Ask HN: Do you hate software engineering but love programming?

Couldn't agree more with this and above poster. Having weekends back by less failing systems caused by cowboy unreviewed code and no crunch caused by inadequate planning are for me the main social benefits of agile.

It's best to learn to deal with processes. Some companies do have really bad ones, and if that happens you should leave, but all companies will have some level of process, and every job will have some amount of work you don't like doing.

Learning how to deal with this is a career skill. Remember that to your employer, you are not a coder, just as a firefighter is not a hose operator.

To your employer, you are someone who delivers, maintains, and supports software. That requires a lot of non-coding work, and as you advance in your career the time demand for the non-coding parts of the job will increase.

If you know how to deal with processes -- how to streamline them, avoid them, delegate them, and use them to your advantage -- you can build the kind of role you want. So, the good job for a person like you is a job where you understand how to work the processes in your organization.

More like I love cooking but I hate cooking shitty boring fast food I’d never eat myself.

Yes, I have come to have a hatred towards software engineering. I will probably always be a software engineer because it's still a better job than many, and because I like programming. But holy hell, there are so many problems with this profession and a real lack of interest within the industry in terms of actually maturing it.

Pretty much every problem an engineer deals with on a daily basis is either self imposed or imposed by other engineers. Most of the problems aren't even real problems because most real world issues have already been iterated upon. Most of what we do is fixing our own mistakes. Being a software engineer sometimes feels like being a self-licking ice cream cone because, if it weren't for all the new frameworks and the lack of effective team organization, a substantial fraction of us would have nothing to do. Well, besides hobby coding, which I guess can be a good thing, but I don't even know that many programmers who actually code anymore as a hobby.

What needs to go away are most of the paradigms that still get pushed around.

The tools themselves are actually pretty good. We have speedy JIT languages, package managers on every OS, no more Internet Explorer, awesome free IDEs, and more help and documentation than ever. What's gone horribly wrong is believing that we need more tools for every task domain. A mistake we've made is believing that X is "considered harmful" and to only apply the "best practice" in every nook and cranny no matter how insanely complicated things become. We've made the mistake of believing every problem is a matter of scale and almost never poor engineering. Poor engineering? Impossible! That is unless it's that of the guy who came before me and left the company.

I can go on. Why do we still use frAgile methodologies all over the place when no one can adequately measure whether it's more effective than another workflow? Why is it that every single company I work for ends up using Scum methodology but never bothers actually measuring whether performance improved as a result? Why are we so opposed to documenting our work? Why do we keep bending over backwards to make websites behave like applications and still screw it up most of the time? Why are we obsessed with code coverage when it's only weakly correlated with the number of bugs that manifest? Must we keep adding more and more lint rules?

To top it all off, it doesn't matter what you think unless you are one of the 10% that has a real say in how a codebase is going to take shape. The reality is most software engineers have limited capability to take the initiative for change.

But hey, it's a good profession no matter how crazy it can drive you sometimes. I'm not saying people should do it forever, but we can do a whole lot worse.

At the same time, we ought to be doing a lot better. With the exception of AI/ML, I believe software engineering is in a bit of a dark age.

This is 100% true for progressing to management. However the OP doesn't want management, which is fine, that's what principals are for. They should just find a good "servant leadership" manager who will get all the BS out of their way, and let them do "their job."