Ask HN: Writing Software – Is it boring or am I bored?

Hey,

Some prose first, questions at the end.

After over two years I quit my student job. Besides the weekly meeting I was pretty much 100 percent of the time writing a frontend in flutter. In the beginning it was quite fun - lot's of new stuff to learn and quick progress. But it recently evolved into this boring feature implementation treadmill where things got ever more complex, brittle, and having this falls-apart-when-you-look-at-it-wrong attitude. I got bored from it.

It really reduced my interest in all the other computing stuff I’ve been playing around with. So since four or five months I haven’t cared much and did just the bare baseline amount of work - But it helped a lot! Started learning how people use tmux as a window manager, what makes vim addictive to learn, why some people can’t stop talking about clojure (reading about clojure and its ecosystem, I love it), what gnu is and software ideologies/licenses there are, people printing their own parametrized split ortho colemak keyboard. Fine stuff! Not advanced, but I'm eager understand all the parts.

I'm doing my masters degree in aerospace engineering, but I'm thinking more and more of putting that on pause and working in Software for some time. Having no formal software education, I want to learn new stuff. Is there enough demand for engineers that companies are willing to pay for one learning “it” on the go? If yes, what field is it? Trying to avoid cruft and mundane tasks: What kind of companies to look for and which ones to avoid? And on a more philosophical note: Can a hobby be a job without losing the fun part?

> In the beginning it was quite fun - lot's of new stuff to learn and quick progress

For me, it's the same. It's great to try something new. Thankfully, I work for a startup that allows me to learn new technologies on a monthly basis.

Reframing your question: “Boring” is not a quality of a thing or activity. You may experience boredom when writing software, or doing anything. It wouldn’t make sense to ask if an activity was “happy” or “angry,” only to ask why you have the emotional reaction to the activity.

Like anything else your work can make you feel bored, frustrated, happy, excited. Those reactions come from you, not from the activity.

Most programming work falls into the “boring feature implementation” category. It’s not inherently boring but can feel repetitive and unchallenging. Software systems tend to get more complex and brittle over time, that’s the nature of building something complex. Most code you and everyone else writes is not particularly novel or solving interesting problems, it doesn’t always feel creative, which can make all of us feel like the work is a treadmill.

Having worked writing code for 40 years I know the feeling you describe. To fight it I take pride in my craftsmanship, and pride in satisfied customers. I learn new things constantly. After a while the whole programming “industry” feels like a lot of more of the same, old ideas with new wrapping paper. You will find that software development isn’t really all that innovative, there’s very little actual new technology. It all seems new when you’re learning but eventually it’s more like driving a different car every week.

You can learn programming yourself and on the job, but don’t expect employers to spend a lot training you. You don’t need formal education but it will help to learn some fundamentals like algorithms and relational database theory.