It is all mental in my experience. If you want that spark back, work your way back to the people you know who still have that spark. What separates you and them -- Why do they think that way? What thoughts are blocking you from thinking that way?
Ask HN: Losing all interest in programming, what now?
71–80 of 178 posts
Re: Ask HN: Losing all interest in programming, what now?
#72The problem seems to be that the reward is too far down the line to maintain your interest, and any obstacles or slow starts only make that recede further away. Best ways I can think of combating this is to pick small setups with quicker payoffs as mentioned in another comment, or learn to enjoy the process.
Blogging about your journey is one way of doing that. Even if the setup is tedious, once you have it and document & publish it, it can give a sense on completion and satisfaction.
Another thing I often do is prototype an idea using something more familiar or with much restricted scope at first. The key thing is to go from success to success however small the steps. Building up to one grand success only works if you are committed to a vision through all the preamble, obstacles, delays, and distractions.
Re: Ask HN: Losing all interest in programming, what now?
#73> much of what’s involved in doing it just feels tedious and I know I’m going to be stuck screwing around with the most trivial boilerplate crap
I started to feel this way during my first internship in my sophomore year of college, after having been programming as a teenager for 4 years and then starting a CS major in college. It was a rude awakening. It led to years of depression and confusion. Finally I see the light through a potential career change
Re: Ask HN: Losing all interest in programming, what now?
#74I'm in the same boat. After 14 years of software development, I am done. I've switched companies 4 times in the last year alone looking for something that will keep my interest alive. It's my first week at the newest one and I'm already uninterested. I even started helping out an acquaintance with a side business project that is really cool, but after a couple of weeks of that I'm no longer interested in it either.
It's not depression leading to this; it's the reverse. This problem is leading to depression! I get enjoyment from other things in my life (e.g. being outdoors, doing yard-work, building things). Just not programming/tech. It's been like this for several years now. I can go on vacation and soon as I get back, same issue... zero desire to work with technology.
With 4 mouths to feed and one kid approaching college age, switching to another field while retaining the same salary/benefits seems impossible.
Re: Ask HN: Losing all interest in programming, what now?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I turned to helping other people solve their problems because at least I was helping others to get through what I couldn't figure out how to get through myself. Do you consider this to be a good thing? Doing the same now, and wondering if it’s okay.
Ultimately you won't really know if it's a good thing until after the fact. I think just following my nose and doing what felt good in the moment was a big help. I guess it helped that I'd been trained as a youth counsellor early in my career, and I've been helping people my whole life as a by-product of who I am. A lot of people over the years have told me I should be a counsellor because apparently I'm really good…
Appreciate this comment very much, thank you!
Re: Ask HN: Losing all interest in programming, what now?
#76It's always possible that your weren't that into programming first place, but also some jobs/projects/people just suck and may have given you a bad look into the field.
Your options are pretty straightforward:
1. Press on with programming, perhaps find another job or sub-field.
2. Do something else.
Like so many other things (and like your past projects, it seems) the devils in the details. There are a million ways to go about either option. Figuring things like this out is basically what life is. There is is a good chance you'll find a good path from here and far from now look back at this point as a inflection point on your life, where you took a turn for the better.
Re: Ask HN: Losing all interest in programming, what now?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m in a similar boat myself. I told myself I didn’t have any energy for things outside of work because of my job, though I never found the workload that overwhelming. I could get lost in the puzzle of the technical work and I’m good at it, but I ultimately found the work to be meaningless. At some point enterprise SaaS feels so abstract that even if in some sense it’s improving the world (helping companies work more…
Hang in there. Having been in your position, I know sometimes all you can do is hang in there and not much else. You can never predict when the upturn will come...but it sounds like with some restorative activities (your hiking, cooking, music) you are on the right track even if it doesn’t feel like it.
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Re: Ask HN: Losing all interest in programming, what now?
#78I was asking myself if I was destined to write for-loops for the unforseen future. Echoing Edward Kmett, "Haskell is the reason I am still a programmer today."
https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1tdkrx/review_of_h...
Re: Ask HN: Losing all interest in programming, what now?
#79Everyone reaches the point where they just want to live in a yurt and milk goats eventually. It's been a fucking rough year or five.
Thanks for telling it like it is. The advice in this thread is really lacking. Maybe it's because the real answer is there is no advice and we just have to suck it up?
"Take a 3 month break and come back to it". I'm back. I don't want to do programming anymore.
"Ok you should play video games and not do anything productive, then come back to it". Cool, just finished Days Gone and i'm replaying BioShock. I don't want to do programming anymore.
"You're just burned out and depressed, find a therapist, take medicine, etc.". Did that. I'm on Welbutrin and my therapist says I should look into changing fields, maybe going back to school. Easy right? I don't want to do programming anymore.
"It's all mental, meditate". I sit outside on my deck every weekend and just enjoy the outdoors. I still don't want to write programs.
"Buy a motorcycle". I already have one and I love it, but I still don't want to write programs.
After many years of feeling this way and getting the answers like the above, any answer not in the realm of "you can move to X field with relative ease and maintain the same salary/benefits" doesn't feel like it's going to help. It seems my only option is to just accept defeat
Re: Ask HN: Losing all interest in programming, what now?
#80Switching to Clojure did it for me.