Hobby turned Career turned Shit | Hacker News Reader

Hobby turned Career turned Shit

3 pointsnaegatori3 comments

Back in high school, I started graphic design because I liked it..then my friends started liking my work so I started charging for it. Years later it became a career for me, but now I hate it. Maybe it's just me (hopefully not) but knowing that graphic design is what I do for a decent living creates a great amount of stress.

Has anyone else ran into this problem of making a career out of your hobby, then finding that the stress is making you dislike the craft as a whole? If this happened to you, how did you get back on the right track?

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This happened to me last year. I am an undergraduate student majoring in Computer Science. Last year, I got a part-time internship at a company that makes school applications. Work was monotonous, every day was like the other day. The people I worked with never challenged me to improve my skills. All they wanted was to get the job done. I started despising the moment I open the IDE. When I moved to BrainJocks, a web development company, I loved computer science again. The team are all enthusiastic and young. The company divides my time into learning, working, and exploring new things. They gave me an account on PluralSight.com to learn whatever I like, and they encouraged me to explore new tools and propose them to the company. This new internship invigorated my love for software development. Of course, every person has his own circumstances. If you find that your workplace is the cause to your problem, try somewhere new, even if it pays a little lower. The benefits you can get in return may be worth much more than the money.

So I spent about a dozen hours a week in photoshop every week all throughout high school.

When I graduated I was actually holding a full time programming and a part time graphic design gig for about 3 months. (so.little.sleep!)

What I realized was, that for me to be happy I needed to work on things that could actually be 'finished'.

Graphic design is just so maddeningly subjective that I could endlessly push pixels around the screen and never actually reach my goal.

The same with front-end work / css for me. I just need to shift focus to the backend, or even write some unit tests now and then.

otherwise it never feels like I 'win' anything, and it just becomes tedious and depressing.

Happens to me from time to time, I'm a web developer.

I'm 26, coding since 15 and working since 19. I still love my craft as a hobby, but I'm unable to find a stress free job since 2010.

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