Ask HN: How happy are you working as a programmer?

Yeah, in my case, ithe work was very very simple. Slightly tedious because I had to type up lookup tables, but once I familiarized myself with php, it didn't take 5 hours.

> To be really effective in your non-work time, x would have to be at most 5 or less

That doesn't sound very effective to me

> Reducing expenses to half is pretty tough given the biggest expense is rent/mortgage.

This is simply a matter of finding a location to live where rent is not a big expense. All you need is an internet connection. You don't have to live in the Bay Area to create software and there are plenty of cheap places to live, both in the U.S. and in other countries.

> Reducing work to half is harder since there are not very many companies that are okay with 20 hrs or less a week. This also means you wont get health insurance.

I take it you don't have a lot of experience freelancing, but it's very easy to find as much or little work as you're willing to do - I did it for years. I also find that the best health insurance policy is to take care of yourself. Beyond that, just get the highest deductible plan you possibly can and minimize your health risks (thankfully programming is not very hazardous).

> But as a single person or a family in the US, this just doesnt make sense.

If it doesn't make sense for a single person in the U.S. then who does it make sense for? Ask yourself who you're trying to convince, me, or yourself? Ever notice how much easier it is to come up with reasons why something is impossible than it is to actually try it for yourself?

Just a side question on the issue of animal welfare, but how do you handle the paradox of the spider and the butterfly? I'm not sure it has an official name, so a simple description is that some animals kill other animals to keep themselves alive (such as a spider hunting a butterfly), so how do you provide for the welfare of both?

My first companies were all services companies so they immediately generated reveneu and were thus easily bootstrapped. I believe it was easier begin 90s to 2000s to do that though. With that money and also during that period I started building products: a dating site, a CMS, a freehosting OS and large freehoster, a POS for grand cafe's and some niche LOB dev products. I sold all of those after running them for a while; in the end they were all very profitable and fun because of the diversity. The company formed around the CMS grew to 300 people in the high times. That I did not like at all so I quit as CTO and opened the R&D dep of that company with 2 colleagues.

Currently I'm working on the hardware and software for a smart credit card while I have a services company to offload work to and do work for other clients.

Services still work well as bootstrap; first do some freelance work in a client office, start discussing working from home when the trust has been built, start suggesting to get more people on board when it gets busy. Before you know it you have a small team and you can start cloning that process until you have enough portfolio to do less intensive sales. You will never run losses: quite the opposite. When your team takes over enough you can work on side projects if you want to.

Currently, I'm not happy working as a programmer.

I really love the job, I've done coding and software development as a hobby since I was 14, maybe 15 years old, because it was always my dream to do this kind of thing.

After I've finished my apprenticeship as a java ee / android dev 2 1/2 years ago, I continued to work for the same company who hired me as an apprentice in the first place. After that, I decided that I need a "change of scenery" and to explore the big world of professional software development.

The second company, which I currently work for since a year now, is however somewhat very different. I've started my career with an already existing business project (imagine your typical java enterprise project here -> rdbms + application server + java rich client), supporting it, making the clients happy with _everything_ they want.

It was in a really bad condition (architecture, software design, ui design of the main application, the client was fed up with), but it was doable, so I decided to make a change. I started developing a new client, with modern design and a cross plattform approach, and everyone loved it, I got great response from everyone and the project even got a stockup of developers from 2 to 6 - just because of my work and the resulting interest of the client (= more money++ for my company for a project which was theoretically thought dead). Everything was great.

The last 3-4 month however were terrible. I learned enough about this project to understand of what hell im into now: the client hasn't the slightest idea of what this project is doing anyways. The team leader had no experience in leading teams or even projects, because he was actually an architect which has done a solo job on this project for 4-5-6 years now.

After all, the project was developed because the client's company had money. But this is a different story, however...

The feature requests of the client were getting more and more, the time to accomplish goals was getting less and less. There wasn't even time anymore to test things, (I know, testing - haha, but this company is pretty well known in the world of testing and test-consulting, every other project there is heavily tested for example), or to get rid of technical dept. - every accomplished jira task was just a patch of code and hopes, pushed into the project git, hoping that everything will work - but of course, if you changed something, everything fell down like theres no tomorrow.

I just couldn't work like this anymore, I've tried it several times to talk with my boss or my project lead to get rid of, or at least, minimize the impact of technical dept on this project, because it was the main problem which consumed most of the time AND budget, when solving features for the client. After the "critical path" of this project, and 2 happy clients, we had a sit in with the whole team, including the team leader, and my boss.

We talked about everything, what went good, what went wrong, how to improve ourselfs and how to manage clients in order to prevent something like this the next time and I was really, really happy with it.

As the time went by, the project lead was taking a break because of way to many additional workhours, I was fine with it. It was just one month to go until new year, and after that, I thought, everything will be fine - of course it wasn't.

The workload doubled in this month, no team lead, just me and my coworkers who had just half of an idea of this _great_great_ project. Anyways, we've made it. Everything the client wished for was done and even more, they were happy.

As my vacation began and the new year started, I fell into a deep depressive hole. Me and my project lead were so terrible burned out, that after 3 weeks of vacation, I needed another 3 weeks just to get into real life again. Today is my last free day of this 6 week timeout and I hope that I've got enough power and endurance to get back on track.

I've learned a lot about company politics in the last year, how to handle clients, new coworkers, bosses and a lot of do's and dont's on enterprise java development. But I've also learned alot about the "darkside" of software development.

I love the craftmenship and all the clever thoughts and every single person I've worked with - but if you start a career in that industry or a new job be aware, that money is the only thing that counts at the end of the day. So be grateful if you're getting paid to play with the newest technology or just try stuff out.

P.S. - Sorry for the long personal post and the horrible spelling, english is not my native language. I feel better.