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Comment by chihuahua | Hacker News Reader

The first software "product" that I sold was created using Turbo Pascal running on DOS. I was in high school at the time. It was designed for an Orthodontist who wanted to input (using a tablet with a cross-hair "mouse") about 20 points from an X-ray of a patient's head, then perform some calculations on the geometry to predict how the jaw bones and teeth were going to develop as the patient gets older.

To this day I think it's the most interesting and satisfying thing I've ever done in terms of software. Despite getting a Ph.D. in computer science and working for Amazon, Microsoft, and Cray, nothing even comes close, with the exception of one project at Microsoft Research. These days I've given up completely any hope of working on something even remotely interesting or satisfying.

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I used to feel this way, and I wanted to rekindle the fire I felt when I was younger and absolutely in love, mesmerized with writing software. After a few years of that, I went into the professional world, and can relate to how you and others in this thread feel, about the dullness and lack of satisfaction. I remembered those times, though, and I kept looking for something to do.

I realized what the difference was: Back then, I was programming for myself, for the enjoyment of it. I was dogfooding everything, at times I was not only the top user, but the only user of my software.

So I went back to doing that, and I can happily report that I feel that way again. It can be done, don't give up hope.

Yeah, back in the days I was in the demoscene, coding for fun. 25 years later, I started coding demos, on Apple 2 (yep, that old machine I had when I was kind). You can call it nostalgia, but hey, that's coding for fun, pushing the machine to the limit, taking time to optimize for speed or memory instead of customer's satisfaction. Plus you get to meet other passionnated people, like before.

So yeah, it's somewhat "going back", but at least, I can express creativity in some unbounded ways. Plus, I code my dream, not the dream of the company which is paying me :-)

Nice! I decided to go back to the old Web days and write something which really does work in ANY browser.

So far, I've reached back to Netscape 2.x and Mosaic :)

So all you need is Safari support. Should be easy right. Jeeve Stobbb$

I am going trough the same stage and started developing the game that I wanted to develop as a kid on my first home computer: a Commodore 16. At the time I learnt to program in 7501 ASM ( a 6502 derived CPU ) but the endeavour was too much for a kid given the tools of the time. Nowadays is way easier: I have a sort of IDE built over emacs, can easily design ( and rip ) sprites and charsets, can mix code in macro ASM and a C-like language and can easily debug on an emulator. It's really a joy!

I've had a similar experience. Every time I get a glimmer of an idea of something I'd have fun building, my thoughts immediately go to my devops workflow, hosting, cross platform, updates, testing, security, tax, patents, viability assessment... and my professional experience has suffocated my idea before I've even built a fun prototype just for myself.

Maybe the disillusionment does not have it‘s origins in your work situation but stems from other areas of your life? - I am in my late fourties, and I feel great satisfaction whenever I am sitting at my desk and writing code, hacking, automating stuff, solving problems using my computer. - I have a similar anecdote regarding Turbo Pascal. In highschool, I had visualized a breakdown of vector forces in an electromagnetic field, and my teacher was thrilled. In order to be able to do that I had written my own vector and matrix calculus libraries.)

Your comment comes as a kick in the gut to me. I feel the same but didn't realize it until I read your comment.

For me, programming has become largely unappealing since the advent of cloud computing (which happened shortly after I entered the market). I really miss the first years of my career.

I also miss my early years, writing programs on a BBC Micros or for Windows 3.0 in Turbo Pascal for Windows. Now everything seems sanitized and no longer challenging.

I think it's the learning experience and result we crave.

For many years, I'd get frustrated with jobs where the projects were invariably limited to copying and caching data. I kept moving from one job to the next, hoping to find something better. Life is better now that I'm no longer searching for that elusive unicorn.

Now that you are older and much more experienced, have you considered the following?

1) Find some worthy students and be their mentor

2) Do Program something you really want or enjoy, e.g. a game or a new language

Young musicians who are thinking of pursuing music as a career are often given the advice, that doing something that they really enjoy as a hobby can become a burden when it becomes a job.

A hobby lets you choose your own battles, work on your own schedule and terms, gauge your progress by simple measures such as personal satisfaction or helping someone with their own life. Career means all of the ** that comes with the job, and doing mostly stuff that other people want.

Granted with music it's a bit more extreme, since a middle ground of doing fun work for subsistence money doesn't really exist.

I hope you won't take my curiosity badly, what made this first project so much better ? it seems interesting but short in perimeter too. Was the rest of your career dulled by politics and large projects management to the point of making the work sluggish and boring ?

What made that first project rewarding is that I had to figure out the math for doing certain geometric calculations: find the angle between the line through these 2 points and the line through these other 2 points. Find the orthogonal distance between this point and this line. Etc. Also, writing code to poll the COM port to communicate with the input device. Those are interesting problems to solve. You get a sense of accomplishment from solving them.

Fortunately, in my professional work, I'm not affected by office politics, and I can handle the overhead of project management. It's just the lack of opportunity to write code that does something interesting (figure out an algorithm that does something non-trivial with this data) that bugs me.

So the lack of intellectual stimulation then ? you need a harder job :D

I have a good friend who has avoided big-co software work his whole career. He writes software for telescopes. Often, it's in Haskell.

He does not have this problem, but I suspect he's left lots of money on the table as a result.

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