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Ask HN: How do you keep your programming motivation up?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your programming motivation up?

#101

Post by scarface74 »

LuNan wrote: post #98
juangacovas wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the further down the stack you go" is the reason I love English (being Spanish)

I am not following as well, I am from China. Thanks.

Consider a typical web application, the “stack” is.

The browser and front end code - just sticking with Microsoft, the popular method has been classic ASP, ASP.Net Web Forms and ASP.Net MVC and ASP.Net Web API and they both have changed significantly after Core. Not to mention that the industry has moved away from server side rendering to client side rendering. The popular client side framework seems to change every year.

The next level down is a server side language, let’s assume that we are doing client side rendering. When I really got serious about my career in 2008, after staying at a job for a decade, job listings were looking for C# and Java. Those are still two of the most popular enterprise languages. While of course both languages have evolved in 10 years, it’s mostly syntactic sugar. If you were in a coma for 10 years, you could wake up and easily understand code in either.

Databases - back in 2001, I was working as a backend developer writing batch jobs to load data into MySQL and Sql server databases and do reports. Now, I’m still working with MySQL doing some ETL as part of my job. What I learned back then is still applicable. The difference between those two databases now and the front end framework of the day is like night and day.

Web servers. I don’t deal with web servers that much anymore (see below), but when I do, it’s still IIS, dealing with IIS hasn’t changed much in 15+ years.

Networking/Infrastructure. I’ve had to deal a little with the networking in the early 2000s, but I didn’t get back into the infrastructure side until two years ago with AWS. Everything made perfect sense. The basics of TCP/IP, servers, load balancers, etc hasn’t changed in decades. While AWS is always adding things, nothing you learn is ever obsolete unlike the framework of the day.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your programming motivation up?

#102

Post by codesternews »

scarface74 wrote: post #4
mieseratte wrote: post #3

I don't. Turning my hobby into my career killed my hobby and, really, that's fine. It affords me a good life and the ability to discover and enjoy new hobbies. If you're worried about "keeping up," then I would suggest you 1) ignore the rat-race that is framework-of-the-day and 2) focus on learning fundamentals of your domain. Sure, you'll miss out on some hip startup jobs but typical employers don't care about your…

Ignoring the framework of the day and “learning the fundamentals” won’t get you past the either HR filters or make you competitive with developers who are constantly doing Resume Driven Development and have a resume that is buzzword compliant. Especially if you are an older developer (I’m 45) and you will just be seen as just another old out of touch developer. That being said, the further down the stack you go, the…

Thanks for great advice! May I know how you keep yourself relevant at that age and what approach you changed from earlier when you get old?

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your programming motivation up?

#103

Post by eanthy »

Rannath wrote: post #60

Motivation is fickle. Cultivate discipline. Set aside time to do something every day. No exceptions. Don't worry about how long you do it for. Discipline is something you can learn.

I agree with this, but when you get drained all day on mindless tasks, you want to go home and forget all that rather then jump straight into work again even if it's interesting own project

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your programming motivation up?

#104

Post by eanthy »

dsego wrote: post #84

One idea is to have more influence on the business decisions, take a more active role in the project. So push back on the crappy parts and bring new ideas to the table. Try to make it your own, be proactive instead of reactive. That might give more weight to the work you do and having more stake is also more thrilling. You could be the next team lead, architect or cto, who knows. And if it doesn't work out, at least…

our team is very separate and even if you do anything it goes unheard. Also I can't make myself care that much about a project which is not mine. If that's something that benefits me personally yes, if it's something for the company to make more money I can't care less

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your programming motivation up?

#105

Post by eanthy »

simplify wrote: post #72

It might be a health thing. I notice when my health is poor I don't feel like doing anything. But after changing my eating habits and sleeping more[0], I have much more energy and motivation to do things I like. I didn't notice this for a long time; the decline was so gradual I didn't notice until I was constantly tired every day. Still not perfect, but much better than before. [0] Please sleep more, dear reader http…

don't have any issues with health, already exercise, eat healthy and generally live healthy. It's only professionally unmotivated

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your programming motivation up?

#106

Post by eanthy »

eikenberry wrote: post #76

A few years ago I found myself in the same situation and finally determined it was going into the office and dealing with so many people that was to blame. Once I started working remotely I found I had lots of spare energy and motivation for all my hobbies. I don't mean to say that this is your issue, but take a look your life and what drains you. It might be the boring work or it might be something else completely.

this plays a huge role yes, but seems to me that finding remote work is quite difficult

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your programming motivation up?

#107

Post by eanthy »

nickdandakis wrote: post #51

I don't. I have stints of high motivation and stints of low motivation. The trick is to be productive without being passionate about programming. "Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life" is a toxic mentality, and it's okay for work to just be work (sometimes or even all the time!).

that's very true, every job will eventually become a chore. I guess working on the motivation highs is doable, and then do only enjoyable things on the lows

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your programming motivation up?

#108

Post by eanthy »

ozim wrote: post #33
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're telling me most people just love making the "latest" and "greatest" CRUD web app? Because that's what most programmers do.

I love making our CRUD not latest and not greatest web app. I get not bad salary and I have great people to work with. No pressure, no assholes. Some point in time company owners may change, situation may change, but for what it is worth I am riding this wave until it dies and then will see. Not changing that job even for 2x salary.

no idea how you have CRUD apps interesting, it's always the same thing just different tools/application. The most mindless work I've ever done really

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your programming motivation up?

#109

Post by naikrovek »

muzani wrote: post #100
naikrovek wrote: post #87

Learn to not need motivation in order to get work done. This is what my father and his father called "work ethic." In short, the memory I always think back to went something like this: me whining about digging a ditch, followed by: "I'm paying you to dig a ditch. I don't care if you're motivated about digging the ditch. Dig it, and I'll pay you." It's the same with anything. If you can't work without motivation then…

I find this works fine with physical labor but not anything requiring creativity. I used to work 14 hours/day as a barista, no problem, but 4 hours straight untangling code is impossible.

Software development isn't really a creative endeavor, though. A large portion, if not all of it, is seeing what needs to be done, then doing it.

Creative friends (coworkers, really) tell me that "the wall" is a very real thing and that to get through it, you simply must find a way to push through it, somehow. That sounds a hell of a lot like me getting over my inability to want to dig a ditch as a child.

My creative friends say that they switch projects or turn to another art, such as drawing if they are a writer, to force their imagination and creativity to stay on, while not banging their head on the same section of "the wall" and getting terribly burnt out. Others just switch projects within the same medium.

I'm not a creative person, so I can't say if what that have told me works for everyone (almost certainly not) but I can paraphrase what they summarized for me.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep your programming motivation up?

#110

Post by a-saleh »

scarface74 wrote: post #4
mieseratte wrote: post #3

I don't. Turning my hobby into my career killed my hobby and, really, that's fine. It affords me a good life and the ability to discover and enjoy new hobbies. If you're worried about "keeping up," then I would suggest you 1) ignore the rat-race that is framework-of-the-day and 2) focus on learning fundamentals of your domain. Sure, you'll miss out on some hip startup jobs but typical employers don't care about your…

Ignoring the framework of the day and “learning the fundamentals” won’t get you past the either HR filters or make you competitive with developers who are constantly doing Resume Driven Development and have a resume that is buzzword compliant. Especially if you are an older developer (I’m 45) and you will just be seen as just another old out of touch developer. That being said, the further down the stack you go, the…

There are paths and trade-offs.

a) Focus on technologies that have staying power. I don't think Java EE jobs will really ever disappear

b) instead of flavour of the month, focus on the flavour of the decade? i.e. Go and Kubernetes seems to be the trend :)

c) instead of resume-driven development, focus on having a network. Most of my jobs have merged because a former colleague, classmate or friend realized I knew some programming once, and they might want me to work for them :)

More in depth, I think you can make a trade-off between the tried and tested and the new-fangled thing, by introducing the new in your current job. Technologies that are not cutting edge, but slightly past the first peak on the hype-curve. I.e. if you do backend, you would probably try Go language (instead of Rust/Elixir/...), on frontend you could introduce Type-script (instead of other compile-to-js languages), you might try Kubernetes ... in general technoligies with following that are still new, but with more than five years in production at some places it puts them outside of the 'flavour of the month'

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