went on to do some business/psychology studies, trying for years to find a way out of coding that would pay the bills (since that's all anyone would pay me to do). Eventually I started loathing the coding work. I did it, every day, but I loathed it. I had to occupy a lot of my after-hours time with reading and watching interesting videos completely unrelated to software development - especially focusing on psychology and philosophy.
Then, towards my early 30s, in a matter of weeks I had this sudden change of heart. No particular reason that I can pinpoint. I just started loving coding again. I loved being able to make things that made other people's lives better (especially by way of saving them time so they could get to do the really interesting things they wanted to do in life).
I have no idea what drives people's inner sense of "interest" (i.e. what interests people, piques their curiosity and motivates them). It seems pretty far outside of my own control, for me at least. It seems to take a lot of wisdom, introspection, radical honesty and internal negotiation to balance my interests with what genuinely works for me at the time.
When you reach the point where you don't want to code outside of work, you've lost the passion and you're slowing starting to deteriorate as a developer. It's time to do something else.
This whole article is great, but the first 2 paragraphs really resonated with me: http://www.loper-os.org/#selection-29.0-44.0 Here's an excerpt: Sadly, the above scenario is more truth than fiction – for computer enthusiasts. There is a particularly cruel discrepancy between what a creative child imagines the trade of a programmer to be like and what it actually is. When you are a teenager, alone with a (programmabl…