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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

I'm a software engineer who does his own plumbing and his own electrical. Example projects:

   * rewire 1920's three story house with romex instead of knob & tube
   * install 6.6kW ground mount PV arrays and connect to grid
   * replumb two kitchens and three bathrooms
   * install water softener (all copper, dozens of required brazed joints)

I love doing that stuff (carpentry and cabinet building too). But ... a couple of times I've made the mistake of agreeing to help others on projects like the one's I've done for myself. Mistake? Well, absolutely. Doing work like this for other people is completely and utterly different from working on your own projects. Despite loving the work itself, I would never, ever want to do this for other people, even for good income.

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I worked in a daycare for a while when I was young; I really liked being a scout leader and figured I might want to do something like this for a living. I didn't like it very much: turns out that a few hours on saturday is not quite the same thing as 8 hours every day.

I think in general "doing this for a hobby and fun" and "doing this for a living" are two entirely different things. Many people love to cook as a hobby, but being a chef in a restaurant is a completely different thing. Years ago I had a friend who loved to drive trucks as a hobby; I never understood the appeal myself, but he just loved the feeling of driving a truck. He left his teaching career to become a truck driver and in a matter of months ended up hating it (and he ended up going back to being a teacher).

Some years ago I had a friend who agreed to do some tile work for some other mutual friends. Midway through, I was at the "client's" house talking with them, and they were complaining (not bitterly, but perplexedly): "We just don't get it, Steve finishes and says he'll be back in the morning but then he doesn't show up for 5-10 days". I shared in their amazement - it seemed so rude, so unnecessary. Why would you do that?

A few years rolled by and I found myself doing construction stuff for friends. "See you in the morning" I would say as I left, and then find myself returning a week later. There's even a situation now where I've left an absurdly simple final task helping one of my neighbors with some minor repairs ... I think I told her 3-4 months ago that I'd be back in 2 days.

I don't really understand why this happens, but it did give me some insight into a whole extra layer that is required from you when doing work for other people: you have to go back, tomorrow, even, over and over until it is done.

Now this certainly applies to any regular (well, contract?) employment too, but there is something different about construction that I think requires a different kind of personal character to enable you to fulfill the implicit obligations.

Ah yes, the infamous builders. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0QxQoOInV0

> Doing work like this for other people is completely and utterly different from working on your own projects.

To be fair this same logic likely is the source of stress for a lot of software engineers. Loving to program and programming for other people for a living initially seems like a brilliant way to make a living. For plenty of people it is, but for some what programming for money looks like and programming for passion look like can be so different as to be depressing.

The hardest part of software engineers in this situation is the money is really good and, all things considers, the job is quite cushy. However having your passion drained by your profession still can be an awful feeling, and that can be magnified by the fact that there's no easy solution.

For me personally I resolved this by realizing and fully embracing that the programming projects I like to do need to be in a completely separate part of my mind that the ones I'm paid to do.

By day I sling mediocre code on arguably useless things because I need to pay the bills, by night I work on a separate set of interesting problems that are related to the day time ones only insofar as they technically involve writing code. If I get a cool insight at work, great, but I've learned to leave my passion at home when I check into work.

I suppose I am both lucky and rare: I get to experience the "I do what I want to when I want to how I want to" for both my programming and construction work. A useful insight, I hadn't connected them in that way before.

Out of curiosity, what programming work do you do that’s both so free and pays the bill? Do you sell a successful indie product or something?

https://ardour.org/

To bring it back to the premise of this entire website: this is a reason why entrepreneurship becomes a recourse for some dissatisfied engineers. Startups, small-scale consultancies, side projects are all ways to code the programs they want to code.

I don’t think that’s a good escape. I tried owning my business and I hated it 10x more than being just a engineer. Instead of spending 70% of my hours doing what I like it became more like 30%

That’s what I always thought about programming. So fun when you do it as a hobby and meh when you’re 10+ years into building business requirements

Yeah - I wonder about the age / experience level of commentors in this thread. If you had told me in my 20's about burnout (and I'm pretty sure people did tell me), I'd have said I love tech too much and it'll never happen to me. Now in my 30's it's a struggle. I think the last decade was pretty rough too, perhaps if I was a bit older and gotten into tech professionally in the 90's it might have been more of a fun ride, but it's also possible that's just nostalgia.

> Despite loving the work itself, I would never, ever want to do this for other people, even for good income.

This is pretty much how I feel about IT work nowadays. I've done it in the past, nowadays I repair rental houses.

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