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Odd. I barely do any debugging at all. If it compiles, it's usually right, and when it's not, I just kick back and think. Thinking takes a lot more of my time than writing or debugging. Perhaps that's because I work largely by myself on those components - there is no one else's intent to grasp.
"When I was in college I used to write papers for my friends. It was quite interesting to write a paper for a class I wasn't taking. Plus they were always so relieved."
Yikes. Really?
>But you may have to like debugging to like programming, considering the degree to which programming consists of it. Odd. I barely do any debugging at all. If it compiles, it's usually right, and when it's not, I just kick back and think. Thinking takes a lot more of my time than writing or debugging. Perhaps that's because I work largely by myself on those components - there is no one else's intent to grasp.
Personally, I experienced this with programming. When I learned to program in high school, it never struck me as a chore; it was always just interesting and I enjoyed it. However, I think the only reason I was able to enjoy learning programming was because of how adept I already was with computers as a "power user", because it gave me the physical skills and conceptual underpinnings required to appreciate the field.…
There are plenty of activities I can enjoy, and some, quite a few of them in fact, are profitable.
Once you shoe-horn them into the power dynamic situation of a traditional job (with the bureaucracy that entails unless you're dealing with Actual People as opposed to corporations), suddenly a lot of the luster disappears.
As a ridiculous example - I enjoy reading. It's not really work at all, right?
Ask me to read 9am-5pm and I'd start to find it frustrating. Or add in a commute, or very low pay.
The actual job itself is very rarely the issue for me. It's what you miss out on, and also the fact that it invariably involves submission, acceptance of being subordinate, etc.
edit: To be clear here; I'm not talking about work ethic in the sense of 'pushing through something you find difficult'.
More the general idea of not wanting to be a part of a machine, a construct that you don't agree with. Large corporations and their 'policy documents', for example. I don't want to work for a company in which my boss doesn't have the autonomy to speak to me as a human being - this stands regardless of whether my job is backbreaking labour or eating chocolate bars.
How do you separate hobby from a potential work/job?
I found something that didn't feel like work, turned it into my career, and then realized that when there are real business outcomes riding on it, suddenly it feels like work. To the point that I now don't even like doing it as a hobby.
This dichotomy, and the realization that it can fuel smart people to use their abilities to do amazing things in the world, is what upsets me most about the startup ecosystem. I'm a programmer. Writing weather software doesn't seem like work to me. However, since going through a startup accelerator, I'm supposed to all these things that are very much "work" - and it gets me down. Things that are important, for sure,…
i enjoy chopping vegetables much more than most people, and i'm told i'm quite good at e.g. making sauerkraut - an activity i truly enjoy. but i get paid a lot more to write software, which is also reasonably fun. to be honest i think i only enjoy writing software about as much as the next person! can we be honest that it's an absurdly good job currently? https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/in-the-name-of-love/
The "next person" completely dislikes it. Almost everybody with such twisted tastes as to like creating huge incomprehensible orders to machines is already a programmer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it always intimidation, though? I find programming unimaginably boring.
It probably depends on the type of programming and the challenge it presents. A typical month, for me, has probably 5% exciting programming work. The rest is just tedious churn that you inevitably have to do to support the exciting bit.
I found myself wondering what a person might have to change to be able to up the exciting work to 10, 20 or 30% of the work-month.