Ask HN: I love programming but hate the industry. Can anyone relate?

Yes, can relate.

Working in a field where people can get frustrated very easily is though. Specially if you are in the receiving end.

I worked with a lot of nice colleagues that makes the job more enjoyable, try to focus on that and ignore all the negativity that come from the loud ones.

Try to grow with the pain to the point it goes away, for example, for me it was soul crushing discussing something infrastructure related and having someone who doesn't know much about it suggesting serverless, using low effort arguments, instead of paying attention to the subject of the discussion. After some time I realized that people can be jerk for the sake of it and in the corporate world you are gonna find many of these. So for me what worked is to think that people are passionate about different things and it's your job to keep yours alive and ignore people who likes to create havoc.

Then do your job and when is time to go, simply go. I know it sucks to have a pile of code to review because people without social life are working during the weekend, but you will have to establish some boundaries to protect your time.

You can program outside of "the industry".

I work at a science institution that sits between NASA and the .edu sphere of influence. While we also have our own frustrations, it's generally wonderful and I'm a cog in a machine that is enriching the human experience. Are we a little behind on all the spiffy trends? Yep, but we're also not under constant pressure to adopt/adapt to spiffy trends. Do we make a little less than market? Yep, but it's still plenty and the benefits, including retirement and vacation, are amazing.

Of course startups are going to grind you down - you're tasked with rapidly deploying and optimizing someone's business baby and they're on the hook for copious, tenuous funding. Check out USAJobs or similar and find something with a human pace and good benefits.

That's an excellent point - but I'd emphasize that it's the problem that's solved with the help of programming that the customer cares about, not the software package that's built by the programmer. Likewise, the end goal of the customer of the SCUBA welder is not the welding; it's the utility they gain from the pipeline or the structure or whatever the SCUBA welder has assembled. The customer doesn't really care about the welds themselves.

As an automation integrator, I frequently have to push to the forefront of my mind that my customer's focus is not on the machine that I'm designing for them. Yes, I'm going to spend 600 hours on the intricacies of hazard mitigation and operating modes and IO and quality control and timing, with a deadline looming large to ship the machine - it is easy when you're that deep to think of the machine as the end goal. But for my customers, the focus is on the chairs or door handles or valves or whatever they're making that come out of the machine. Graceful fault handling, alternate paths through the sequencer, purge and single-cycle modes, calibration wizards, or whatever other features I can build in might be elegant and might be powerful - but the customer doesn't care about the machine itself. They especially don't care about the machine when logic I've written gets in the way of making products come out the other end!

I really love the greenfield situations where you're building stuff up from scratch and have minimal APIs to deal with so you can just keep everything in your head and plow through writing tons of code. No one pays you to do that though.