Ask HN: Did Anyone Here Lose Interest in Coding After a While?
I have a CS degree, and 3 years of experience, the spark of coding seems to have gone, I can't enjoy even small toy projects, I end up focusing too much on writing perfect code, I tried writing meh code, but I couldn't succeed.
Living in a country with no prospects or job oppurtunities for software developers doesn't help as well.
I want to learn from your past experiences if any.
Thanks
You suffer from a common malady that you must be told what to do.
After decades you may develop your own mental mentor who tells you to do things and you listen, or maybe you will be an idle content your whole life (hey, direct personal familiarity here.)
You must find an objective or goal you will actually care to work towards at expense of your self satisfaction.
Or try another hobby/profession. Hardware sensors and the like are going through an auspicious time. Never before so cheap or plentiful. Get sensors and data flow going from everything commercial or civic.
You’ll have to learn discipline to become an independent contractor or proper business opportunist, otherwise you are a wage slave competitor like “everyone else.”
I had something similar to your situation, in this situation I did what I wanted to do, I stopped programming and played games for a whole year, and forgot about programming, but now everything is back and i continue develop open source projects.
What is it about coding that you enjoy? Do you like perfecting the code? Do you like creating a finished product that’s useful to people? Do you like solving difficult puzzles?
At 3 years, you’re probably leaving behind the part of your career where you learn to write good code at the function/class/small module level and entering the part where the learning is about design and architecture of larger systems and libraries. This is also the point where at many companies you’ll start to be expected to engage more with what the product is and the ultimate problems you’re solving for the user.
Are those new areas of learning less interesting to you? More interesting?
Not me. I have been coding for nigh on 35 years now and I still enjoy it. Most of the time anyway. What annoys me isn't ever really "coding" in and of itself, but rather the incidental complexity that comes from the various tools and infrastructure stack elements. IDE plugins that don't work right, build tools that have byzantine and broken configurations, app servers that crash, hang, eat log messages, yadda yadda yadda.
But if anything, I lament that I don't get to code enough these days. Any time I get an opportunity to sit down and spend even a couple of hours actually writing code is usually the highlight of my week.
Totally agree. Most of my professional coding has been on window desktops although the servers are often unix/linux. The amount of time spent spinning up a new framework, IDE, build pipeline or something can be ridiculous and every time it seems to be different in some way. Stuff like npm package management, proxy servers, random stuff being blocked by a corporate vpn, getting admin access on certain things, app server setup and monitoring, CI/CD setup seem to take up 99% of the time!
Actually writing some logic and seeing the results can be quite satisfying at times if I can get over all that. Mostly I just do small POCs and things to help out my team and have a break from meetings and system design.