Ask HN: How happy are you working as a programmer?

Any time I catch myself complaining about my career I do my best to jolt myself out of it. That's not to say I have nothing to complain about or that aspects of my career and my job can't be improved, but my god, is there really any other profession in the world that is as lucrative, open, and challenging as programming? There are no bullshit certifications to go through, the best tools and resources are free and open, and the more technology advances the more important it becomes. In no other field can someone start a company with basically zero capital and have a realistic shot at becoming profitable. I am absolutely addicted to programming and the only real downside is that there aren't enough hours in the day to do it.

I quit.

I had a nearly 20 year career in software, excellent references and well paid. I became completely burned out and hyper-cynical at the pointlessness and shallowness of it all. I can't get excited or even much beyond passing interest in an industry that is almost completely devoted to making the problem of too much stuff far worse.

So instead of getting excited at another pointless startup or tech that's "going to disrupt x" (it usually won't, and often it isn't even a sensible idea to), or "change the world" (nope, not that either), I gave it all up to work with my hands doing something. It's nice to actually feel like I am /doing/ something I can feel proud of, and is sustainable. Moving electrons around is just so unfulfilling.

I'm utterly jaded at the constant replacement, or latest shiny framework that's going to improve little, just change lots and sell more crap. The web has become an almost unusable mess where a single page loads 30 or 40 domains of ad, crap and tracking bringing us back to dial up speeds unless you block most of it.

I still follow tech, but my personal projects are dead as even when i have the time to (I have far more of that now and I feel so much better for it), I can't bring myself to code any more.

The money was nice, but I don't even really miss that. I do regret not being able to afford aerobatics as a hobby any more though!

Many of my peers have quit tech too, and of those who remain some would like to do something, anything else, but mortgage or other commitments keeps them tied to the money.

After three years I'm happier, healthier and don't miss it in the slightest.

I enjoy programming but 'working as a programmer' is infuriating.

There are so many interesting product ideas yet 'me-too' CRUD app recreations of previously successful incumbents products are highly desired. This is particularly true in the startup ecosystems where kids talk about 'interesting' problems and finding 'purpose' and yet are blindly following the mantras and motivational speeches of trite capitalists.

I currently work as a freelancer/contractor in London and I am happy as I make enough money to finance my own intellectual and creative interests for months on end. I hope I'll soon meet other intellectually curious people doing the same thing, and hope we'll be able to join forces to teach ourselves things or perhaps even work on small projects together.

Of course I feel extremely lucky to be in this position which has nothing to do with wanting a slower pace and everything to do with wanting to exert my whole self. And I can't say whether it will be good for me or bad for me; I'm certainly learning a lot about myself and the practicalities of doing this.

I worked in landscaping and then as a custodian making $7/hr before I started learning to code. Working as a programmer has transformed my life. I've got a lot of autonomy in my days, I enjoy solving technical problems, I get to work from home and see my 2yr old grow up.

Yeah it sucks when your manager puts heavy deadlines on your team, or having to do things you don't necessarily agree with, or navigating corporate politics, but at the end of the day it's the best. I don't come home physically exhausted, I don't make shit money, and if I ever end up in a job I don't enjoy, I am able to find a new one fairly easily.

I think it's easy for programmers to hate life sometimes. Most people who are good at this line of work started doing it because they enjoyed it before it was making them money, that's how it was for me. Sometimes I miss haphazardly stringing code together to make something fun, but at the end of the day being a programmer has made me feel fulfilled.

6/10. I'm less than 3 years into my career, but I think I've worked for some of the best companies with great pay, benefits, environments, etc, including a tech giant and two startups. End of the day though, work is boring. Its always work. Your time and effort is going towards making someone else rich and their priorities are more important than your own.

The only things I really look forward to are vacations and events outside of work. Learning things is always exciting and sometimes its extremely rewarding getting a project (or even a feature) off the ground and seeing a company rise and beat projections. But then a few weeks later, its just back to work and nothings really different. Its a temporary victory at best, then expectations just get higher and more grind.

The best you can possibly hope for is enjoying the people you work with and getting a couple good exits. I'm never married to my work and I would be incredibly depressed if I allowed it to define me as a person. It pays the bills, and generally pretty well.

Even compensation wise, it peaks very early and probably won't get most rich without a ton of luck. Its depressing to make comparisons, but 99.9% of developers will never make half of what a specialized MD or successful lawyer or someone in finance might make. Granted, the barrier to entry is much lower in CS (sometimes nearly nonexistent depending on the line of work).

edit: Reading some of the other comments made me realize how dissatisfied I am with this line of work. On average, the people really are incredibly boring, especially at large companies. It is true that it is dominated by men and many are socially awkward. Its even worse that I think being on a computer for so many hours a day for years at a time makes everyone a little less socially adept, at least compared to the sales folks who spend most of their days on the phone. I'm literally spending my weekends looking for the most reckless and dangerous things I can do (lately its been surfing 2-3x head high waves, before it was motorcycling through snow/ice storms) to compensate and its completely unhealthy.

Move!

Here's the thing: I love programming, I've been working has a web dev since I was 18 (34 now), but I always loved design and creating desktop apps. And recently I've been learning Swift and mobile design.

This year, the startup I was working with went bankrupt, and I just dive into depression and self-confidence as a developer. I couldn't stop thinking to myself: "oh no, not again all those web dev interview processes and more JavaScript, PHP code..."

I got burnout of web dev, I just couldn't see myself doing it any longer. I hate JavaScript and the whole current ecosystem, it's a fucking mess, I don't want to have anything to do with it. PHP bores me to death, it's getting more and similar to Java syntax. Traditional web apps are dead. Everything is an API with a frontend-app, and that's fine, but I'm done.

So I decided to move, I'm now learning design, UX, Swift, iOS. And I'm loving it. The creativity and motivation spark are back! I feel so free, the web was a burden to me, a constant pressure to keep up with frameworks and trends.

So before you quit, think of moving to something different. Learn a new paradigm, try something different. Tired of C++, learn Ruby. Tired of Ruby: Learn C# and Unity 3D. Tired of the web? Try building an iOS TV app.

Been programming for 32 years 25 of which professionally. I never had a job as such; I always started companies based around tech of which I was the lead coder/CTO and it gave me a great life. I have other hobbies but I love coding and find it hard to imagine living without it; the creative process, the making of something that did not previously exist, the idea that you can make something without any funds; be it with or without money. If everything fails today, I can start another company tomorrow without spending any money. I do not know of another field where that works like that.

I still get happy when something I worked hard on works and even sells.

That said; I would not work in circumstances some here work in; commuting for hours a day, glueing together crud apps, tons of stress and no upside besides money. I always say that if you are a decent programmer you do not have to do any of that. Unfortunately people do not like to take risks and apparently working like a dog makes them feel better.

In short; 10/10 happy coding more than fulltime for over 30 years. Hoping for at least another 30.

Been coding professionally 37 years. Started as a self taught video game developer back in the Apple II, Commodore era. I loved it at first. University had me working at a 3D graphics research lab with Mandelbrot himself, later on I was an OS developer for the 3DO and the first PlayStation. I worked on tons of high profile video games, and later transitioned to VFX for film, and worked on a ton of popular blockbusters. But the thing is: I love the work, but the management of software development is stone age voodoo and witch hunts, deceptive management, and psychological manipulation. Our career is create on demand on schedule. It's a recipe for stress and burnout. And I burned out. I returned to school, got an MBA (2nd in my class) and found that no one would hire me because my technology past was "too exciting" and "I'd never be happy with what they do". But that is exactly what I wanted! I even tried not including my previous "exciting" past work, but that read as either an unemployment hole or was figured out with a Google search of my name. I had to eat, so I returned to developing. I created a startup for my technology passion (www.3D-Avatar-Store.com : neural nets that 3D reconstruct people) and now work in facial recognition. All the things I love and hate about the career at still there. If I could do it all over again, I'd have thrown that temper tantrum at 17 and gone to animation school rather than a normal university.

Can't complain. Great company. Constantly wondering if I'm good enough to keep my job, though. I'm trying to prepare for that day I'm told, "Let's talk. We like you a lot, but we've decided to let you go. If you need referrals, let us know." I mean, everyone says I'm doing well. I just don't feel it, so I work a lot more than I probably should, and I'm always ridiculously paranoid. I'd say I'm happy but I'm worried. I bet it's more common a combination of feelings than I think. The funny thing is that the company is full of really nice managers who keep it honest (as far as I know), and would tell me if I'm under-performing. I'd hope so, at least. So I guess so far, so good.

It was the easiest and highest-paying job I've ever had. Unlike previous jobs where I had to be at work somewhere between 5am and 7am, I never had to had to be in the office until 9am. I regularly solved interesting problems, and I could go home after 8 hours without feeling exhausted. I had a regular schedule, and never worked more than 5 days in a row.

This is all past-tense, of course. It paid enough for me to work a few years, then take several years off to pursue a master's degree.

I started learning how to code at 14 when my parents bought me a Sharp MZ-700 instead of a C64 like I asked (I guess the salesperson had a better commission on that!) and since there were basically no games I had to write my own, that was about 30 years ago and I've been programming ever since

I still love coding, getting in the zone, learning something new, in general the feeling of being able to make the computer do what I want it to do, and I am still good at it, but career wise it's getting to be not nearly as fun anymore, since as the years go by it's a smaller and smaller part of my day, being pushed more and more into team leading and endless scrum / standup / grooming / planning / ... meetings, having to deal with politics and so on.

The money is definitely much better now than it used to be, but I would honestly take a 50% pay cut if I was able to just deal with the code working at home, I am a fairly frugal person and wish there was something like basic income so I could just spend my days programming on projects that interest me. You don't see musicians being forced to become conductors as their careers progress and being given less and less time to practice their instruments, why is it that we developers often end up doing that?

Unfortunately I don't have an entrepreneurial bone in my body so I am really not sure how to get from where I am now to where I'd like to be, and I am sure I am not the only one in this situation.

Well, this weekend I'm particular happy. A private equity guy in NY paid me $150 an hour to 'learn PHP immediately and fix his site.' He paid me for all 48 hours because he assumed 'I ate, drank, are his job the whole weekend.' I told him it was too much, I usually charge $100 an hour. He said he hopes I'll be available whenever he needs me. Best believe I will.

I'm a programmer who doesn't really get to program. I work for a consulting company. Most development work is off-shored, which means most roles for UK staff are more client facing.

Right now I'm building a web front end for a bloated piece of enterprise software. There's no technical difficulty, it's just frustrating and boring. I can't leave to work in 'proper' software development because I don't have the relevant experience, and because I keep being given crappy jobs like this, I'm not getting the experience I need. Plus my educational background isn't great. To top it all off, I came to programming late, I'm already in my 30s and I'm painfully aware of time ticking away.

I'm in a strange mental state where I feel simultaneously bored and burned-out. The day job saps my motivation so much I find it virtually impossible to work on side projects in my spare time.

I don't think my experience is very typical of the high-achieving HN crowd, but if anyone has been in this position and can offer any advice I'd be hugely appreciative.

Though I've been writing software for 15 years, and have worked in the technology industry exclusively throughout my life, I have spent only one year of my professional career as a developer. My job was always a managerial/project management kind of situation - I have equal competency in technology and media/content, so I could always carve out a niche. Then, one day, I decided to abandon my cushy job at Amazon to become a developer for startups that I was interested in working for.

I spent all of 2015 pursuing this goal - it was a mistake. I loved the work, but really, really disliked the work environment with which I had to put up. Startup environments are noisy, and I could never really hear myself think. Despite all the flashy tools like Slack, Trello, and Google Docs, my teams never got quite as much done as the enterprise environments running Office 2010 that I was growing sick and tired of the previous year. Other team members would routinely stay home, not coming in to join the team during the work day. Scrum was held remotely every single day. Frankly, it was a mess.

I am now back in a cushy, boring office job. Didn't have the stomach for this insane brogrammer NYC startup culture. 5/10.

I'm not. I have been doing it since I was 9. I pulled most of the heavy-duty, hardcore all-nighters during my teenage years; I grew up writing C, and was hacking on socket code and compiling kernels when I was 12-16. So by the time I was 20, I was utterly burned out. Most of my peers discovered the crazy, hyper-caffinated, 24/7 techie life in university years, and still have a few years of this insanity left in them. I don't.

I'm 30 now, and feel like I've been running on fumes ever since. I am still interested in software architecture at a conceptual level, of course, but suffer from immense fatigue at the keystroke-based deliverables aspect. It's always a motivational struggle to write even a little code, with few exceptions. I procrastinate horrifically, because I find it tedious.

Some of it may be because my work entails dealing with fairly uninteresting and unexciting things, and some of it is the cash flow schizophrenia of constantly operating at the very margins of economic survival, but above all else, it's just psychological, cognitive and physical fatigue. I'm also fairly extroverted and have always been interested in the social and political dimension of what I'm doing, but, through eight years of self-employment, have pigeonholed myself into a solipsistic role without a collective--rewarding to those who crave peace, quiet and code, but not at all catering to my particular reward centres. I love selling what I do, but the dreaded implementation of what I just sold is like pulling teeth. Deprived of a collective, recognition, the competitive aspect, and any sense of larger purpose, it's a real challenge to get myself to work on code.

In retrospect, I probably would have been better off sticking it out in corporate America and tracking myself into technical management. However, I left the employment world at age 22 and decided to hole up in a business model where I'd be most economically rewarded if I could get myself to write more than a few lines a week.

I am deeply specialised in a niche vertical that can pay well, so one would think the money would keep me going (I can easily bill $250/hr for what I do), but it doesn't. Some of that is a business and life problem, but some of it is that I just don't care enough to pound code anymore at virtually any price--though, of course, that's not to say that taking the bricks of economic stress that come with a bootstrapped eight-year consulting-turned-product death march off wouldn't help.

I still do it, but it's taken me five years to write a slightly half-assed software suite that an energetic and motivated programmer could have done in far, far less time.

After a decade of doing it, I'm trying to get away from it.

To detail a little bit, I got into programming computers out of passion. The pay and the life was an after-thought. I'm still passionate and that is both a gift and a curse.

It's a curse because it slowly consumed me, my life, and much of anything else besides computers, throwing my life out of balance many times before, and each time I had to go to lengths to become "normal" again. Even now I have things in my (life's) program that I had to force them there to keep me straight and healthy.

It's a gift because despite reckoning all the damage it did in my life it still brings me joy. I'm like a sort of junkie in this regard, and now just like a junkie I feel the pain of getting away from it.

Now, looking back, the funny thing is, if I have to chose again something to invest into like I did twenty years ago, I'll repeat my choice (for better and worse). The take away would probably be that if you get into it and you're passionate about it then your passion will serve you well (feeding you with happiness), and if you're less passionate about it then your lack of passion will also serve you well (by keeping you human, the job itself being a relatively healthy one).

I have been programming for 22 years. There have been times where i hated it and wanted to get rid of my computers. However, presently I'm really happy working as a programmer. The key for me is curiosity. How do things work? How should i solve this problem? If I'm not curious then I'm not having fun, and if I'm not having fun I'm not happy. My job at present doesn't feel like a job because I'm learning all about Hadoop and solving new and interesting problems with it. I'm sure I'll have down periods again, but i know i can find ways to regain my curiosity by switching tech stack or problem domain and get through those rough patches.

I've installed my first linux(Slackware) at the age of 14 (im 35 now) .. since then I think i've been "programming" until i started working , when it became the thing that pay the bills. Now... i think it's like everything in life ... i have bad days and good days , I've worked for places where i felt challenged and for other places where i was in only for the money (that never worked) , at the moment it kind of sucks ... I'm only in for the money (so is everyone else) so the job i do is not very challenging leaving a feeling of sort of emptiness , but as i said , it will change ... I've been here before and i know it can change very quickly . So all of you that feel quite down , have some patience and make a move , things will get better.

I love it. I've been programming since I was 12 (I'm 32 now). For me, the key to avoid burning out, is to constantly keep learning new things. I currently work remotely for a NYC dev agency, and we have a massively good team.

I have a couple of side projects, and one of them is generating an income of $500/week. Just keep building stuff during the weekends. Try to learn marketing, UX, UI, etc. Apply those new skills to your side project, and iterate again.

It's also important to not work in isolation. The most effective way to become a better programmer and keep learning things, is to pair constantly with better programmers than you are.

I spend about ~14h/day in front of a computer. If I don't enjoy what I do, then I'd be wasting my life.

9/10

I'd say that's roughly half because I enjoy the work and half because over the years I've got better at looking after myself, being self-aware and cultivating positive habits.

For me, the big wins have been:

(1) Regular exercise (daily cardio, weight training 3x a week)

(2) Daily mindfulness meditation.

(3) Flexible hours, remote working.

In some circumstances, (3) can be hard to negotiate. But (1) and (2) are up to you.

See also this excellent survey of positive psychology: https://www.coursera.org/learn/happiness/

I'm 33 year veteran of programming. I'm more or less 7 years from retirement. I've worked as a civil servant, at two startups, a large corporation, and for a three letter government agency. I made a decision early in my career not to move into management, but to advance to the "team lead" position at most.

I love and hate my job every day. I have no better time than when I am coding, but I hate frameworks pushed in lieu of design and architecture. I am a polyglot (C, Java, SQL, PL/SQL, XPath, JavaScript, XSLT, bash) and enjoy coding in all of them. I am looking to learn a few more (Python, Lua) giving the time. When a team pushes something like an ORM in order to be "pure Java" it makes me sad since it is seldom accompanied by rational comparison for design factors and true reasoning. I make a good living, well above average, since it is our industry that is driving the world economy. I believe it will continue to do so for some time. My personal motivation to do insanely great things is nearly expired. I have not the will to fight for better implementations with my current employment. I'm generally too tired at the end of the day to work on my personal projects, but not entirely. If it were not for the cut in pay, I would love to start teaching programming. Maybe I can do it part time after retirement.

In re-reading my text prior to posting, it seems like a description of burn out. Perhaps, but I am not unhappy, just unmotivated by the mundane nature of my work. I work to pay my bills and make it to retirement, not to change the world. I hope that whomever reads this can find both motivation and compensation. Good luck.

Programming is a means to an end for me, not an end unto itself. I like to make products, and—in many cases—the path of least resistance is to write code to make that happen.

As a result, my happiness as a programmer is directly correlated to how much user impact I see in the work I'm doing.

I also love my immediate coworkers, which helps immeasurably :)

edit: I'm in my 13th year of professional software development, and I have worked at a company where I can reasonably expect a 40 hour work week for the past 2.5 years. My stress level is at an all time low, which helps my happiness, too.

After 21 years in the business I am finally starting to realize that I want it to be something that it isn't. In the past, I have always been interested in programming as a means of creative expression. The last thing a programming team wants, however, is creative expression. You are successful as a programmer to the degree that you are able to make your thoughts, your solutions, your algorithms, and your code consistent with those of the rest of your team. Creative expression is ground away through application of best practices and through code reviews.

I have a healthier relationship with my work, and am thus more successful, now that I view it as assembly-line work and don't try to express any creativity at my job. That said, I don't find the work to be the least bit fulfilling, and I am working to make a career change.

I find programming to be an easy path to a steady, but ultimately empty living. I would only recommend the field to those who want nothing more from their job than a paycheck and who find meaning and fulfillment entirely in the nonwork parts of their lives.

I loved it when I was younger. The older I get, the less satisfying it is. At this point, I just tolerate it. I realize more and more how damaging it has been to spend 25 years sitting at a computer. It is not all bad - the career is great for supporting my family and the life we have built. I work with decent people. But I do not intend to take another programming job after my current one.

I'm not, at least not really. Started to code at the age of 15, been doing this for 16 years everyday now. Currently working in a big corp, where you have the feeling that people won't let you bring any positive change, won't let some innovation coming to their desks, you just have to do what people have been doing for years because "hey we've been doing it for years for a reason". It just feels like trying and trying but nothing will change.

Its been pounding on me for years now. I have no reason to complain yet I feel sad, empty, I reckon I'm useless at my job and yet my boss is way more than happy of what I'm accomplishing, I don't understand.

I wanted something great from my career, I thought I'd be surrounded by passionate people, but to this day it's been a huge joke, you just have to do what someone higher in the food chain tells you to do and use that bullsh*t bloatware because he's got some present from another bigcorp placing its product making you more entreprisey and more agile, to no avail. You just have to accept choices made by someone. You just have to contemplate others on the market using something exciting while you're stuck with Java 6 with no one around you wanting to move on.

I feel I have no reason to complain, because life could be so much more painful, I'm well paid and I could be working on an assembly line for way less or living in a country where fear for your life is the only thing in your mind all day long. But... It's just that it's not the big dream I was expecting, and I feel that for someone not working in the bay area but following HN all day long, I'm suffering from an immense sadness of not being part of it, it's like I'm just watching people succeed on my TV screen, eating junk food. I know this is a biased vision and a lot of people aren't happy there too, I just can't help feeling this.

8/10

Pros: - I get paid a lot of money doing what I did as a hobby when I was younger

- I come in whenever I want and leave whenever I want

- I can work from home whenever I want

- My work is intellectually stimulating

- My coworkers are smart and interesting

- I get to play with dogs at work

- If I don't like my job, I can get 5 other offers within a week

Cons: - I still make less than I would have if I pursued law, finance, or medicine

- Most interviews are some sort of hostile, cargo-cult nonsense

- Those 5 offers would not offer me anything significantly different from each other or my current job

- Nearly all of my coworkers care more about playing with the latest technologies and building unnecessary frameworks than actually making things

- The best companies/jobs are all in Silicon Valley or SF, whereas I want to live in NYC

I don't really like the "industrialized software development" model most companies follow. Wherever I work, I am 2-5x more productive than the average developer. When I start, I usually am on a team with people who are similarly productive. But, as our success grows, we hire more people who are less productive (against my wishes), and the people I used to work with either leave or get promoted to management, which means I don't get to work with them anymore. I also get promoted to management, which means that I spend less time programming and more time doing things I don't enjoy.

Yes, I get that it's hard to hire exceptional people. I get that companies would rather consist of many easy-to-replace mediocre people than a few hard-to-replace exceptional people. I get that, at a certain size, predictability matters more than speed, and having more people on the team allows their idiosyncrasies to cancel out.

I just wish that I could work on a small team of really smart, really well-compensated people. Does such a thing exist? Should I take Google's job offer (from what I hear, they over-staff every team)? Should I look into hedge funds (not super interested in building stuff I can't use)? Should I say "fuck it" and try to get a job as a quant or trader (I've gotten offers in the past)?

As a programmer, very happy. As a lone dev propping up a design agency as it clumsily transitions from print to web, developing static sites and WordPress junk, not so much.

Occasionally something interesting crops up but I generally want to find an in-house role working on a web app or something.

I don't have to be happy because I am putting my partner through university so they can pursue an academic career and putting food on the table.

I am doing contracts (enterprise java), it pays well so my wife doesn't have to work and takes care of 2 kids while paying mortgage. Happy? I believe it is about the people who surround you at work - where you spend most of the time - i like my team and many other people in my current company.

The work is boring in general but i am trying to make it more interesting in getting more involved in production investigations (can be exciting quite often) and helping other people at work find some crazy bug or better understand something...

Working as a programmer, very happy.

Working, not necessarily that happy.

Programming is a manifestation of curiosity. Therefore, programming is a spark that, once ignited, probably never really dies. You can suffocate it and pretend it's out but when things free up again it will come back. If I wouldn't be working I would simply be programming on my spare time more than I do now. I can only speak for 30 years down the line, though, so YMMV.

Working is a whole another thing. It's a great opportunity to work on interesting and challenging things. It's also an opportunity to see those interesting and challenging things serve goals you don't find so interesting and challenging. That's obviously because the owner of the company gets to decide what the company makes. The problem is decent income and good benefits. There's really no other way to fix that problem except to stop working and get your income from a company of your or your investment returns.

Much of what I do at work is not programming even if I am a programmer. Most of it is communication, maybe comes down to fixing bugs so that other people can continue their work, and then there's a slice of actual development in between, at times. It's not necessarily development that would always be fun but it's still interesting and challenging. I could imagine doing something else but the nature of work wouldn't change except that the payoff would likely be lower. I could work on something else but not as an employee.

Well, it's intellectually engaging, and (if you have halfway decent ergonomics) not particularly physically taxing.

Is it what I'd do with my time if I didn't have to make a living? Maybe a few hours a week.

Is it more enjoyable than most of the alternative ways I could imagine making a living? Hell yeah!

Does it have its exhausting, hellish days and political bullshit? Doesn't everything?

Could I stand to do it in a bureaucratic corporate setting, doing nothing but maintaining a small corner of some horrible enterprise monstrosity and filing TPS reports? Probably not.

How happy am I doing it in the small company / startup setting I've been in for the last 15 years, with plenty of autonomy and a decent proportion of green-field work? About as happy as I'm going to be working any "day job".

I think in general programmers tend to be happier when they are constantly learning new things, so I set myself up for a job which is constantly challenging. I work in the advertisement and campaigns industry (no, not tracking or banner ads) where we build large campaigns for global brands with technologies such as VR and WebGL. In general, I think we build the type of projects that tend to get a lot of hate on HN, but it's really challenging and fun and I've won many awards (Cannes Lions, dozens of FWAs, Awwwards, etc.)

Over the past 3 years working in this industry I've learned more things about more topics than I have in the past 10 and I don't see this changing any time soon.

I've worked for several different companies over the years; a Java shop that builds large web-shops and corporate websites, a local startup focusing on science, a local radio station maintaining their site. All of them bored me after 6 to 12 months of learning their tooling and technologies. Many tech companies tend to stagnate on their stack and are afraid or too invested in it to change which is a huge contrast to where I'm working now.

Sure, the work I do isn't saving the world or disrupting a stagnant industry like many startups claim to do, but it's certainly challenging and keeps me happy as a programmer.

I enjoy it, but only if I'm treated with respect, not micro-managed, and trusted to do my job. Ironically when managers set deadlines and add process, it demotivates me and the code ends up shipping later. The silver lining, however, is that I learn what not to do if I decide to start my own company (I have a note on my PC called, "Mistakes from previous companies that you shouldn’t make"). So in general, even if I'm unhappy at a job, I try to consider it a learning experience and move on to the next thing.

Edit: I should add that working remotely has been absolutely fantastic and adds to why I enjoy being a programmer. I feel lucky to work in a profession that allows this amount of flexibility.

Pretty damn happy. I'm a little over 3 years into my career programming and I've just started at Google which has been a goal of mine for awhile. The challenge is pretty immense (in terms of having to learn so many new languages and pieces of tech) and the compensation is unbeatable. Years ago I never would have imagined I could make such a good life for myself programming.

I have also met some wonderful friends and intellectual peers through my programming jobs, and I'm even trying to write my own language now for laughs. I'm trying to encourage everyone with the aptitude to get into it because it is rewarding in many different ways.

Being forced to work for a living is absolutely the worst thing that could ever happen to a human being. As far as that goes, I would do almost anything to break free of this yoke and enjoy my life.

Alas, reality is only what it is. I suppose writing code in an office beats manual labor or a life of crime.

As a programmer, I see some benefits that make me happy. I can list here some of them:

- I have ability to automate something. I can tell the PC import data automatically instead of doing by manual, or make apps let me store some sensitive data that I don't trust anyone else (and their apps, of course).

- I have opportunity to be a digital nomad, work everywhere over the world. Yeah that's just my vision, but now I can work everywhere in my country. Travel and work, perfect couple, especially when I'm single now. I'm trying to do all things that a husband cannot do, before I find my spouse out :D.

- I have skills to turn my ideas to real products which may help someone. Now I'm an iOS Engineer, and yes, making several apps, not big ones but helpful for somebody. But at the first, I always try to resolve my problems, then believe that someone may in trouble like me, they may find my apps useful.

- Because of making apps, I found a romantic approach that I can give my friends as I made an app exclusively for a girl, a drawing tool let us remind our moments in the past.

My cynical elevator pitch is, we're internet construction workers on a good day and Internet janitors on a bad one. That said, I chose this life at 17 and haven't looked back. I'd be miserable as a lawyer or some other professional. Programmers are treated like professionals, but we get a lot more leeway when it comes to how we live our lives.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm happy, but working at a startup is hard and that can sometimes be depressing.

9/10 - Interesting problems; working remotely, to my own schedule; living in paradise; pants optional.

Prior to my current gig it was

8/10 - Interesting problems; well fitted-out office with great people to work with and coffee nearby; the opportunity to grow technical and people skills and mentor.

In the 90s I worked in public service doing accounting and marketing gigs. I'd rate those jobs about 3-4/10. So I'm pretty happy with the transition.

Right now? I'm pretty unhappy. I don't think I want to talk about exactly why publicly while I'm still in this job, but to give you an idea of how bad the situation is, literally all of my friends have been trying to get me to quit for months, with the exception of people who have given up because they think I must be insane.

On the other hand, I have a decade of full-time experience and I've been happy for about seven out of ten years. All things considered, that's not too bad. The other way to look at it is that I've had maybe five roles at one company, two another another, and one at a third, and I'd say four of those have been good. That's only 4/8, but it's possible to bail on bad roles and stay in good ones, which is how it's worked out to being good 70% of the time. Considering how other folks I know feel about their job, I can't complain about being happy 70% of the time.

In retrospect, some of my decisions have been really bad. If I could do it over again, I'd bail more quickly on bad roles and stay in good ones for longer.

My dumbest mistake was the time I was in an amazing position (great manager & team, really interesting & impactful work), except for two problems: an incredibly arrogant and disruptive person whose net productivity was close to zero who would derail all meetings and weird political shenanigans way above my pay grade. When I transferred, management offered to transfer the guy the guy to another team so I'd stay and I declined because I felt bad about the idea of kicking someone off the team.

From what I've heard, the problematic dude ended up leaving the team later anyway, so not having him kicked off didn't make any difference, and the political stuff resolved itself around the same time. The next role I ended up in was the worst job I've ever had. And the one after that is my current job, which is, well, at least it's no the worst job I've ever had. Prior to leaving the amazing job, I thought that it was really easy to find great jobs, so it wasn't a big deal to just go find another one. Turns out it's not always so easy :-). If I hadn't bailed on that and just fixed it, I'd be 4/6 and I could say I was happy with my job 80% of the time. Oh well, lesson learned. Looking back, I was incredibly lucky to get the roles that I did, but that same luck blinded me to the fact that it was luck and that there are some really bad jobs out there.

After 25 years of this, I now see the logic in communism (though it is idealistic). So no more working for suits and getting nothing while they extract the profit from the surplus labor I produce. Capitalism is all about exploiting or being exploited, and I haven't the temperament for it, given that I've taken too many red pills by now.

So ... it's going to be contribute to OSS (because the creative part of still worth something), become a truck driver, and write plays in my spare time... Art is the only thing that means anything in the long run - the fruits of business mean nothing, especially in IT given how the "churn" is less than a decade.

I love programming. I started programming to automate my work as a radiologist in residency. I don't get paid for programming, but i think it helped me get a nice academic job when market for radiologists was bad. I program mostly as a hobby and as a way of life. But i help out my colleagues by sharing some of my software tools or sometimes just solving their data problems from time to time. Most of the time i am collecting computing power, bandwidth, storage capacity, and ofcourse collecting and learning from data...

3 years since I graduated from my CS program. Enjoyed the internship and the first year as a python developer. Then I had the bad luck of landing a Node.js + MongoDB project. I've been hating on programming (particularly JS) ever since. Just like @abalshov, I procrastinate as much as I can. Side projects and Open Source contributions have dropped to practically zero. It's just...tiring. Assembling X library with Y framework and then spend 10 hours trying to figure out that one bug. This isn't what I got into CS for.

The pay isn't amazing either. Though I'm good at what I do (a lot better than some colleagues who are getting paid much better), I just can't get excited for yet another startup job (which is where I've been most of my career) which is working on a non-problem.

The work needs to be interesting for me to be motivated. So far, it's mundane. And given I'm not in the US or any western country, I haven't found many companies working on interesting stuff here. It's all ideas copied from the valley and hammered into the ecosystem here.

Perhaps I need some inspiration or some creative idea to put things into perspective. But yeah. Things could be a lot better. I've recently started getting into Statistics/ML and learning Clojure on the side as a distraction and that's been going well.

In a word, yes.

Is there an implication that work should be fun and fulfilling so as to make me happy? Work does not make me happy. It affords me the money I need to keep my family healthy and safe. Happiness comes from within: art, literature, mathematics, science, family, friends... life.

I just make money by selling some portion of my waking life to the pursuits of others by helping them realize their ideas in software.

The ideas I have are just not marketable. My curiosity hasn't led me to dream about ways I can extract rents from financial tools or make advertising more profitable. I find myself to have more in common with Donald Knuth or John Conway than Larry Ellison or Bill Gates. If I could find a way to work with hard, fundamental problems or pursue hunches that may have no fiscal utility I'd be happy as a clam at high water. Alas I never had the privilege and opportunity to pursue a career in academia and, given what I understand of the current climates there, probably wouldn't find it fulfilling either.

So I content myself with tinkering and following my own hunches and try to maximize the dollars-per-hour exchange I make so I can spend less time with the mundane world of markets and value and return to the land of whimsy.

Update To clarify, I don't want to put myself in the same esteem as my heroes, Knuth or Conway. What I do find in common with them is a curiosity and propensity for selecting problems merely because they are interesting and with disregard for external factors such as economic utility.

Extremely happy and thankful. I think it depends more on where you work than what you call yourself or how much you make.

I enjoyed programming as a kid but after learning more about how much programmers were often exploited (especially in the games industry) and having a few bad experiences doing small contract jobs I figured it wasn't for me.

Luckily I somehow stumbled into it again half-way through university and started doing full-time contracting.

With some of my clients, work was a nightmare. They'd demand the impossible and wouldn't be satisfied no matter how much effort and thought I poured into it. The work was unrewarding and I constantly felt like a fraud.

With others it was complete bliss. I got to work with clever people who are good at what they're doing and learned a lot from them. My input was appreciated and I was given a lot of control over my work. The teams were great and the people I enjoyed spending my lunch breaks with.

Over time I earned enough money to be able to search for more of the latter kind of work while turning down more of the former. These days I can pretty much pick and choose and make sure to keep an option to walk away if I'm not certain about a job I'm taking.

I have never been happier. But if you had asked me when I was in long-term contracts with the worst clients, I would have told you a very different story.

Pretty darn happy.

It's inside work with no heavy lifting, I get paid way above the median wage, and I get to intermittently learn new things, and build new stuff.

I'm not a constantly ecstatic ball of happiness, but that sounds more like a drug-induced dream than something that real people get to be. Instead I'm "mostly satisfied, with occasional peaks, and some bits that annoy me." - and that's a lot better than the non-programming jobs I've had.

I'm in my forties now, I've been working as a programmer since I was 18. I love writing code, I love doing it as a job and in private projects. I could not imagine my life without having this skill. I haven't gotten rich off it, but I very well could have, and it's still a profession where monetary success and upward mobility are common.

Writing code for work can be a mixed bag, though, since you don't necessarily always get to work on things you like or in a manner conducive to productivity. But even in "not-fun" projects, the reason why I often perform better than other programmers is because I love it. As a rule I have learned that people who are going it nine-to-five with zero actual interest in the skill set aren't as happy or as good.

So how happy you are working as a programmer depends on many, many factors. Is programming a creative outlet for you? Are you working on something you care about? Are you getting paid and appreciated? Are you susceptible to burnout? All things being equal, if you already are a programmer, chances are you'll eventually be happy working as a programmer.

I'm happy if I follow this golden rule : "Premature optimization is the root of all evil -- DonaldKnuth"

I so often spiral into an endless loop of "this could be done better, rewrite from scratch, must have more decoupling!!".

I've been programming for 15 years, since I was 21. It used to be my passion, work, and hobby. Over the last 3 years I've gradually shifted from development to managing projects and product development, and recently moved to the team leader/manager.

Right now I really like the product and management side of the work, but the technical / programmer side I am very burned out on. I used to spend my free time consulting, coding, researching, and had dreams of starting my own company. Now I want to go home and relax, work with my hands out in the yard/garden.

I've been at the same company for 7 years now, we typically have enough freedom and project variation to learn new skills and keep from being bored. There are simply to many frameworks/languages to keep up with to stay relevant. I don't see myself finding another development job after this one, at least not without time off/a break. The money is great, and I've been fortunate to save well, and we live will below our means.

Honestly, I'm working on a plan to be out of the industry by the time my daughter graduates high school and I'm 45.

Not in the least. I spent a good portion of the past 15 years trying desperately to rekindle the flame that brought me into the business, but I just couldn't seem to do it. As of November last year, I quit, and I'm now back in school at the ripe old age of half_dead.

At present, I have no idea what the future has in store for me, but whatever it is I hope it grants me some level of satisfaction at least.

That's a difficult question to answer.

On one hand, it's a cushy job. I work from home almost whenever need to. I can find remote work if that's not enough. I'm paid well. I get a decent vacation time. It's easier than physical labor.

And I love to program. I enjoy solving problems and writing code to implement it. I even enjoy debugging and tracking down bugs.

But at the same time, I haven't found working as a programmer to be very enjoyable. It's rare that my interests and my work tasks intersect, so most of the time I'm toiling away on projects I'm not really interested in, wishing I was working on whatever small project I've come up with at home.

Also, as I've grown older I've become increasingly annoyed by the "culture" around programming and computers.

TBH, I often wonder if I wouldn't be better off doing something else and just programming at home in my spare time.

Not particularly.

I have few friends or hobbies. Most of my coworkers can't even hold a conversation, much less go clubbing or play sports with me.

I've had chronic burning pain in both legs since age 14. The doctors say too much computer usage led to poor core strength which damaged my spine.

I think computer use damaged my body as well as my social skills.

I enjoy working as a programmer but I do not enjoy it as much as programming as a hobby, which I do too.

I have found that my growing skills outpace the level of challenge provided in my day job. I just think this is a fact of life when your work stems from your hobby.

As an analogy, I think of someone who works with metals (e.g my father). The type of work asked of him was routine stuff where as he was free to sculpt cool gifts for his family. The unfortunate fact is that it's easier to make a living doing routine stuff since those requirements are far more common.

Perhaps there is a company that would match skill growth with challenge growth but somehow I think I'm in a sort-of 'limbo' where I'm not skilled enough or hold the experience to work at those places so I must resign myself to the less interesting jobs.

Really stoked!! I love what I do (front end, design, occasional dalliance further back the stack). I taught myself HTML and CSS in my earlier years of high school and kept building upon those skills through university. I actually studied an unrelated field but getting an entry level job in it was difficult even after a masters so started working in tech and it's a blast being able to come into work every day, do an activity I love, and get paid more than I'd be getting paid doing my credentialed field.

Some days I'm just in awe of how lucky I am.

I work for a nonprofit so we are more mission focused than the average company and don't have to deal with certain kinds of bs to the same degree. My team is great, I've got a nice range of people to learn from.

Now, time to get out of bed and go to work...

Super Happy. Happier than I have ever been in my working life, due in large part to said job allowing me to enjoy not-working-life more than at any previous point.

I was a Journalist, the video and multimedia producer for a medium market newspaper. Pay was lower middle income level. Hours were flexible when flexibility was an option, but revolved around an inflexible daily deadline.

I just spent my 4th weekend in a row snowboarding, and yesterday was 11" of powder. As a remote employee, I still have deadlines, but they are from days to months depending on the project. Pay is upper-middle income level. My boss is great, smartest person I've ever called a boss, and extremely reasonable and personable.

Right now, life is good.

Frustrated most of the day! But somehow strangely satisfied.

10/10 would choose career again. Just started my own consulting company at 30 years old. I get to work at 5:30 - 6:30am everyday because I can't wait to start hacking and making awesome things that make my clients happy. I like to swap between working on building stuff for my clients and a product and having my own business gives me the time to do both.

I truly love programming and solving problems, so it never feels like work. Well, that's not a completely true statement; not everything is going to be fun and awesome, but 99% of the time it doesn't feel like work.

10/10. Electric Engineer turned programmer, never looked back. I get to work on a field for which there is absolutely no regulation, and mobility is very high. I don't get paid as much as a lawyer or a doctor, but neither have their stress level. I pretty much get to the office any time I want and leave any time I want, or not at all if I decided to work from home. I get plenty of time between project cycles, and over 30+ years learned how to establish proper expectation on clients and managers, so it is very rare for me to get in a crunch.

Happiness at work is not a figure, it's a curve over time. Programming has high highs and rather low lows :)

When everything goes well, when I am working on code bases I like, on interesting features or on Open Source software, I am pretty happy.

When I am tracking an obscure bug that annoys my users for days, in an obscure proprietary code base and with a tight deadline approaching, I am somewhat less happy.

Sometimes, it is a stressful job, especially when you are close to production systems. But the rest of the time, it is so rewarding I would not for a second consider doing something else.

I’m happy for the most part. When I am not happy is when I’m busy fighting with time thieves, mostly bugs and oddities introduced by someone else working on the same system that I would not have picked to work with if it was my decision.

I’m at my peak happiness when I work on my own solo projects or on projects where everyone is “one team, one dream”. Although I’ve built up some thick skin over the users I’ve worked on too many projects with splintered goals amongst team members, even well-meaning ones, that I start to think that I’m too tired for that shit.

I once met famous author Chaim Potok who said "You should never choose to be a writer. You should only do it if there is nothing else you can do." I think I feel that way about programming.

I've gone back an forth between working as a programmer and working as a system admin (plus some data stuff for grant programs). I have been happiest as a programmer and the most depressed. Strangely, it wasn't legacy code, new creation, programming languages I hated but was good at, or languages I loved that made the biggest delta in experience. It was the policies surrounding the programming that made or broke the job.

I think the single killer to programming is the production support rotation that is something more than emergency pages. At the end of one job, I was constantly being woke at 1AM because of database issues that I couldn't correct (not the DBA). I really don't need much sleep to feel great, but the disturbances for a week at a time was a killer. Worse, our team had no power to fix the problems, and the team who could was really not that interested. They would wake up (maybe) and fix their issues. Management didn't really care because they thought it was part of the job. I really blame our immediate bosses for not making the fix a priority.

tldr: programming is fun even in crappy languages, its the environment that will kill you.

PS: SQR and T-SQL are the from the devil - when you're looking forward to shell, awk, and perl you have issues - VB was ok, Pascal was "really, me, now" moment, and Objective-C & C are still my favorite. Being only allowed to code review other people's C and C++ was bizarre and painful.

I`m not a programmer, but I want to be a programmer because I might be more happier with programming.

It`s my third year of doing my current job, IT project managing/IT system managing in Teleco company(Not in the U.S.) and I always dream about being a developer which I wanted to be before I got this job, because I like write a code I like learning something new. I don`t like my current job because it is very monotonous, it has very little things to learn as an Engineer(As far as I experienced). It`s just all about risk/cost/quality/deadline management + a lot of paper works. At the same time, however, I also afraid that If I quit my job and be a developer, I might lose everything that my job give me now - high salary, job security, not bad work/life balance(9 to 6~7). Because, in my country, most of developer cannot have those things like good salary as mine, w/l balance(close to 10 to 10 almost everyday) and job security. Yeap. Being a programmer in my country is quite tough choice.

Many of my friend having told that I have to stay in my job and write a code as hobby, and some people says I should do things that makes you happy. Someone says 'Working as a programmer is not as fun as programming for hobby', but the other says that if I 'stuck' in my current job, there will be no 'improving'.

It`s really really hard choice for me.

I've only been doing this about a year but I have to say it was the best decision I have ever made. Like some of the other here have said, I have never found an industry quite like it. Not only is the profession lucrative, exciting, and in constant demand, but it also has the best community around. I mean how many other industries have an open-source community like we do where we actively try to help each other. Every other profession I have seen is basically dog eat dog.

    6/10. I'm less than 3 years into my career, but I think I've worked for some of the best companies with great pay, benefits, environments, etc, including a tech giant and two startups. End of the day though, work is boring. Its always work. Your time and effort is going towards making someone else rich and their
    priorities are more important than your own.
    The only things I really look forward to are vacations and events outside of work. Learning things is always exciting and sometimes its extremely rewarding
    getting a project (or even a feature) off the ground and seeing a company rise and beat projections. But then a few weeks later, its just back to work and
    nothings really different. Its a temporary victory at best, then expectations just get higher and more grind.

I can second this. I have been working in the industry for 10 years and I figured that while I work for (probably big) companies and code someone else's ideas I'm stuck. Not to mention that the bigger the company the more enterprisy the software.

That's why I started to do my own development on my own ideas at home. Ever since I started to do so I'm feeling much better. I regularly contribute to GitHub projects as well. I also feel rejuvenated by being LEAN and using the fewest possible 3rd party libraries. Now I know the code I'm using since I can see the source of all libraries I use and they are much simpler than the enterprise stuff. I'm sure that after a number of successful side projects I will be able to work on my stuff full time. This is my primary focus at the moment and the thought of achieving this makes me more happier now reaching a 7/10.

Pretty happy. I was stuck for ahwile on php, and then found out you can do stuff in Python. So I can imagine that a switch of another language can make you happier. (Feeling like a beginner again and getting more confident by each thing you learn new).

Also, programmers like to create things, and if you're just maintaining projects, you're probably less happy. So for me moving from employee to freelance (creating over maintaining) increased happiness.

9/10.

Been working as a programmer since I was 18 (32 now): on and off (worked part time & took some time off for studies), but mostly on.

I like the project I'm working on. I only go to the office twice per week and work from home the rest of the time. I like my coworkers. My pay is pretty good (enough that I don't have to worry about supporting my wife & son).

On the downside sometimes xcode crashes or git behaves in weird ways that I don't understand.

I like programming but I'm tired of the hours, of being salaried, and of employers that could lay their filthy hands on everything I make outside of work. I hate "unlimited vacation" but it's nearly impossible to avoid. I like how my small company job is much more intellectually stimulating than my old big company one, but the work never ends and I should be making a lot more in this city.

I worked for a few years as a programmer but also exercised my people skills over time (being in NYC). I eventually realized I didn't want to write code for work anymore, only for fun. I eventually did a bit more management related stuff at one of my gigs, and now I run a small development shop which requires very little coding on my part. I'm really happy with how things have turned out.

I have mixed feelings about it.

I wanted an intellectual challenge and to serve my community, yet what I'm mostly doing is glueing libraries I don't even understand together and squeezing out performance and page impressions to make someone I don't care about richer.

I wanted to consider myself an artist, not an interchangeable cog in a materialistic machinery. A craftsman that truly cares about his work and learns from others, not blindly following imposed cargo cult and so called best practices with the ultimate goal of optimising for the lowest common denominator and promoting cheap labor.

I wanted to learn and discover new things that are truly useful, but what I see is an extreme focus on tooling. The latest new cool framework on the block while showing complete disregard for already existing knowledge and tools.

They said technology was to make our lives better, yet it has become a means to an end in itself. I wish for a more perennial school of thought in software, a back to the basis, and I'm not even 30.

But I have to pay my bills somehow.

Then again, we have it much better than other labor in the workforce.

I like programming. I like architecting. I like ops. I like putting things together and seeing them working. All the things that make me good at me job, the technical side, I like this. It's the projects I don't enjoy, where I have to take a technical implementation and make it ready for the user. It's the maintenance of projects. Adding in features that were never supposed to exist. Butchering code because of deadlines. Working with other developers who really don't care, and don't read documentation, and don't try to understand things. It's explaining why we shouldn't do something a certain way, or why we should, to someone who doesn't care or doesn't understand.

The thing I don't like is everything that got added on when I turned my hobby into my profession. But it's all that stuff which is the reason why my family live the way we do.

I'd be happy doing something I truly believed in, but at least I'm not working in a mechanics garage in mid winter for national minimum wage.

I love programming. The first ten years of my career I was doing hardware and networking, nothing programming related as I had yet to learn it.

This has been the best career change that I could have ever had.

I've also worked construction for five years. I don't think I'll ever want another job. Probably because I've already been on the other side and I know what life is like there.

I'm not a programmer, I'm much more, if you have 10+ years in software and only think of yourself as a programmer that's likely the root cause of your unhappiness. Like dilbert creator blogged a while back, be pretty good at two things is much stronger than being very good at one.

to answer the op's question 10/10 I'm very gratefull.

I've been doing this for 10 years now and I can see myself trending away from it honestly. To stave that off I'm taking jobs which pay less are more interesting: firstly I did some functional stuff and now I work for a non-profit that does mobile healthcare for hard to reach communities.

It's very easy to get jaded. It's very easy to stare at the bespoke insurance application you and 6 other people have built (or slotted together from hideous technologies your client has already purchased) and wonder what the point of it all is.

Writing code for something you're passionate about helps.

Working out how to do things--not even important things, but just _other_ things--outside of work helps.

Remembering that the effort / money ratio in programming (esp if you live in fancy parts of the states, which I do not, or want to sell your soul to the London bankers, which I also do not) is really pretty fantastic helps as well.

9/10 - I program for work and for fun. I am doing the thing I was born to do. I haven't become wealthy doing it, but I'm upper middle. I am enthusiastic and amazed and lucky to live during the time of nascent technological marvels (that I expected to happen) with virtualization and massive scale solutions.

While doing custom enterprise apps in Java isn't the sexiest or the best paying job in IT I enjoy it quite a lot. Working on a standard and stable stack with well-established conventions minimizes the hassle of jumping through the technical hoops and allows me to concentrate on the actual business problems.

A couple of years ago I moved into an architect postition and while the high level of abstraction, customer interface and leading and instructing the development team is enjoyable I feel my personal development has slowed down significantly because I have very little time to contribute to the actual code. On my spare time I'd rather concentrate on my other hobbies and when I do programming it's mostly dabbling in Ruby, Clojure and other stuff I'd hardly be using at work. Currently I'm looking for a new gig that would be a lot more hands-on.

Depends. My current job is cushy but very badly paid.

By cushy I mean they have flexi time and let me work 100% from home even though the office is less than 10 miles away. The boss is not pushy about deadlines and the work is not challenging.

By badly paid I mean I make about half of what I should be at my level of skill and experience.

I live in a small town. I could move to a big city and get more money, but I think my happiness level would drop. I really like it here. Life is good.

Of course, at least once a week I start getting paranoid and thinking that the company will eventually go under (we've had a few rough patches) and I'll have to move. And then I'll have spent 10+ years being underpaid with nothing to show for it, and it won't look good to a potential new employer. I worry that I'll be too old to be employable. That I should move now for my families sake. But then, I wonder how many successful well paid programmers look back over a career and think "well, I'm glad I spent less time with my family, because now I have all that extra money"

As for the work, as I said, it's not challenging. I've been tinkering with computers since I was a child, and its been a natural career path for me. I really don't think I could have been anything else, it was always going to be code. There are moments when I think I'm wasting my life standing in front of a monitor for 8 hours a day, but there are worse jobs, and I have to put food on the table. And that's really a complaint about society in general, not an issue with my particular choices.

I code outside of work hours, making apps and web-services mostly for my own use. I've never been very good at making money off any of them, but that's not really the point. I do it because it's who I am. My worst nightmare (sad but true) is coming down with some kind of a medical condition that would prevent me from typing or looking at screens. It would kill me.

It depends on the project I'm working on. If I have to work on a Wordpress site and write plugins I really want to quit. But then there are interesting (hobby)projects where you can decide on how to build your app and how to solve problems which is rather fulfilling. Overall happiness at the moment: 60/100

I am moderately happy. There is no one big thing right now that would dramatically change my happiness as a working programmer/dev. There are little things that could be changed by me or the people I work for that would increase my happiness. But I am happy with the big picture and how things are moving. Day to day is a rollercoaster. Finding new bugs can be frustrating. Bashing your head against bugs that don't make sense can be horrible for happiness, but at the same time, once you solve it and the weight is lifted off you feel great. The hardest part for me is believing in myself, that I am capable of solving something that I am having trouble understanding. That and dealing with corporate America.

I don't see myself working as a programmer my entire career. I have about 5years professionally, but how much longer, I don't know.

I love it. My job is full of interesting challenges and the things I do really matter to the business. My ideas are thoughtfully considered. There is something to learn from everyone on the team. I feel like the company cares about its employees and there is a lot of room for growth, both personally and for the business. There are occasionally tedious things we have to do, but they at least have clear reasons that they need to happen -- it isn't just bullshit being handed down by management.

But it wasn't always that way -- my last job wasn't very challenging and it felt like I was just a cog in a giant machine (which, I was). It was pretty soul crushing despite being a "good" job. I felt bad about hating it so much, because compared to most people's jobs it was still much, much better in every aspect.

Being "just" a programmer was okay. I'm loving life as a software/information architect and "general problem solver" though, it's fantastic. I get to play with lots of interesting algorithms, data analysis/machine learning techniques, data structures and storage tools; I write the most interesting part of applications, and I get to hand off most of the boring testing/CRUD/user interface/etc stuff.

Another benefit is that at this level management is more concerned with the quality of my work than the volume, or whether I get in at 10:00 or take a two hour lunch break from time to time. I like to say "you're not paying me for the code I write, you're paying me for the code other people don't write because I'm here".

I think it's a job like any other. There are days when you hate it; there are days when you love it. One thing I do notice is I actually do programming on my own time, coding my own projects. And on bad days at work, I wish I could instead work on my own projects (so it's not programming per-say I dislike). I guess the same idea works for a carpenter or an electrical engineer; it's a lot more about where and for whom you do the work than work itself.

Programming, however, is definitely a field where you can learn the profession and get a job making good money without getting formal education. I notice a lot of recruiters are more interested in your passing a sample test or viewing your past projects than necessarily with your University diplomas and certificates.

I am quite happy with my work and work environment. I think for the following reasons: Management that knows the field and knows how to manage. A delightful combination that is rare. steady release cadence. Every 4 weeks a release, new features land as ready. Always more data. Long term vision on product improvement and let us programmers decide on how to improve it. Combination of research and production work. Can be on the edge,but make sure it doesn't cut to much.

In summary we are treated like professionals and work professionally.

It's not pure commercial work at uniprot.org but it must deliver. The site is popular enough and constraints are interesting. All in all happy.

The job pays decent and allows me to be flexible with time. Which is important to me as a dad.

I like the work, but I don't like who I have to work for: it's all marketing, finance and/or surveillance. Looking for a moral job that doesn't rely on dishonesty, misdirection, or the invasion of privacy for business advantage. Hopefully manufacturing?

What makes me happy depends on what type of work I'm doing.

- Scripts, tools, etc. Here I really enjoy being able to automize tasks. Then being able to combine scripts, tools, etc. into even more useful things makes me even more happy. Some things almost become magical once they have been automized.

- Games. Here I enjoy being able to create something fun out of nothing.

- Debugging. Finally finding a hard to find bug can give a quite unique rush of happiness.

- Research/innovation. Working on something brand new which no one has done before and finally releasing a product which people enjoy is sheer pleasure.

- Web development/user interfaces. Finally finding the right combination of simplicity and usefulness to create a really usable product is also a very pleasurable journey.

Well, as the old saying goes: "Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life."

I think its pretty much what I am doing. But the big question that pops up after a certain period of time: How long are you going to love something? 5 years, 2 years, 1 year or 6 months? That truly varies from the project i am working on. As long as its all fun, i continue the job. If not, i move to my next job or a next project. There are so many IT, programming jobs (for more or less money). I think what matters is that you are loving what you doing. So far, for last 9 years of professionally working at 8 different companies that has been my norm and I don't think it's that bad or worrisome.

Im not even working as a programmer, but everyone says so and pay me well for that title, I get to do perhaps 5-10 minutes per 40h week of "work", actual programming.

The rest is listening to bullshit from coworkers and reading hackernews, reddit etc.

Ive changed workplaces, this is my 3rd in 5 years, and its the same in my experience from those 3 very different "enterprises", "way of working", "agile" and other scrum bullshit methods, manager talk, backstabbing, backtalking and bad coffe.

At work I am quite miserable. Working with technologies I loved and grew up with, Linux, python, distributed systems, yet I look forward to just quitting one day. Maybe start working as a window-cleaner or similar.

8/10

Pros: - I get paid a lot of money doing what I did as a hobby when I was younger - I come in whenever I want and leave whenever I want - I can work from home whenever I want - My work is intellectually stimulating - My coworkers are smart and interesting - I get to play with dogs at work - If I don't like my job, I can get 5 other offers within a week

Cons: - I still make less than I would have if I pursued law, finance, or medicine - Most interviews are some sort of hostile, cargo-cult nonsense - Those 5 offers would not offer me anything significantly different from each other or my current job - Nearly all of my coworkers care more about playing with the latest technologies and building unnecessary frameworks than actually making things - The best companies/jobs are all in Silicon Valley or SF, whereas I want to live in NYC

I don't really like the "industrialized software development" model most companies follow. Wherever I work, I am 2-5x more productive than the average developer. When I start, I usually am on a team with people who are similarly productive. But, as our success grows, we hire more people who are less productive (against my wishes), and the people I used to work with either leave or get promoted to management, which means I don't get to work with them anymore. I also get promoted to management, which means that I spend less time programming and more time doing things I don't enjoy.

Yes, I get that it's hard to hire exceptional people. I get that companies would rather consist of many easy-to-replace mediocre people than a few hard-to-replace exceptional people. I get that, at a certain size, predictability matters more than speed, and having more people on the team allows their idiosyncrasies to cancel out.

I just wish that I could work on a small team of really smart, really well-compensated people. Does such a thing exist? Should I take Google's job offer (from what I hear, they over-staff every team)? Should I look into hedge funds (not super interested in building stuff I can't use)? Should I say "fuck it" and try to get a job as a quant or trader (I've gotten offers in the past)?

Saying I love my work is an understatement. I get to work remotely as a consultant paid well over the market price but treated like a long term employee and travel as I please. I know the CEO and VP and its a fairly large company with 5 large high-rise buildings throughout the world, 2 in California. I get to work on my side stuff pursuing my startup AND the boss not only knows about it but thinks its cool as long as I get my stuff done. How can you possibly ask for more than that? The only downside is I don't relate to anyone having to drudge through traffic each day, having an asshole boss or caring if its the weekend or not. Hell yah.

I am happy at the moment. Doing contract work, have clients I've known for years, and getting into my own IoT projects. Life is good for now. I just told me wife though that it feels like it could all come crashing down at any moment.

Some years ago i was not so happy to be a programmer for life thinking about what i wanted to be 10-15 years down the road, after getting older i started to realize how good it is to have this skillset and that its worth my time venutring into new fields of informatics.

Programming always brings oppertunities from small stuff like side projects up to your own company. And we are in this one profession which has a bright future ahead in a society that is owned by programms. Right now we have the freedome of choice if you dont like your current job you can easily find a new one with the same or better pay.

We are the Artist, Stonemasons and Architects in conjunction.

8/10. Four Years ago (with 26, after studying Design) I started working as a front-end-developer, and two years ago started learning proper JS- and programming-skills. The work is mostly rewarding and the pay is much better than it would have been as Art-Director in a design- or advertising-agency. There is no overtime and the co-workers are really nice. The only small downside is that there is no senior front-end-developer with more experience than me, since the company consists of ~100 Java-Consultants and 5 Mid-Level Front-End-Devs. Sometimes I could need a mentor, like the Junior-Java-Devs have.

10/10 - I'm extremely happy after I decided to stop pursuing web development and switch to native mobile. I started doing web development in 1996 (15 yo) and around 2012, I was extremely frustrated. There were too many frameworks, databases, and tools which just made tradeoffs of solving one problem for creating another. It seemed like web products weren't getting better and the brittleness of development was increasing. I started mobile development in 2008 when the first iPhone SDK came out and fully switched over as a career in 2012 and I couldn't be happier.

Very! But being a programmer does not necessarily make you happy though. In a similar way that having lots of money doesn't necessary make you happy. If you invest some time in looking for a good team, at a company that encourages learning - you're getting closer. Work on something you're interested in. If you're missing one of those things, change it... Keep changing it until you find something that works for your lifestyle. You'll either find it or figure out programming isn't for you.

I hate programming, but I couldn't think of a better place to "sunset" my programming career! I'm really lucky to be working with such kind & talented people.

Happy. Broke, but happy. :)

(I earn around $100/hr, but my life organisation skills are so miserable that I can't yet make the ends meet. And I have to travel around 50 times per year).

Scala/Java.

I've been programming for ~25 years and I still love programming. Last night I resurrected my old Xeon 8-cpu server and spent all night trying to install centos on it. Turns out my specific bios needed special settings to boot from USB.

My goal is to learn vagrant and spin up vms to handle variable load tasks. I want to be able to process website data using Hadoop and store the various outputs to my database. It's not novel but it's all new to me and I'm excited.

We should have a website to centralize all of these testemonials

5/10. Finally working on my dream project, a medieval rpg. Was scared off by Breshenham's algorithm to doing web stuff in the noughties, followed by small iOS titles this decade. Slowly getting to be a competent 2D game developer. Taught myself graphics and am proud of every small victory. Love the programming aspect and the literary aspect of story & world creation. Why only 5/10? Because ...life, bills, health, taxes,drama etc.

My satisfaction as a programmer comes and goes with the project and the team. While I love building programs and working through the logic, the thing that I am building matters more to me than solving the problem. So as long as I and the people I'm working with personally care about the project, I'm happy. If I'm not interested in the project, I'll do the work (work ethic is always important) while finding another job.

I enjoy an environment that respects developers, their comfort, and their passions while pursuing new techniques and technologies to better their stack and make developers' lives easier.

However, I temporarily gave that up to see how I'd like the corporate world of Java programming. Although I don't mind working around people (previously worked from home), I will say this: I care more about the software instead of someone's weekend.

Depends on the role. I change roles a couple of times a year. The good ones give me freedom to come up with novel solutions and have major design input, growing my skills and giving me a good sense of ownership and respect. I look forward to work each day on these contracts.

The bad ones just want a grunt who asks no questions and turns out code without contradicting the project leads or architects, even when they're talking shit. No fun at all.

I don't like being used to make people money. That part of it sucks. Programming is great, the fact that you are making things is incredibly challenging and fulfilling. Being viewed as a boy genius instead of a human being is the trade-off. I feel like this industry has forced me to become more anti-social. Always on the lookout for the next snake trying to steal your work or use you for their next big promotion.

Watch out for repetitive strain injuries and high stress levels. Don't burn yourself out. Keep work at work, even though it may be tough because you love what you do. Make sure your current job and product are aligned with your goals in life. Be passionate about what you are working on. Keep yourself challenged and you will love it all. Don't undervalue yourself. Make an impact and change the world.

not happy but at least i can feed myself and go on a date. I was hoping I'd receive better compensation than I do. I certainly did not go to college for this. however I have been able to afford a (not big but okay size) appartment in a bad neighbourhood. this I use to rent out rooms. SO far it's been a very smart investment. which means hopefully I'll be able to move on to a better life someday.

When I first started out as a self-thought programer and worked for the first company where I really enjoyed my work, the second was horrible, third was cool at first until it began to suck. I am now usually assigned tasks like changing the margin of buttons and other annoying stuff, I don't feel my skills are improving and am not gaining any knowledge. Really horrible

I definitely go through times where I struggle with the team dynamics, product direction, management. Perhaps all fields have similar analogs. But I'm not sure I'd be able to stay away from programming. It's been a lifelong pursuit and I have just as much fun now as I ever did. I am definitely happy, and I think I would be quite unhappy were I to stop.

Honestly, I really love it. Yea, there can be insane deadlines and it can be frustrating work, but it's so satisfying overall. In my job, I get a lot of freedom to do my own things here and there, and we're getting into a major rewrite of internal systems to use Azure. Currently it's a huge amount of fun.

If you are unhappy as a programmer you should quit your job immediately and try sales/marketing/anything else.

I was disappointed with the way companies I worked at organized their programmers so I started Software Engineering Daily, a podcast about software.

This economy rewards software skills and general acumen as much as programming.

I'm happy working as a programmer, I wouldn't have done if for the past 35 years if I didn't like it!

Hate it.

I started coding at 14 and had my first paying contract at 16. Worked in a large startup once and freelanced until 22. Even though I was making 6 figures, I was extremely unhappy and depressed with the monotony and boredom my job had become.

I was fortunate (and probably lucky) to have been able to move to finance (hedge fund) at 23.

I love programming. The line between work and play is very blurred for me. The only thing that makes me cringe every morning is the fraking drama. I became a programmer cause I thought I would have less interaction with people(among other reasons). Why are office politics like freaking high-school?

Working as a freelance programmer for last 10 years. I am happy working as a programmer from home.

However being lazy on exercise, and social life makes me hate it for few hours in any given day of the week. Then I bounce back, get out ... get stuck in traffic.. and then working from home seems great again :)

Very interesting comments itt. My take is that can be happy when doing stuff that is either very (very) well paid, super cutting edge/interesting or have the power to change the world. Is my current job like that? It pays well but no. I try to make side projects then and iterate.

I like the field, but as someone who's done graduate work and peered into what is plausibly possible, seeing the industry's preferred technologies is like reading Donald Trump's twitter feed. More, I will defer to email, as it'd cause flamewar. :-)

There was a moment were I wanted to quit. Then like most things, I accepted it for what it was and moved on. My current focus is saving enough money to go back to school and get a Ph.D in Mathmatics. I need another 300k saved before I can do it with my family.

I find my job real boring (not programming itself) and I'm not sure if it's going to change. I'm not sure if I could risk getting a better programming job and my workplace would be left in a bad place if I actually do leave. It depresses me.

I pretty much enjoy iOS dev for 3+ years now, with all its quirks and annoyances.

Apple drops new frameworks and features every year, so there's always something new and interesting to learn. Not to mention Swift.

So yeah, I wouldn't really do anything else in this field.

I'm like 8 years into my career, and CTO-level now, and I'm happy most of the time, depending on the non-technical situation at a moment ;-) (dealing with requests from non-technicals can be exhausting sometimes :D)

Very. Used to be an accountant. It is much more satisfying to create something.

Back when I was working at a MegaCorp who kept trying to turn me into a tech lead/manager? Miserable.

Now at a small company where I just code all day long and nothing else? Extremely happy.

Where you work and who you work with matters.

I absolutely love being a programmer and wish there were more hours in the day for me to tinker with stuff and spend time on toy projects.

I'm impartial to working as a programmer, though it pays the bills quite well.

It probably helps to see programming as a tool and being employed / acting as an entrepreneur from a field or a cause you care about. That way, the daily job and the stress may become more bearable.

C'mon, quit with the 'software engineer'codswallop. We're programmers, p-r-o-g-r-a-mm-a-r-s, and the sooner we all come to terms with that, the more karmic our profession will be.

I started programming a C64 at 10 yo - that was 31 years ago OMG. I'm happy when I can work as a programmer, even if that is just a very small percentage of my time now.

I am really happy I have a job that pays good money and get to meet lots of new people. It's good to live normally again.

I worked as a programmer, briefly, after college, it sucked, expectations were ridiculous, pay was crap. I would never work as a programmer again.

I really enjoy my career as a Software Engineer though. It's been, mostly, fun, and as I've learned and grown I've got the chance to work on more and more interesting things.

Currently I'm helping to build a cloud provider for a specialized sector of the economy that has eschewed the cloud (until now).

I'm happy working as a programmer, I wouldn't have done it for the past 35 years if I didn't like it.

Programming is no work.. It's fun

Ehhh, like a 7/10.. One of the many reasons I ended up applying to med school.

I don't even think about retirement, that is how much I like programming.

"I enjoy X but working as a Xer is boring."

i enjoy programming. but with projects that come and all the politics take the fun away & also make the product nonsense till heads are counted.

Hahaha! If you have to ask, you can't afford it.

12/10 :) - Working with interesting problems - Finding better ways to do things - Great people to work with and learn from

12 years experience in web development.

Currently, I'm not happy working as a programmer.

I really love the job, I've done coding and software development as a hobby since I was 14, maybe 15 years old, because it was always my dream to do this kind of thing.

After I've finished my apprenticeship as a java ee / android dev 2 1/2 years ago, I continued to work for the same company who hired me as an apprentice in the first place. After that, I decided that I need a "change of scenery" and to explore the big world of professional software development.

The second company, which I currently work for since a year now, is however somewhat very different. I've started my career with an already existing business project (imagine your typical java enterprise project here -> rdbms + application server + java rich client), supporting it, making the clients happy with _everything_ they want.

It was in a really bad condition (architecture, software design, ui design of the main application, the client was fed up with), but it was doable, so I decided to make a change. I started developing a new client, with modern design and a cross plattform approach, and everyone loved it, I got great response from everyone and the project even got a stockup of developers from 2 to 6 - just because of my work and the resulting interest of the client (= more money++ for my company for a project which was theoretically thought dead). Everything was great.

The last 3-4 month however were terrible. I learned enough about this project to understand of what hell im into now: the client hasn't the slightest idea of what this project is doing anyways. The team leader had no experience in leading teams or even projects, because he was actually an architect which has done a solo job on this project for 4-5-6 years now.

After all, the project was developed because the client's company had money. But this is a different story, however...

The feature requests of the client were getting more and more, the time to accomplish goals was getting less and less. There wasn't even time anymore to test things, (I know, testing - haha, but this company is pretty well known in the world of testing and test-consulting, every other project there is heavily tested for example), or to get rid of technical dept. - every accomplished jira task was just a patch of code and hopes, pushed into the project git, hoping that everything will work - but of course, if you changed something, everything fell down like theres no tomorrow.

I just couldn't work like this anymore, I've tried it several times to talk with my boss or my project lead to get rid of, or at least, minimize the impact of technical dept on this project, because it was the main problem which consumed most of the time AND budget, when solving features for the client. After the "critical path" of this project, and 2 happy clients, we had a sit in with the whole team, including the team leader, and my boss.

We talked about everything, what went good, what went wrong, how to improve ourselfs and how to manage clients in order to prevent something like this the next time and I was really, really happy with it.

As the time went by, the project lead was taking a break because of way to many additional workhours, I was fine with it. It was just one month to go until new year, and after that, I thought, everything will be fine - of course it wasn't.

The workload doubled in this month, no team lead, just me and my coworkers who had just half of an idea of this _great_great_ project. Anyways, we've made it. Everything the client wished for was done and even more, they were happy.

As my vacation began and the new year started, I fell into a deep depressive hole. Me and my project lead were so terrible burned out, that after 3 weeks of vacation, I needed another 3 weeks just to get into real life again. Today is my last free day of this 6 week timeout and I hope that I've got enough power and endurance to get back on track.

I've learned a lot about company politics in the last year, how to handle clients, new coworkers, bosses and a lot of do's and dont's on enterprise java development. But I've also learned alot about the "darkside" of software development.

I love the craftmenship and all the clever thoughts and every single person I've worked with - but if you start a career in that industry or a new job be aware, that money is the only thing that counts at the end of the day. So be grateful if you're getting paid to play with the newest technology or just try stuff out.

P.S. - Sorry for the long personal post and the horrible spelling, english is not my native language. I feel better.

eh, pretty happy.

I just want to note that there's strong social pressure to not to claim that you don't love working as a programmer on this site. The odds a future boss or coworker is an HN regular is extremely high, and "passion" is high valued. Weigh the responses accordingly.

I'm 30 years old, I started programming BASIC on my Apple IIc when I was 7, so this is the only life I've ever known. It's difficult to see the forest from the trees enough to known if I like it, it just "is." What greatly troubles me is that to continue to push the envelope in the fields I work in as I always have and always looked forward to, I am essentially compelled to violate my personal code of professional ethics and build super creepy technology that violates the privacy of other people. I know that if I don't do it someone else will, but that doesn't help me. It leaves me very conflicted.

I'm a final year undergrad with a real passion for programming using modern, well-designed languages like Rust, Swift or Elixir and I enjoy it so much that I spend most of my free time contributing to open-source.

Lately however, I've heard a lot of "I hate programming..." kind of talk from my classmates and by talking to them, I came to realise that most of them are in just for the promise of a good pay, that they do basically no programming or side projects outside of labs and that they had an illusion that the basics of C++ the university taught them is the whole deal and are only now discovering memory management, templates and such, which makes them frustrated. Also, very few of them have tried anything outside of C++, mostly because they didn't know anything else existed and didn't bother looking.

This frustrates me a great deal, since I quite frankly think that if pay is your only concern, you're better off in law, medicine, the finance/banking industry, or hell - oil & gas management for that matter.

This is the reason that the tech industry over here, (UK/not London) is so old-fashioned and extremely boring, new players not able to spring up; because these recent graduate students everyone's hiring can't do anything more complex than what a repetitive Java shop can offer.

I love programming (desktop software dev for an engineering consultancy), but I have started to hate this company recently. It's my first dev job out of uni and I have been here three years.

Everyone is really nice here, but it's the management. The boss acts like we're in the 50's. Everyone must wear a shirt and tie, no headphones are allowed because it's 'unprofessional', any talk of unions or the like is 'communism' and no plants allowed in the office because he doesn't like plants.

Add to that we're woefully underpaid as developers. We tend to lose a lot of developers after three or four years due to the pay and the slowness the company has in switching to new technology and delivery models (web and mobile apps are on our roadmap, we haven't even started implementing them and won't for at least two or three more years) and they are generally replaced by graduates, meaning the code base suffers as a result.

Before my company switched to SCRUM/Agile and pair programming last November I would have said like 4/10.

But right now it's a 9/10.

Formerly we were four separate web developers. Only consulting with each other, and not really ever working together on projects. And two of the four of us constantly had 6 or more projects we were juggling concurrently (I know, right?) It was really rough, even with being able to work remote four days a week and having a fair amount of autonomy, it was wearing thin.

Then we ran an experiment, two of us doing pair programming on a single project. We loved it. Then the company sent some of us out for proper Scrum Master training, and committed to doing SCRUM properly.

Since the switch we have become a cohesive team. We rotate partners every sprint and we only work on one project at a time. I actually enjoy work now. The whole team feels the same way.

Plan your retirement by 40 in programming career

Programmer, like a poet, or a coder, like a typist?)