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Comment by OnlyMortal | Hacker News Reader

I’m 55. Started as a 6502 cracker on the C64.

I still get enjoyment out of some coding - C++ on Linux for enterprise applications - but I do miss the “magic”.

These two perspectives are not incompatible. 49 here and still love programming. But only discovered that after quitting my Google job and spending a year working on my own things. Then housework wasn't getting done because I was writing code instead, and I realized I just love doing it, still, and I'm a far far better programmer than I ever was 20 years ago. I can do things I only dreamt of back then. And faster!

but that's not the same thing as enjoying writing the dreck that many employers want, and keeping up with their endless stack of messy JIRA issues, planning meetings, poor design docs, and management shenanigans....

I sometimes think that big corporations pay more because the actual work there sucks more for an engineer (likely to a manager or a sales, too).

Are you involved in the still-thriving C64 demo scene at all? Possible way to reconnect with the magic if not. Especially by attending (in-person, ideally) one of the many demo parties around the world.

There are also parallels with embedded device and FPGA work that I personally find thrilling.

Plus we on the VICE (open source Commodore emulator) team are always looking for devs.

I bought a C64 and SD card a few years ago. I enjoyed running up a few technical masterpieces - like DropZone - but the gaming interest has waned.

I don’t code 6502 nowadays but I’m active on r/c64.

FWIW I find the vscode + kickassembler + VICE toolchain a pretty fun way to iterate on C64 code.

Same age. Got started on a ZX-81 and a university mainframe.

I still enjoy writing code or shall we say solving problems via code. I still get excited about new things. I'm also a manager and I enjoy helping others. What I enjoy less is the politics.

Building things is fun, I don't think this goes away, it was always fun and is still fun.

Good point. It’s the problem solving.

Thing is I’ve solved so many problems, over the years at different companies, that there aren’t many new ones. Obviously, I can knock out the code quickly to the surprise of many. It’s just experience and I’m not a magician.

Like yourself, I enjoy helping others, younger coders in my case, work through their problems.

I guess that’s why I keep having to switch teams to pull them out of the quagmire they’ve gotten themselves into.

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