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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.

I can relate to that feeling intimately.

The intellectual content of programming has definitely changed since the simpler times which were, for me, formative. There's a combinatoric explosion of proper nouns, frameworks and libraries, and doing anything seems to entail 95% of time spent pouring over 27 browser tabs of API references.

This wasn't what made me love programming when I did systems programming in C as a teenager, and it's a different skill set. I wrote things like highly asynchronous & modular MUDs, chat servers, etc. Sure, one had to consult man pages of system calls once in a while, but fundamentally, it was much more of a closed system with a straightforward standard library and few dependencies. Of course, some of that is because my tinkering wasn't subordinated to economic imperatives or Enterprise Business Rules, but I do think it was qualitatively different in a more objective way, too. Now, it's an overwhelming river of gewgaws that each have their own APIs, conventions, methodologies, life cycle, etc.

It doesn't help that a lot of these gewgaws are clearly conceived for the same reasons academic advisors conceive schools of thought and seed conferences with spam publications relating to them by their pet graduate students. Maybe I'm just old, but it seems to me a lot of fashionable frameworks and doodads are more about O'Reilly book royalties, speaking engagements, consulting projects and *Con registration fees.

Similar background here, and complete agreement with you!

Started out seriously with the Amiga and it was a delight - the OS was beautifully designed, and there were so many ideas that should have caught on. I'll name just one - datatypes.

Work started out with C and Unix, and so long as you had K&R and W Richard Stephens you were good to go. Loved the design of this too until I got to the GUI - X was not fun. Messing around with MUDs was fun, as was knocking up internal chat servers etc.

Now programming is gluing modules together with the aid of a web browser, often with little real understanding (no time for that). No need for a real grounding in the math or tech when you can just plug lego bricks together which leads to the mess that's PHP or most of the PHP code I've seen.

Design has moved on but it's as much about change for changes sake as improvement. It's now about driving the advertising click stream, or locking us in to the app world, even on our phones rather than improving productivity.

I agree that's it's about fashion and selling those certifications, exams and training - yearly (lol) microsoft certified x etc. Can't say I've come across a one of them that indicates in any way that someone is even basically skilled in the tech in question.

It's just a continuation of that complexity for complexity's sake.

I remember being 16 and forging teacher's noted to get out of study hall to go to the library. Why? Because they had a REAL computer there! A Commodore PET! With 4K of RAM and BASIC!

I came in, sat down, and thought "what do I want this machine to do that would be cool?"

And so I wrote a game. Other kids loved the game enough to fight over who could play it. That was pretty cool.

But I look at programming now? Damn, those days are gone. You don't sit down and in a day or so create something totally from scratch that people love. Instead you get a framework, or another, or half-a-dozen frameworks bolted onto a 3-year-old programming language. You head a bit down the happy path -- until you don't. Then you spend the rest of the development effort either a) giving up on what you wanted to code and instead coding what the framework makes you, or b) struggling with the framework instead of the problem.

Worst part? I don't think it's needed. You can do a ton with just plain html, some css, and a bit of simple functional-like programming. But if you try to show that to a new programmer? It's like telling them they need to carve their computer out of bear skins and tree stumps. The culture itself rejects just freaking doing stuff people want. Instead, if it ain't new, it ain't cool. And if it's got one piece of complexity? Might as well have a thousand.

I hear you guys. Sad that it's turned out this way.

> You can do a ton with just plain html, some css, and a bit of simple functional-like programming

Or, you know, you don't need a virtualenv running inside of docker running inside heroku running whatever to make your stuff run

Or setup 20 "automation chores" before you write a line of code

Yeah, things today look like 80% is nitpicking and 'best practices' (by whom?) and 20% writing some code that will fall off because of bugs in all those abstraction layers You don't need

Let's suppose I want to write a quick app to text people horoscopes. They enter their phone number and the horoscope is texted to them.

My first step now would be write a command-line function to send the texts. Once that's working, I'd knock out 5 lines of html and start showing it to people. I'm not even sure I'd wrap the freaking thing in <html> tags. For something nobody may ever use, it's simply not important.

The way the vast majority of programmers would begin this would be to set up a container. Then start installing a framework. Then buying a domain, downloading some tools, purchasing a gateway....

Programming is still programming, of course. But the way people think about programming today is total crap. You can ride the "It's cool! It's new!" horse around the merry-go-round a few times, but sooner or later it's gotta start getting old if you have any sense at all. Know what's a travesty? The number of working programmers in the world who have worked for years and have yet to actually make something that people use.

You know, you have the freedom to NOT pick a framework at all. It's not like it's mandatory. Use components and wire things your way.

Don't like legos? Reinvent the wheel then. Go nuts ;), programming is a way of expressing yourself. Like an artist feel free to do whatever you want.

I've been thinking a lot about those days, and how magazines like Creative Computing and the Commodore computer manuals provided all the necessary foundation to make engrossing 1-2 day projects. It is totally possible today, but one needs to realize those magazine articles and project tutorials need to be created that guide new developers. That is us, we're the people that need to create the engaging, he's how its done in a day tutorials that do not depend upon new fangled shiny frameworks, but rather implement the new shiny idea in the minimal form that is its essence. With WebGL, creating jaw dropping tutorials is simply a matter of time and creative effort. Many new developers are fascinated with graphics and 3D - and the browser supports it much better than BASIC was supported back in the Apple II, Commodore era. Minor plug here: I've been pursuing this idea of a browser based return to the magical creativity of those early days with my www.3d-avatar-store.com - a web app and API that creates lip syncing 3D versions of real people. The combination of technologies that enable me to make this site is a gold mine of creative technology. My major issue is finding the time to create the tutorials, now that I have most of the hard stuff done.

IME the barrier is much higher now; if a kid writes a tetris or space invaders, he would be laughed at by his peers, when in fact either of those are significant accomplishments for a beginner. Expectations are so much higher now, it really changes the dynamic.

> You don't sit down and in a day or so create something totally from scratch that people love.

Why not?

It's up to you.

By "you", in the latter paragraphs, I mean "one" As in "one doesn't just sit down"

Apologies. Of course that's what I keep doing. Really happy about it too. That just ain't the way 99% of development happens.

ADD: The point of my OP wasn't that I hate programming, it was that programming itself has changed. It used to be a direct expression of creativity and had quite tight feedback cycles. Yes, I still code that way. But for all the other coders I see? Most of the profession is stuck inside a prison of its own making.

I pretty much agree. Just thought your comment sounded a bit defeatist, which I now see you aren't.

"I gave it all up to work with my hands doing something."

Yes I did this as well. Worked for 15 years as a programmer in financial services. Really found it depressing.

Retrained as a care assistant to work in a nursing home. Find the physical work suits me better and enjoy spending time with the residents. Also did a Physics BSc part-time.

But mainly my headspace is free now when I come home from work. Still do some side programming though - starting Scheme and SICM at the moment...

>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 choose my current job because it was a small company, that actually shipped stuff to customer. You give us money, we'll ship you something in the mail. To me that is an honest, simple and satisfying business. Now the company has grown big, we spend most of our time figuring out how to do up-selling, tracking of users, social media bullshit and tries to push useless subscriptions. We still have basic stuff like order tracking and returns that aren't working correctly. Sadly better service always lose out to "more features" for some reason. I think we could save a ton of money by fixing the basics and trimming features not used by most customer.

The level of tracking and tracked advertising we do pretty much sickens me to the extend that I want out. I just want to solve people problem, not push them to buy hairdryers and batteries.

I don't think I would want to leave the business, but sadly I'm a little to insecure in my own ability to start my own business. Right now, what I really want to do is help small non-IT business getting the services and solutions they need, without ripping them of. It just quickly because terrifying. The prospect of maybe not finding customers, or not being able to solve a issue scare me beyond belief.

I'm curious; what do you consider of something working with your hands? I came from the opposite background (former chemist, process engineer, chemical engineering) and opposed the minimal work that hardly anyone cared for. With programming, moving electrons makes it a much bigger impact with much ease.

I can sympathize with anexprogrammer and I think by working with your hands he might mean something like woodworking, metalworking, generally working "in the shop" making stuff.

I'm not unhappy being a programmer, but from time to time I immensely enjoy fixing things at home myself - I see result of my work here and now. Being a programmer I may not see finished result of my work for a long time.

I think it is quite beneficial for programmers to dabble in some hobbies that involve some handiwork - be it knitting or making playing dices out of metal.

I'm now in conservation and restoration, so a bit of all of those.

I considered restoring old vehicles, but didn't want to end up "just" a mechanic. It was working on cars that was my trigger to get out - I felt so much more satisfaction from restoring a car than I ever did from meeting a ship date. I think because it has a tangible sense of progress and completion, and there's something to point at that's more "real"

Ah, I agree, we all need to see progress and potential eventually. I was previously working in semiconductor and it would take 3-8 months to see any effect of my work. That long cycle time pushed me away. Now I am a front-end developer and love it. The feedback of aesthetics, no matter how small, reminds me that I can still have an impact. Thank you for sharing your new found love!

There's a (fair) book on this very subject: "Shop Class as Soulcraft" by Matheww Crawford. He earned a PhD in economics and after working briefly in a Washington think tank he quit and opened a shop repairing antique motorcycles. (That was the plan anyway. I think he really makes his living writing.)

I can totally relate to the need to have a life outside the virtual world. I've been programming for 30 years (data analysis in R&D mostly), and while I love the intellectual stimulation from writing code to do something new, I also crave physical contact with the world. But it's still not clear to me how best to make that work. Can I do this as part of a job, or must this happen only after hours?

I considered working in robotics, since that seemed an ideal mix of the two realms, but I'd rather not feed the military maw, which is where 95% of the work is. Maybe I should just reorg my garage to add room for a workbench and join the ranks of shadetree mechs. Lord knows I have enough machinery that need wrenching...

Conservation and restoration. Some of the things I do will hopefully outlast me. Your typical piece of software is replaced or rendered obsolete in a year or two.

Unless you do something out of the ordinary, in five or ten years time the app, game or website you built is long forgotten or replaced.

That's why I'm losing some of my excitement in programming and getting it back again in designing physical board and card games. Video game development used to excite me, but now most games are made to be consumed in an hour or two and forgotten for the next game.

Meanwhile board games last, there's value in old editions (I picked up a 40 year old copy of Diplomacy recently), and people still play games that are decades old (not all games, but enough to be worthwhile).

Also, even if I never get a single board game published (unlikely), I will still leave prototypes behind for my family to encounter. Meanwhile, my video games are on my hard drive and could disappear if they don't keep perpetuating digital copies of them.

Also you can make a video game version of the board game you made and now you can sell in two different mediums.

Hi, what did you do for a career change if it's okay to ask?

What are you doing now?