Ask HN: Do you love programming or is it a chore? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you love programming or is it a chore?

9 pointsabhinav2218 comments

My story: I was really into programming as a kid, did some basic stuff in BASIC and some HTML / JavaScript at the turn of the century when I was 12-13.

I enrolled in an IT course but switched majors to Business after one semester, as I hated staying up all night fixing my bugs. I generally thought I was good at programming (first in school, scholarship at university etc), but at the time I was 18 I fell in love with accounting & finance.

Fast forward to today, 15 years on, I am happy with my work in business, but I have really rediscovered my love of programming and through working on side projects, have advanced past what I did during my earlier life.

I wonder however, if my love for programming is because it’s not my job and I didn’t spend 15 years on - it’s like a nice hobby. If I stayed with IT when I was young and became a programmer, I wonder if I would still love it or if I would love business instead, since the latter would now be something novel for me?

So I’m asking on how your love for programming has developed over the years? Has working full time in IT reduced some of the charm and you now like spending your time on non-IT hobbies outside of work, or is your passion burning strongly 24.7?

These days I would love a job in IT, but I wonder if that’s because I have not been exposed to working for others and not simply on my hobby programs.

I think it’s one thing to have fun programming as a hobby, another to do it as a job. I learned that gradually over the years going from “it’s fun to build toy games” up to a prod code base is a big leap. And you might enjoy programming, but not want a job as a software engineer.

As a software engineer you have to:

- often focus on maintenance and refactoring over long stretches of time

- develop some knowledge of the domain you’re working in (like biomedicine vs educational apps vs language learning vs ...)

- be able to communicate ideas and build partnerships with other programmers, not the least of which yourself in 6 months when you revisit that code base

- interact a lot with non programmers to get the job done (UI designers, product managers, etc)

- compromise to your orgs development standards (languages, frameworks, etc)

- possibly be on call to support your project

And the list goes on...

I’d say there’s a pretty wide gap from the projects that got me into programming and what I do now as a full time software engineer. But I like all the things above too, as it means I’m building software for a sizable user base that will get real value from it...

Same as you but I started about 21 years ago with a zx-spectrum

At 16 years old I hit my thumb many times trying to nail something in my bedroom wall. My mum laughed her head off and told me very seriously "you better be good with computers because you're totally useless with your hands".

So I become a programmer.

I design and program full time, 90% self taught, whether low level stuff or high level stuff, I make games, I do all sorts of things that involve programming in many languages.

Technology changes, especially the front-end is becoming incredibly irrelevant. The abstractions are so high you wonder who knows how to write code anymore.

There are certainly technologies and languages I prefer. I focus on those. They sort of drive my next challenge, my next job etc.

I've always preferred talking to compilers than people.

Personally I do this professionally as well as after hours. I estimate I spend about 12 hours days in IntelliJ, commercially or not. When I'm procrastinating, it's usually programming _something else_.

My biggest concern is keeping fit and not dying of a premature death sitting for so long.

Another ZX Spectrum owner here, also the reason for me becoming a programmer:

https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html

I programmed for money for a long time, but realized that in any particular project there would be a small percentage of the work that was novel/interesting/difficult/stimulating. The rest of the work would be mechanical, tedious, or uninteresting.

So I gradually switched into system administration, and cloud-stuff. I program for fun, in my spare time, and I get to write small utilities, tools, and automation-magic in my career. That's a happier balance for me than programming full-time.

I hear you. At the same time there is light at the end of the tunnel. Once you grind through the boring and lengthy part you get to have a working software. That's rewarding and worth it.

I love coding, but I do enough of it as a full time job that my passion for external side projects is pretty low. I mean that more in the context of "The problems at work are novel enough that 8 hours of working of them is more than enough brain time for me thanks", although honestly if I had a day where I get stuck in meetings for 4 hours, one of my first impulses when getting home is to pound some time into a side project.

I think it helps that my company is small and I have wide latitude to do whatever I want at work, as long as it works at the end.

Quite similar here.

I do find I need to do some "pure creative" programming every now and then if the work stuff has been a bit boring, but being in a small company as well I can usually find time for that.

Doesn't have to be big stuff, mostly just exploring ideas and the boundaries of the language. Basically having a bit of fun with it.

I love programming when I know I'm actively contributing to something or I have people who want to use my software. I actually lose a lot of motivation to write software if I don't have an active goal or someone to share it with. Being able to help people, get a new tool for my development toolkit, or solve tangible/"real" problems gives me what feels like infinite inspiration to work on programming outside of work.

I'm not built like some of the people on here or Reddit who get thrills from solving interview questions or coding for the sake of curiosity about math problems. When I'm solving a puzzle with code where the reward is just knowing an independent answer, I think programming is just a chore. The feeling of it being a chore is alleviated a little if I have someone to talk to about the problem in question. Unfortunately, that type of person who loves solving code puzzles for the sake of solving them is not only the majority, but that type of person is usually in a position to decide whether or not I get to make a living writing software.

Coding side projects brings me immense joy. My paid gigs have been soul-crushing, with occasional exceptions. It's all about autonomy. I have a particular approach to cultivating robust codebases, which I developed over 30 years, and which I'm mostly forbidden to apply at work. What, how, and when you can make changes is constrained by team consensus and / or company culture.

I've found that SDE day jobs can be not so great, but it's actually BECAUSE there's not as much coding as I'd like. I think I'll be content if I can find a job where 70% of the time is spent writing logic and testing it. But my experience so far, while limited (about 3 - 4 years), has been that your time is taken up by meetings, research, tech debt hell, etc. So you might not be missing much, some developers actually do most of their coding in their own time just like you!

I mostly enjoy the act of programming, without the need of producing something useful or profitable in the end. Particularly when it's a hobby project in whatever domain interests me at the moment, e.g. currently it's low-level optimization hacks and ridiculous concurrency in Rust.

I'm a developer proffesionally but find I only spend about half my time writing code, so I still have plenty of energy for my own projects at home.

I love development. I like designing the algorithms, coding them, testing, debugging, even documenting. Project planning is great with me, like being a team leader. I do not enjoy tedious meetings. Tedious being anything over 30 mins where my GAD (give a Darn) is broken. Writing papers justifying why we need more people, why something cannot be done etc.

As for OP, I think if schools would teach debugging and code structure better, then he might have stayed with it. Surprisingly writing a parser taught me a lot about both.

To OPs current situation, why can you not be the SW guy in your group? I have met enough non tech professionals to know almost any group would love to have someone to do small projects. Typically they must have some domain knowledge, which after 15 years you should. Question is, can you percieve any projects?

For my personal experience I freelance because I know if I did it as an actual 'job job' it would kill my passion.

I think maybe that's the same for any profession though, doing it everyday as a 24/7 grind would make you want to blow your brains out.

It's just a problem solving strategy - neither fiery romance nor domestic drudgery - but a way to solve problems in my life, a way that some people see fit to pay me for, even though the type of problem solving they generally task me with is self-perpetuating, creating new problems by design to keep me busy and justify my manager's budget increase requests

To me coding is a process to get to an end result. Since that enables me to create and use my imagination, I love coding.

In work, if I'm not working on something that I like the end result of, I don't love it as much. It just feels like work.

I am a jaded "corporate" programmer. To summarize, I love solving programming puzzles such as Advent of Code and ICPC World Finals archive problems, but hate programming at work.

I know some people like programming for its own sake, and that's cool, but that's not me. I enjoy building software that is useful or playful.

I love programming but I hate software engineering.

Same here sorta, I like software engineering when it's my product, I don't like it if I have to do it for someone else and bend their demands as to how their software should be engineered.

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