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Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?

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Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?

#11

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 »

I was thinking the same scrolling HN, then saw your post.

After 15 years I'm no longer interested. I don't care about the web, css, javascript, react, testing....it's just an increasingly tedious and difficult headache to me.

I have a creative urge, and a problem solving urge, but i feel maybe it can be better expressed through another medium. I just wish I had some way to unchain myself from this 9-6 5 days a week soul-less grind.

Even when I did enjoy my job before, the increasingly complexity, the amount of tedious plumbing, spending hours fixing obscure npm bugs on a tool I built only 3 months ago (and worked perfectly). I just hate it all.

To answer your question, i haven't gotten it back and don't think i ever will.

Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?

#13

Post by Daub »

Not at all a coder, but a painter. Ever now and then I loose the allure of my profusion. What usually brings it back is a change of medium (e.g. from oil painting to digital painting, or from large paintings to small ones). I guess that translates to a change in coding language in your game.

Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?

#15

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #11

I was thinking the same scrolling HN, then saw your post. After 15 years I'm no longer interested. I don't care about the web, css, javascript, react, testing....it's just an increasingly tedious and difficult headache to me. I have a creative urge, and a problem solving urge, but i feel maybe it can be better expressed through another medium. I just wish I had some way to unchain myself from this 9-6 5 days a week s…

I can sympathize with that npm point. I think there's a real distinction between coding-as-problem-solving and coding-as-plumbing, and I feel like a lot of the wear and tear of the motivation to code comes from the latter. This reminds me of the essay the MIT guys published on why they stopped using the classic SICP curriculum and instead moved to Python, the gist of it being that the kind of development they used to teach, with a blank piece of paper in front of you, working through first-principles, etc., was increasingly rare; that the most important skill to teach now was how to take separate pieces of someone else's code and effectively cobble it together onto something new. Which, fair, but I don't think it is doing stuff like that that first ignited the passion for it in a lot of us.

Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?

#16

Post by mdp2021 »

You build tools because they enhance your quality of life. You code to build tools to enjoy the service they render you. You will not lose your love for coding (in general, outside specific contexts, you have no reasons to lose it), since you have use for tools and by now surely you will have found processes and systems (or, in general, processes and systems are fortunately available) to implement your tools with a good degree of comfort and pleasure.

If you happen to "lose appetite", you are suffering the consequences of unhealty situations. You must fix them.

Many people who must suffer unhealthy situations, bound to conditions difficult to overcome, actually find a shelter in those hours, carved in the day, in which they can fulfil their creativity and productivity, do something useful with their time. You should use your talents to compensate with the ugly sides of "being alive here today" (which should of course be accompanied by the underlying conscience that "there and yore was much worse, though"), to break with the permeating effect of the ugly, which could enter too much into you - but mind you, you should spend time in creativity and productivity and yet work on planning "how to exit the bad situation". Find time for the healthy things to enjoy - coding is one -, and at the same time work/plan to leave, make past and gone, those things that drag you into a loss for appetite.

Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?

#17

Post by monster_group »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #11

I was thinking the same scrolling HN, then saw your post. After 15 years I'm no longer interested. I don't care about the web, css, javascript, react, testing....it's just an increasingly tedious and difficult headache to me. I have a creative urge, and a problem solving urge, but i feel maybe it can be better expressed through another medium. I just wish I had some way to unchain myself from this 9-6 5 days a week s…

Add to that - one is still writing CRUD apps that seem to run slower than ever even though the computers have become faster. That's why I feel more drawn to my guitar now than computer but then guitar will never make me any money so need to keep churning out CRUD apps.

Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?

#18

Post by coldcode »

After 40 years (just retired) as a programmer, I still write code every day (but now what I want, mostly art related), I never got tired of writing code or learning new things, and the joy of shipping things that worked. What I did get tired of was high stress work, long hours, idiotic executive decisions and politics, businesses going out of business, interviewing (even when successful) and dealing with terrible work environments.

One thing I always did was learn new things, usually before they became popular, and find a way to work in that; new things can often reinvigorate your love of the coding part. Sadly the other parts have actually gotten worse over the decades; however the opportunities have also expanded, if you can find a way to get in.

Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?

#19

Post by wayoutthere »

Yes, and I never gained it back. I realized I could have a lot more impact on the things that frustrated me higher up in the org as either an architect or product manager. Those were the parts of the job I liked anyway; not the part where I had to spend a day debugging a JSON parser.

Re: Ask HN: Ever lost your love for coding? How did you get it back?

#20

Post by Clubber »

I lost my love for coding after the Snowden revelations. The story of programming stopped being, "to make the world a better place," and became a means to a much more nefarious end. I don't have anything to do with the NSA or that type of work, but that made me realize that the programming trade was mainly used for less than altruistic purposes by most people employing them. This includes selling ads and all that garbage.

I still work as a programmer because that's my trade and my work ethic allows me to do it well; and lets face it, I have to pay bills, but my passion for it is gone.

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