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

The good news is you can use programming in lots of other jobs, although it's not often called that. Even a lot of data science and business intelligence type work isn't in "the industry" (in the sense of being tech companies - as I assume we're referring to on HN). But you've got industrial automation, the use of IoT devices in conservation, the military, point of sale systems, etc. Programming is all over the place and there are surely even opportunities for you to take programming to 'non-industry' places if you're feeling entrepreneurial too. Indeed, having domain knowledge and then adding the benefits of programming to it is probably a better route to success than being a programmer first and foremost..

How did you find your job?

There's a difference between Programming and Software Development and I think it's important to recognise that difference when looking at your career.

Programming is one small aspect of software development. It's an absolutely essential part, and it's the part you probably enjoy the most.

But despite being an essential core part, it's also a part which only occupies maybe 20% of your time.

Some software developers declare that to be a problem, and fight tooth and nail to change their company culture with the idea that if they were just left to program for most of their time they'd be better software developers.

That's actually the wrong conclusion, and a very self-limiting approach.

You aren't employed to just program. You're employed to develop software, and that other 80% is actually where you can make a huge difference to your company and add value over your fellow software developers.

If you start taking pride in the state updates, the endless meetings and approach that part of your work with the same pride you would approach coding then you may find some of the stress disappears as instead of always fighting the system you flourish within it.

For example you might look down upon a programmer who seemingly never takes pride in writing good code, just copy-pasting from stackoverflow with the minimum of understanding, just hacking away until something compiles.

If that's the energy you bring to these "endless meetings" then you risk that being how the rest of the business sees you from outside the software department.

Unpaid overtime and working weekends isn't really a thing in my culture, so I can't relate there. That legitimately sounds frustrating, but be sure to set your own boundaries and stick to them.

One approach to dealing with what you see as problematic behaviour from colleagues is instead of getting frustrated with them, consider what effect it has on you. If you're not actually badly affected by their overworking then try to relax and recognise they have a problem, but that it's their problem, not yours.

No, not really.

Like any other industry, there are good employers and bad employers; there are comfortable working environments and stressful ones; there are good teams and bad teams. If anything, compared with every other industry that I've experience in or friends working in, software generally seems to be way better in almost every aspect.

YMMV, but I suspect your question might be more "would anyone prefer to work on their own ideas rather than someone else's" which… yeah, I think most people would.