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Comment by 5350-uiop-1130 | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking the same scrolling HN, then saw your post.

After 15 years I'm no longer interested. I don't care about the web, css, javascript, react, testing....it's just an increasingly tedious and difficult headache to me.

I have a creative urge, and a problem solving urge, but i feel maybe it can be better expressed through another medium. I just wish I had some way to unchain myself from this 9-6 5 days a week soul-less grind.

Even when I did enjoy my job before, the increasingly complexity, the amount of tedious plumbing, spending hours fixing obscure npm bugs on a tool I built only 3 months ago (and worked perfectly). I just hate it all.

To answer your question, i haven't gotten it back and don't think i ever will.

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I can sympathize with that npm point. I think there's a real distinction between coding-as-problem-solving and coding-as-plumbing, and I feel like a lot of the wear and tear of the motivation to code comes from the latter. This reminds me of the essay the MIT guys published on why they stopped using the classic SICP curriculum and instead moved to Python, the gist of it being that the kind of development they used to teach, with a blank piece of paper in front of you, working through first-principles, etc., was increasingly rare; that the most important skill to teach now was how to take separate pieces of someone else's code and effectively cobble it together onto something new. Which, fair, but I don't think it is doing stuff like that that first ignited the passion for it in a lot of us.

This is good advice. Thanks for sharing.

To OP: What has re-motivated me to code is not the coding work itself; but the application of my skills to solve problems that I care about.

Add to that - one is still writing CRUD apps that seem to run slower than ever even though the computers have become faster. That's why I feel more drawn to my guitar now than computer but then guitar will never make me any money so need to keep churning out CRUD apps.

yeah, i was just thinking today how slow and bloated the web feels. i know things have always been slow, maybe rose-tinted lenses and that but there shouldn't be lag on an input box when using a 2020 mbp with 64GB of ram.

and the frustration of trying to stream a video on reddit whilst the ad seems to have no trouble loading and playing.

I was complaining about this just yesterday[0], while waiting for my media PC, a dual core AMD APU with 8Gb of ram, to scroll the Twitch categories page. I pointed out to a friend a few minutes later how we were watching a game from 1999, which rendered full 3D environments in real time at 60+fps on a 200Mhz pentium with 32MB of ram. Here we are in 2021 with a computer several orders of magnitude more powerful and it is struggling to scroll a fucking document.

[0] to be fair, I complain about this at least 3 times a day, sometimes to an empty room.

OP here - what I found fun about my Django projects was that I used very little javascript. Mainly bootstrap and a dash of htmx. Modern browsers are freaking fast at rendering html and with a light payload and proper CDN setup, it feels like a SPA with 1/10th the work.

Ever think about trying embedded development?

It doesn't pay as well as web development. But it moves more slowly, it's not going anywhere, and it can be a stepping stone towards getting to work with your hands in a technical role.

As a more general response to OP's question, you can always switch industries. We're lucky to work with code, because everything runs on it. Finance, agriculture, medicine, vehicles...moving to a different area of the economy can feel refreshing, and it gives you a chance to learn about things that are unrelated to coding. Soulless web dev is where the big money is, but you won't starve working in other areas.

> agriculture

This I did not know.

> vehicles

This I hoped would never happen (security and privacy) - but anyway. (It has been a problem for well over a full decade, I know.) Anyway, as said, there is some light side: providing features while defending as much as possible security and privacy is a stimulating goal. One would feel more comfortable, though, if that were an established, common, given, granted goal.

Agriculture is more and more based on computers than ever. Massive expensive tractors with computers inside, that collect and visualize a tons of data as farmers tend to the fields. I watched a couple of farming videos online and it surprised me just how much they're integrated now.

https://www.theverge.com/22533735/john-deere-cto-hindman-dec...

It seems a little easier to go from embedded to app dev than vice versa, harder still to think up a personal project involving embedded to get you excited enough to invest the time into learning by hands-on trial and error.

I’d be interested in some started points, books, etc. to embedded, even beginner ELI5 fun projects. I am familiar to RPis, ESPs and similar microcontrollers for fun, but curious about what career and industry practices are common and different compared to app dev.

As an embedded systems guy(Hardware guy who works "on"embedded firmware), i can attest to the fact that its not going anywhere, but caveat emptor, Its glacial growth when you consider career growth and salaries. Also, the tech stack is tied to a couple of big name tooling chain vendors and chip vendors. And after writing the same old I2C/SPI driver for the nth time, you start feeling like the OP. So grass is always greener on the other side.

Isn't a majority of the industry Electrical Engineers who know how to code? You also have a lot more physical hardware constraints to work around unlike standard computers where the lowest baseline is still quite a bit for standard app dev.

Nope! Maybe the trend is that a lot of kids these days double major( in the us) and end up with some passable programming skills. It’s still not the primary focus. Like you mentioned the focus is working with physical constraints in a cross functional environment

The company I interned at did timer and wall din switches which were pretty interesting. They were timid letting me do much programming because it was freshman -> sophomore summer so I basically tackled a counter on one of their wall outlet timers that adjusted with a knob on the front and realized the embedded world was not for me haha. It is REALLY cool to hold your code in your hands, though.

thanks for the suggestion, will look into it.

Pretty much going to have to echo this. The increasing needless complexity in everything has driven me to no longer be interested in technology in general, and it seems that our industry is only interested in making it even worse as time goes on.

I have tried to get myself motivated to do programming projects again and it just isn't taking.

The industry would see the complexity increase not as a bug but a feature. Every complexity is some improvement, some advantage, being marketed or sold, with promises of performance and outcomes but with realities of headaches and bugs. It doesn't help most complexities are someone's company that they want to sell for a huge M&A profit.

I'm on the infrastructure side, so I'm not sure if what I'm saying is true, but you could try taking a look further towards the backend. I'm under the impression that front end work can be a little messy, but again it's not from first hand experience. Beautiful and elegant solutions that solve problems well are a lot not fun to work on for me. Troubleshooting and fixing someone else's mess tends to burn me out a lot more quickly.

What medium are you expressing your creative and problem-solving urges through now?

I guess I meant it in a kind of half poetic sense. I would like to write, or maybe do some kind of digital or video art.

I got into web dev around 98-99 and i've been doing it ever since.

I think what appealed to me about it about the time was the immediacy of it, being able to write these little js widgets and see them in action instantly. Trying to build these intricate table layouts to replicate the offline versions of various websites that came on a disc with internet magazines.

But the field has changed a lot over the years, first it was the iPhone and mobile-web, CSS animations, SVG, Canvas, Node JS, with JS on a server, React, Redux, State management, and now CI and DevOps, Unit tests, TS, - and the endless deprecations and changes that seem to occur faster than I can keep up with.

The things I used to enjoy are only a fraction of my job, and even those parts have become kind of complex - at least for me. I feel like, as others have said, front end is quite messy and the result of that is that I never feel satisfied that I can complete something and just "Get it right". Seems like the edge-cases are infinite, devices, displays, and other weird quirks...

- sorry for the rant.

Same here, what I loved about the web was the immediacy. You edited 2-3 files and you were done!

Today I had to work with Angular, this thing is insane. So many files, so many layers, so slow... This thing makes me hate what I do.

I wish web dev took a different direction towards more simplicity.

I asked because I'm partly in the same situation. I don't write code for work, but have (and had) too many side projects running. The fun is always at the start: thinking of something, sometimes discussing with potential users and being able to see things realized pretty quickly. But then the complexity kicks in indeed, and the fun turns into a drag.

(I've never been able to monetize anything for more than a few bucks a month, simply because I like to spend more time on creating something new than growing what I have)

Your initial comment made me realize I'm perhaps more interested in creating things that do not solve a problem (like my side projects do), but that express an idea instead.

I'll try and consider my knowledge of coding (Python and web front end) as an extra tool for expressing ideas, next to writing and talking.

Thanks for inciting this train of thought within me :)

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