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

I can totally relate to "keeping up with the Joneses" when it comes to new tools, frameworks and trends. JS world is full of new crap to "compensate" for the lacking of older crap. I wish there was some sort of a consortium or standards body to review and sponsor new initiatives. If you have a new idea for "better" JS anything, great, apply to the consortium first to get grilled and polished before being able to release your thing. Sometimes red tape is a good thing.

There's a reason why we have a review panels behind protocols. IF you leave it open to people working in their spare time, you end up with the current chaotic world of JS!

It's okay. Soon it will all done by A.I. /joke

Try another language if you're burnt on the ever changing ecosystem. I would consider Go (golang) for instance.

The tooling is much simpler, so much so that you might not want to go back to javascript.

There is not a big story around building UI with it but some people are working on it (including me). :)

I got fed up with the ADHD of javascript back in 2013 and made the switch. Probably won't ever go back. Bare js is fine but the frameworkitis and build tool-itis, I can't deal with.

> Nowadays, I feel like I have to jump so many hoops and spend so much mental bandwidth just to get the permission to code.

> Any project I work on is connected to a million different tools, workflows and services, that all do things their own way, and everything lives in a totally different place, where it’s hard to monitor what’s going on.

It sounds to me like it isn't coding you're falling out of love with. It actually sounds like you still love coding and you're bemoaning the fact that you never get to do it!

Without knowing the specifics of your situation, it could be that you're at the wrong company or in the wrong role. There absolutely are companies and roles out there that let you spend the overwhelming majority of your time writing code.

> I work mostly with Javascript — and that doesn’t help.

I bet it doesn't. Not to rub it in, but this is why I don't work with JS/frontend. I think you might be onto something here, I bet the JS ecosystem and the way it all shakes us out is a large contributor to why you feel the way you do. I think changing careers right now might be rash decision (though, of course, you should remain open to anything). Why don't you start to devote some energies to moving into a different branch, such as backend/API development? I used to work on mobile apps and, while not as bad as the JS world, I found that I didn't enjoy how much of my time was spent perfecting pixels and the workings of the UI (some people do enjoy that, just not me) so I moved to working on larger distributed systems and APIs. There's no UI to content with and there's a lot of writing code. If I were you, I'd start devoting some energy to looking into that, assuming, of course, you have any interest in it.

You aren't fed up with coding, you are fed up with implementing someone else's idea of coding. Frameworks are helpful. They allow you to get up and running; to leverage other people's work. But you aren't solving anything. That's why it isn't fun.

Which is more fun? importing graphics.draw as g and calling g.lineto(x,y) or writing your own lineto(x,y) function?

Don't switch careers, but take a side project doing your own cool stuff. Get your pen and paper out! Draw thos lines; write that code. Will anyone use it? Probably not. Will you enjoy it? Totally!

I am self-taught and have been working as a software engineer for about a decade. I have this feeling come up a lot as well. I miss the days of when I was working on projects for myself, learning new stuff constantly, spending hours trying to figure something out and the mental rush you get when you finally get something working.

Working in software development as a profession does take some of the joy out of that over time, but I've found that trying to learn things outside of working and working on my own projects is still very enjoyable.