Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

I spoke to a lot of software engineers around me and the feeling seems common.

I remember the days I started coding, and how much I enjoyed that. I was able to create things with just the power of my thoughts, and it felt like a superpower.

Nowadays, I feel like I have to jump so many hoops and spend so much mental bandwidth just to get the permission to code. It would be fair to say that on avg I spend less than 20% of my time coding or solving problems.

Any project I work on is connected to a million different tools, workflows and services, that all do things their own way, and everything lives in a totally different place, where it’s hard to monitor what’s going on.

I feel like anything can break at any moment and ruin my day. I don’t understand any of the tools well enough to be confident that it’s stable, and the worst problems are the silent ones. This is giving me anxiety.

I work mostly with Javascript — and that doesn’t help. All the frameworks/libs I use insist on being too flexible, to the point where I don’t know where to start and how to do things. Just show me the “right” way, and let me figure out how to opt out if I want to. Oh and every 10 minutes there is a new tool that pops up that does things differently.

I wish I could go back to the days where I spent most of my day in the IDE and at the end produce something that was (to me) amazing. My most challenging moments were when I had a tough logic problem to solve — but I enjoyed those immensely. I’d rather fight with my brain than with the tools I use.

I wish I could just use an IDE that takes care of all the crap for me and just lets me code and write business logic.

I now understand why there’s a trend of developers who want to go live in a farm or take up woodworking: tough(er) problems, but with less variables & easier to reason about. If the wood breaks, you can see where and can probably guess why. Making a table is a mostly linear set of steps, and the basic tools you use don’t change much throughout the years. There is no invisible ghost that lives in a separate realm (dev environment) that can ruin your work at any time and leave no trace.

Any insights? Should I just switch careers?

If you don’t like the JavaScript vibe, why not try a different domain? Work for a bigger company, or a much smaller one, doing something else. Maybe get into data engineering?

I don't have exactly the same problems - our dev stack if pretty old fashioned but works well (dotnet). I don't enjoy it as much either though, most business problems are either easy + tedious to resolve, or involve making a complexity tar pit even worse. Naturally you'll end up spending almost all your time on the latter. Add on top a lot of interpersonal tension from there being a bunch of almost equally good ways of doing any one thing and it's easy to see why programming can stop being fun (while still being a decent profession).

I thought this was well put: > I now understand why there’s a trend of developers who want to go live in a farm or take up woodworking: tough(er) problems, but with less variables & easier to reason about. If the wood breaks, you can see where and can probably guess why. Making a table is a mostly linear set of steps, and the basic tools you use don’t change much throughout the years. There is no invisible ghost that lives in a separate realm (dev environment) that can ruin your work at any time and leave no trace.

There's not many things less starting an implementation and discovering a series of hard to anticipate incompatibilities between your implementation and the rest of the system. I'm sure this happens in other professions, but perhaps it's easier to work around?

"I’d rather fight with my brain than with the tools I use."

This is why I prefer reinventing the wheel. I have exactly zero desire to learn someone's mental model when I could instead learn how to perform actual work.

Although, I don't consider connecting APIs to be coding either.

Coding has been embraced and extended. Has it been extinguished?