Intellectual satisfaction and regular doses of dopamine high :-). 30 years and hoping for 30 more.
Edit: Added age :-)
Ask HN: Software devs with 10 years experience, what do you still love about it?
51–56 of 56 posts
Re: Ask HN: Software devs with 10 years experience, what do you still love about it?
#52Software development is basically an exercise in problem solving... Which can give you a good sense of achievement. Being paid well without having to go down the management route is a bonus. Being in high demand, and job flexibility, and as others have said it's no big deal if you want to just quit and join another team... No one in software development is irreplaceable.
Re: Ask HN: Software devs with 10 years experience, what do you still love about it?
#53I have 20 yrs now in mainly c# but also js,ts,sql,ruby,etc,etc,..... I really love the way how programming fits into my head and how I can remember quite every code I wrote though the years. What I hate is that I don't learn anything new, no matter how much I try to explore new concepts. Everything is a remix... But hey, now I have much more time to learn cyber security and piano :) Btw, I looooove the HN community s…
> don't learn anything new, no matter how much I try to explore new concepts I'm sure there's more that you're not being exposed to. Distributed systems, functional programming, or Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP). Go, Rust, Pony, Clean are all interesting languages that do things differently. Elixir/Phoenix framework since you have Ruby background is also a neat twist. You can learn new thing…
The problem with the word "new" is that it depends on which abstraction layer you look at.
for example, all programming languages are turing machines under the hood so you could say that learning a new programming language doesn't bring any novelty to you because it feels like the same end result.
also lisp did most of the cool things and now we are just reinventing the wheel with other languages
Re: Ask HN: Software devs with 10 years experience, what do you still love about it?
#54Having done over 25 yrs , the creativity of it, finding elegant solutions to problems, satisfaction of taming a spaghetti code mess and cleaning it up , learning arcane uber-geeky ways of doing things and amusing others with these tricks, intellectual satisfaction / keeping the brain in shape, having colleagues with good senses of humour and lively minds, (particularly the delightfully twisted silly jokes/banter peop…
> having colleagues with good senses of humour and lively minds, (particularly the delightfully twisted silly jokes/banter people come up with after spending hours on weird abstract problems that are incomprehensible to most people How do you find coworkers like these? Haha.
Oh they are to be found if you look around. ;). Probably more common in less driven or corporate environments - so public sector e:g universities/ government, "unfashionable" but still interesting fields such as telecomms. I'd echo the sibling comment that perhaps FAANG is not the place, that's where people go to make the most bucks but possibly at the expense of having any fun at work. Having anything to do with a large open source project can enable you to meet cool people, and have shared creativity which is awesome. Good luck with finding more of such people :)
Re: Ask HN: Software devs with 10 years experience, what do you still love about it?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
> having colleagues with good senses of humour and lively minds, (particularly the delightfully twisted silly jokes/banter people come up with after spending hours on weird abstract problems that are incomprehensible to most people How do you find coworkers like these? Haha.
dont join faang.
I'd be inclined to agree with this!
Re: Ask HN: Software devs with 10 years experience, what do you still love about it?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
dont join faang.
I'm not in faang :(
To add to my other comment, I'd suggest, go get a job at a university , either research support or even their central IT, with some link to open source projects. You'll meet cool people that way. I did. Including some cool Polish people actually ;)