31–40 of 332 posts
Oh, and trading I love trading. All kinds of trading. I've spent many many nights trading items in various games. Oh, and programming a bitcoin arbitrage trading bot was super fun.
Hmm, it was good thinking these things over I guess.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could get a "Business co-founder" while you focus on the technical side.
Yeah, that would be awesome - our startup has three co-founders: me, a designer, and a CTO. So even though I'm the initial programmer, idea guy, and CEO, I'm also the business role at the moment. We'll hire a CFO+others...once we raise funding ;).
Reading HN never seems like work. I feel like I could do it all day.
You're supposed to come up with something that feels like work to other people .
Yeah, I could share/blog/tweet (and I do, but not much) but often the things that are interesting later aren't things I share right away. Still trying to solve that problem.
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?
Recently I thought, I have to do something with this and I started a Drupal system for searching locally cultured vegetables for sale. It was fun in the beginning but my wife is a designer and pretty soon I was editing CSS all the time and I completely lost interest. It felt like work. I left it in an ugly, unusable state.
Still, I keep setting up servers with the occasional blog with some articles if my attention span allows it. Who knows what I might do with it some time. I have this vague vision of setting up a web services company with CMSs for sportsclubs but that will come with paper work and I know I will regret it. I have a nice job as a biophysicist by the way and I get to play with large Linux clusters from time to time and I try to take those chances as much as possible.
Some things just start feeling like work as soon as they become work, as soon as there are any milestones to catch or things to finish. To me things feel like work if I can't just quite half way into a "project".
"what he really liked was solving problems. The text of each chapter was just some advice about solving them. He said that as soon as he got a new textbook he'd immediately work out all the problems—to the slight annoyance of his teacher, since the class was supposed to work through the book gradually."
is literally me. I did that. Every year at my school I did exactly that. Once I actually turned in my solutions and my math teacher was quite upset because she didn't know what I'd do for the rest of the year in her class. She thought I was being arrogant and I should take in the material slowly, not swallow it all like a whale. But I wasn't arrogant or anything, because unfortunately this skill didn't transfer to the rest of my classes. I wasn't particularly good at history or physics or anything else, only math. Even now, I have tons of Schaums at my home. Like this one - http://www.amazon.com/Schaums-000-Solved-Problems-Calculus/d... I work problems in it just because it is a craving - I simply have to solve it. Sadly, society doesn't pay for this sort of addiction. I have been a professional programmer for the past 2 decades to pay the bills, but I secretly hate programming, debugging, programmers, git, the whole enterprise - just seems so stupid & futile. But hey, atleast I can spend my salary on Schaums.
Is it common for programmers to dislike debugging? I'm stunned. I never considered the possibility, it's always been something I enjoyed. I don't believe it impacts you either way in terms of capability but I imagine it impacts your desire to continue.
If you are working on support/maintenance roles (in engineering) at big enterprise product company then debugging is major part of your job. I enjoy debugging as it is another way to solve problem. But for some people it gets repetitive (and boring) since you have to do that day in day out as a part of support roles.
For me, I can get frustrated when I'm coding and can't figure out a bug right away. But on the other hand there's nothing I enjoy more than spending N time trying to understand what's going on, solving the problem, and feeling a spurt of elation at succeeding at my task. I'm not sure how people who don't see it the same way could handle that kind of work.
With that said, I do think there are areas where even if you don't initially enjoy the activity, you can come to appreciate it and eventually enjoy it.