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

Consider that "being in love with programming," is an odd thing to say. Love is an emotion best reserved for the people in your life that you could never live without. The act of programming is a means to an end.

The act of creating art is a means to an end. It doesn't keep you up when you're down, it doesn't check in to see how you're feeling; creating something is often emotionally draining. You have to dig deep inside to create something, take the risk of putting it out there in front of others, be vulnerable, realize that your first attempts won't live up to your expectations, that the real work begins once you start editing and refining... and the final result may never be what you initially imagined; and so you seek to put yourself through it again, one more time.

Don't fall in love with this process! It's way easier to remain impartial and you will retain a lot more of your creative energy when you do. You will be able to take constructive criticism and be more productive with it. It will help you refine your work and get closer to that ideal form you envision.

Programming is very much a creative endeavour. It has similar ups and downs. Don't fall in love with it!

It seems to me that you're not giving up on programming but perhaps are not enjoying something about the process. It could be the tools! It could be that you don't see that what you're building is worth the effort. Maybe you need a new project? Maybe you will enjoy embedded programming or systems programming more? Maybe there's some problem you would rather be working on?

I found Godot[1] to be a nice, mostly consistent and cohesive gaming engine and editor. It has a Python-like native scripting language, and the whole thing feels much more approachable compared to Unreal and Unity.

1. https://godotengine.org/

> (Nobody asks why there is such a need to onboard people so often, or so quickly.

Very good point

I don’t think so; these things you name but also physical jobs like electrician etc don’t have this ‘new shit to learn every day’ while it doesn’t actually help getting anything more done (the opposite actually). There are plenty industries and fields including art where you can do your job with the same tools (physically the same tools even) you were using 40 years ago. In software I am getting berated by strangers when I want to do that (‘it is morally wrong to use C in 2023’ and crap like that).

When, as a retired musician, painter, plumber or electrician, you walk into a project that was done yesterday, you can just understand it and start working. With software (well, frontend mostly), you will have spend an insane amount of work figuring out which billions will of crappy dependencies and myriad of frameworks were chosen and then learn those to start working.

That is just not very normal in most professions.

But sure, you could get bored after doing something for a long time. The getting annoyed and frustrated by not being able to do your job because someone added crap no one asked for (for tech ego etc), making all kinds of pain you have to figure out before writing code, I have not seen outside software dev.

A lot of this sounds like big company stuff, perhaps in financial services?

The issue with places like that is that risk is prioritised higher than delivery speed, which is arguably fair enough when there is a risk of large regulatory scrutiny and reputational risk.

They are also set up to scale to thousands of engineers, so need consistency in technologies, reporting and ways of working.

I didn't enjoy working in that environment, but I have more empathy nowadays for why they have to work in that way.

Work for a smaller company or startup, and all of that stuff goes away.