Developers hate their job, but like to code outside work

One of the biggest lies that I believed for too long was "do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life". In reality, doing what you love for work turns what you love into work.

A labor of love is something you can do at your own pace, on your own schedule, and there's nothing wrong with deciding not to do it when you don't feel like it. Doing it for work means that you have to do it no matter what.

So I do what I love on my own time, and do work on work time. That it looks like I'm doing the same thing (programming) in both cases is illusory.

I suspect what they really hate is having someone else direct their energy toward objectives they otherwise don't really care much about.

Only one reasonable solution to this problem --- start your own company focused on something you do care about.

Hating the JOB is very different from hating the WORK.

There's nothing worse than a job where you can do incredible work, but it doesn't even _matter_ because the project will get dropped at the end anyways. (And that's obvious to anyone who looks.) Absolutely soul-sucking.

I think it's because in general software engineering is not respected because the definition of the role has been expanded to encompass a variety of disciplines and roles from crafting requirements to telemetry and analytics. Each engineer has a thin vertical slice that effectively makes them switch through many roles for each individual feature.

I suspect that the 20% that are somewhat happy are the engineers in very technical areas or specialized companies, in which the engineering is hard enough to be respected. In these cases it justified for engineers to focus completely on technical problem solving, whereas everywhere else it is more or less about gluing together mediocre solutions and then spending most of the time doing admin tasks like status updates, planning meetings, weekly summaries, writing requirements, coordinating with other teams, etc.

I started playing tennis when I was 7-8 yo. I loved playing. I excelled in tournament play. I played on the high school team. Then I started making good money giving private lessons. It didn't take long after that for my love of tennis to slowly sap away. It became daily work. I stopped after two years and haven't picked up a racquet since. Its been 50 years.