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Comment by allenu | Hacker News Reader

I love coding too, basically for the same reasons. There’s something about creating things from scratch, making them better, and debugging issues that can’t be matched by other hobbies. You just have more control and speed in working on things versus physical things like working on an engine.

That said, I don’t like the business of coding. Doing coding for a living strips away a lot of the joy out of it, but this is why I have side projects and why I have learned to treat the business of coding as a job first and coding second.

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I think a big part of the “joy”, is pursuing your own idea of what would be cool to make. Start a side project, and not one you think would be lucrative, or that other people would be impressed by. Just something you yourself are fascinated with, even transiently.

Pursuing your own idea of what's cool to make is sometimes possible in paid work too. Within constraints, to be sure, but it can be one of the great joys of being a dev on a product team.

> Doing coding for a living strips away a lot of the joy out of it

As someone with a lot of interests, I have found this to be true for every one of them. Seems like monetizing yourself is always soul sucking to some degree.

for me it's the difference between doing purely commercial work and treating it as a craft. I picked up woodworking years ago as a hobby, and after a while I started doing paid work for a bunch of friends and it really wasn't any less satisfying. When you build unique things that people really want to me it's no less interesting, same with programming. Once you start doing industrial style coding it becomes cumbersome.

> I don’t like the business of coding. Doing coding for a living strips away a lot of the joy

This is sad but I think a lot of people have the same experience. Then again, I had a recent programming job that I really enjoyed. I think the team you're in and how they work has a huge influence on keeping the joy.

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