Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?

Obviously for financial/economic system reasons this isn't open to people anymore, think of the cost of medical insurance or cost of real estate, it was much easier to be independently wealthy in the 80s/90s (for a small enough value of wealthy of course). But something similar could probably still be arranged today, somehow.

Another thing to think about is not all programming jobs are excruciatingly boring. Boring jobs should pay a substantial premium to be staffed such that you can afford mental health vacations each weekend of arbitrary expense, to recover.

Also in my starving student days I worked some physical labor jobs that were as excruciatingly boring as your description implies for programming. You feel physically better and more energized if you move more, but you'll be just as mentally bored.

The money will never be the same as working in tech, and you'll almost certainly have to scale back your lifestyle expectations. I still do remote freelance work in slower periods to keep cash-flow flowing, and to fund farm expansion as we grow.

Here's a fun video of my non-tech lifestyle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb0ur8cdOfY

More recently, I've been applying my past development experience to farming automation using Raspberry Pi's. I built an automated greenhouse controller last year and this year am working on a device to automatically mix and dispense milk replacer for all of the goat kids we have born each year. (You can of course purchase commercial versions of the projects, but it was a fun application of programming, while learning about the RPi and automation, which I'd never done before.)

No worse than any other profession. Sure, most days I do more of the same, build reports for finance/corporate problems. It's rolling stones up a hill every morning, but that has nothing to do with programming itself. The issue you're describing is that you're working to haul someone else's stones. Fine, all well and good, pay is good. Wouldn't be any different if I was a musician or a painter... all they ever request is that I play Piano Man.

For me the art comes in doing it a different way each time. Maybe it's a function of my inexperience, I've only been doing this for a few years so far but the horizon seems so far away and there's so much to learn that I can't imagine getting bored anytime soon. Everything is amazing and I can't learn it all! In the meanwhile there's stuff to learn outside of tech. Like gardening or baking. Baking bread is a series of simple tricks (temperature of the yeast, bowl type, kneading techniques, etc.) that people do in order to produce an outcome (a certain crust or flavour). I'm struck often by how similar I find it to writing code.

Try rolling the stone with one hand tied behind your back.