Have you rediscovered the joy of programming? Any advice?
Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?
First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God's delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.
Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child's first clay pencil holder ''for Daddy's office."
Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.
Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.
Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly re- moved from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.)
This may sound dismissive or condescending and I promise it isn't my intent: have you considered speaking with an actual therapist? As a society we tend to think of therapists as something you do when you're mentally ill, but you don't just go to the dentist when you suspect you have a cavity: mental hygiene is important, and humans are universally bad at self-diagnosis, either physiological or otherwise.
In my current job I write Python, which I really don't like very much and I get burned out on Python-specific things. But I know my feelings of burnout are due to things that would be true regardless of the technical environment - and that an overall job with Python is far preferable to my previously miserable job with F#. And there's a lot of non-job stuff going on - such as the historic pandemic, and domestic stresses from being cooped up at home.
So speaking with a therapist about what's actually eating you might be quite worthwhile. If it is just burnout with programming, there really are specialists out there who might give well-informed, non-anecdotal advice. If it's something else, then having a professional suss it out means you can make better decisions about major aspects of your life. Plus, therapy is something that's easy to do over videochat. I am not recommending therapy, but I do think you should consider it.
Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. [...] So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.
[0] Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character.
I recommend you study different programming paradigms because in them we can find really interesting approaches to solve problems.
For me those have been:
- functional programming (with Haskell) - logic programming (prolog) - Constraint Programming with the excellent Coursera class on minizinc.
Those paradigms made programming fun again for me.
PS: I also stay away from JavaScript... When I was working with JS.. I was seriously considering leaving programming... Thankfully I changed jobs and I haven't had to touch it anymore.
And learned Clojure.
You will feel like you know nothing. You will feel handicapped. You will be confused.
Then, one day, you will understand what simplicity means and how Clojure's design embraces that more than in any other language I know. By then you will have embraced the flying-by-your-pants-exploratory style of programming at the REPL. And don't want to go back anymore.
It's awesome!
As a 9-5 programmer, I often found myself too mentally exhausted to do any coding outside of work. This meant that over the years, programming became just a job, and nothing more.
But once I changed career tracks, I found that I had the energy to write code after work. It actually felt like taking a break. I went from "I need to get away from the computer and go talk to people" to "I need to get away from people and just write code". And when I was writing code on my own terms, without any project managers or other people telling me what to do, it became fun again.
I'm not necessarily saying you should move into management too. I'm lucky that I enjoy the people side of the job, unlike a lot of programmers. But I think that if you put yourself in the same situation as you were in when you first discovered the joy of programming, you'll be able to rediscover it.
Here's one example that I found that really screws with people not enjoying programming. If you have a career, chances are you're going through rules/bullshit(ie. code standards, needlessly large codebases) made up by other programmers within your organization and that's making you not enjoy programming as much - in contrast to when you were younger and only needed to get things working.
On the bright side, there are ways to handle it. While I don't recommend going YOLO and willfully breaking all the rules or even quitting without a plan, I do recommend trying to find some other outlet/hobby that you enjoy after work hours.
You could also try to contribute to people also trying to make programming less friction-ish. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De0Am_QcZiQ&feature=emb_logo
I stopped using frameworks, stopped using heavyweight runtimes, switched to a language that built and ran faster, and kicked out everything I didn’t like.
I can now focus on the actual problems I’m trying to solve instead of trying to work out how my problems fit into someone else’s idea of how to do things.
Just my 0.01c. Good luck.
It can be the feeling of "I know I can do better than this, but I'm not doing better than this right now, so I'm frustrated with myself."
There is no quick easy fix. My only suggestion to you would be to: firstly, accept that this is crap situation to be in, secondly: that it is escapable, and thirdly: realize that to escape you have to return to your roots, and rebuild from there.
When you first discovered programming, it was fun and what you created only mattered you. You started here, so go back here. Do an ancient Advent of Code (https://adventofcode.com/), or the first few Euler Problems (https://projecteuler.net/). Do not share your solutions with anyone. The most important thing is that what you do is not important to anyone except yourself. This is your baseline.
I picked up a C++ codebase for a DCC app plug-in from around 2011 and started porting it to C++17.
At that time I had already started learning Rust. Three months into the project the DCC host app changed API which meant major refactoring on top of porting.
I decided: screw it – let’s rewrite it in Rust (RIIR). It has been a most amazing experience.
I haven’t felt like this since I was 14 and started learning C and later (Turbo) C++, when I was 16.
The language and community are amazing. Lots of new material that is outside of my comfort zone. Steep learning curve but with the reward of this warm feeling of learning something new almost daily.
Highly suggested.
“Writing Rust code feels very wholesome”.
–John Carmack
I couldn’t have said it better.
I found that the core reason I temporarily lost my love for programming (or nearly lost it on multiple occasions) was because I was coding all the time and was burning myself out.
The monotony of working as a software developer during the day and then coming home to work during the night on my side projects[1] had left me feeling down when my tasks in work or my projects at home didn't work out the way I had planned. On the flipside, when I did things which I considered to be an achievement at work or at home - I felt better in both environments. Almost like a surge of energy. Work/life balance is, of course, a two sided coin and they both have implications on the other.
I think one really needs to find other creative pursuits besides those which they are inclined to practice on a daily basis. It's fantastic to hone your skills in a particular field however I have personally felt that switching off from time to time and dabbing in completely unrelated work would allow me to recharge. In fact, it would help me think of new ideas as my mind had time to process my thoughts and the work I had completed.
When I 'burnt out' in the past I needed several weeks to rest, read, explore my city & countryside, cook my favourite foods, watch my favourite shows and just take care of me.
In order to avoid burn out, I decided to pick three hobbies: one to make me money, one to keep me in shape, and one to keep me creative. I'm sure I read that somewhere! Some of us do this by default, and there is a lot more to life than those three hobbies.. all I know is it has helped me to pace myself[2], to enjoy life a lot more and to achieve my goals at the same time :)
[1] https://www.darwinmail.app/mail [2] https://twitter.com/joeytawadrous
Delineate between not enjoying your job vs. not enjoying your profession. Sometimes getting a new job in a better work environment and especially with a better manager helps immensely.
Get a new job that is adjacent to software, like technical program management, sales engineer, developer evangelism, etc. Here you can still leverage your extensive programming experience but not have to code. For me - I quickly re-discovered my love for programming.
Treat your employer like your customer. This lets you side-step all the petty office politics, the rat race for the next promotion, etc. which are big contributors to stress-related burnout. Your customer is paying a fair market value for your services - the day that does not hold true, you part ways. No hard feelings.
I think the major difference with this kind of programming is that unlike normal programming, you don't necessarily have a very clear idea at all what your program's output will even look like until after you try it. So there's more of a feeling of "discovery" rather than "invention" and much less of a concrete notion of "correct" and "incorrect" output and it's a pretty different feeling that more "normal" programming.
[1] https://processing.org/ [2] http://structuresynth.sourceforge.net/ [3] https://www.contextfreeart.org/ [4] https://libcinder.org/
So for me, what got me passionate about it again was picking up a new language and doing things like projecteuler or leetcode etc. Just trying to solve algorithmic problems with a new language, playing around, learning, improving the code.
Every now and then I need to repeat this cycle. :)
1. First watch the SICP series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J_xL4IGhJA&list=PLE18841CAB...)
2. Then work through the book (https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...)
If you really do the exercises (an hour here and an hour there), you can feel you brain getting wrapped around many core notions in very illuminating ways.
I find I get burned out by commercial code. So many hands have touched it, millions of lines, scant docs, hard to make sense of it, but ... deadlines, get this task done and that.
Create a simple program outside of work and connect with the joy again!
I am having fun writing a simple nodejs app which is using AWS service. Nothing groundbreaking but its fun to learn and tinker with. I have no expectation of getting good at AWS or NodeJS, just want to build something and get it working.
What is the easiest way to launch a simple PHP website these days?
-A simple CRUD web app
-No new sytax to learn (just good ol' PHP)
-Simple flexible front end library (I have used Materialize CSS, is that the best?)
-Any easy way to make the MySQL pieces easier to manage? Any boilerplates?
-Any end to end integrated development environment? I have codeanywhere subscription and inmotion hosting. Is that good?
Essentially I have decent experience with PHP/MySQL from past and want to launch a simple CRUD website using as much off-the-shelf pieces as possible. Looking for the easiest path to get there.
It would be gravy on top of some day I can wrap it into a mobile app (for location, camera etc.)
I moved from C++ to the much simpler C which I started to enjoy more because it's not putting such a "mental barrier" between my brain and the problem to solve (another option would've been to use an entirely different programming language you're currently interested in but can't use "at work").
Basically: have one or several fallback projects which are completely different from your usual work, without any self-imposed deadlines or long term planning to go back to when the other work becomes boring or overwhelming, just having fun is the main point, and part of the fun is going back to the core of what makes programming actually fun: Just whipping out code in a way that "feels right" to you, and seeing things actually happen, free from outside opinions or priorities.
From time to time (usually over the Christmas holidays) I take a deep dive into this project, but otherwise it's just a few hours a week at most, usually with months-long pauses inbetween.
PS: it took me a few months to "detox" my brain from the "professional software development process" that has become the norm in the "industry" ("agile" processes, software development patterns, estimates, tickets and all that crap). Those had been deeply ingrained into my brain in the last decades, but it's important to realize that all these things are, in fact, turning programming into a chore where burnout is ineviatable.
We program for various reasons.
We got into it because we loved it then it became our job and what started as something we do for fun became something we do to survive. We no longer have a lot of freedom what we want to program and we are required to code for objectives that doesn't interest us.
On top of that, it becomes something that identifies us and more or less the only tool we have at hand to prove we are successful.
Many start dreaming how can they change the world with this tool and invent the next big thing.
We start attempting to hit jackpots by creating one project after the other and failing miserably in all.
By late 20s mid 30s we get burnt out from failure and many move to management.
The ones that stick are the ones that program for no reason other than they enjoy it and are content with that. They aren't trying to change the world, become super rich etc. Sometimes they do by mere luck but it wasn't their intention.
My suggestion here is to tinker. For example, when was the last time you benchmarked a string comparison function and found out exactly why it bottlenecks down to the cpu instructions, instruction ordering, barriers, caching etc ? It's fun and can suck you in for days and a great learning experience. The example here is specific, but the gist of it is not. I hope it helps you.
I was completely burned out and couldn't stand to code even side projects when I started the hiatus. When I was ready and got back into it again, the passion was 100% back. Still going strong 3 years since.
1. Try something different, new. However, it should not be complex, at least not to start with.
1. If that doesn't hooks you, pick a small trivial, meaningless utility to write in whatever framework you are comfortable with. It is important not to overshoot - really just pick a "meaningless" and simple task.
1. If that doesn't work, pick some small utility from a blog/video where full code is available (many examples here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16591918). Write whole code again, copying line by line. As you start getting involved, stop copying and start thinking how you would write the next function, or what optimization you'd do for current function, etc.
1. If that also doesn't work, take a break. Don't think about programming at all in that break, that's important.
1. If that doesn't work either, start looking into other roles/domains and what might suit your background and strengths. As I mentioned earlier, may be you are ready for the change :)
What works for me to re-connect with the technology, when once again being close or after to burn-out or in a bad cycle at work is to slow down and 'play' with the technology, and on my own pace.
Years ago I worked in gamedev, so when challenging mental times hit, I sometimes tend to come back and just 'play' a bit with graphics, visualisations, interactive environments, simulations. I am fully aware that I am not going to compare with professional game engines, but it's just to enjoy the creative process, to freely play with ideas; to no care about lines of code / modules that won't pass code review, etc. hence also not being too much restricted by any frameworks if possible. Let the ideas flow once again and let the mind create.
As a side note, not so long ago, I also bought Raspberry Pi with a pretty nice, affordable kit of sensors. Electronics is fun, when apart from creating stuff virtually, you can create it 'outside'. You can touch it, you can hear it (and even can sometimes smell it when burns) and can control stuff writing own simple scripts. Installing Jupyter Hub on Raspberry Pi and playing interactively with sensors and collected data in Python and is just another fun moment, opening further possibilities to explore.
Good luck and, really, try to have fun!
I also would plug !!Con (bangbangcon.com) and StarCon (starcon.io) as conferences specifically about the joy and excitement of computing. Those might be a good source of inspiration for you. (Full disclosure: I help organize !!Con).
I think one of the important things is to find people who do joyful things with computers and spend time with them, or at least follow their work.
I'd also second therapy. Your loss of enjoyment may be a sign of wider issues. At least get it checked out. And you're in the prime age for your "mid-life crisis", which is a real thing that people really go through. Mine was a bastard. Therapy helped.
I may differ in that I'm not really determined to rediscover programming. I have many interests, don't need or want much cash and am quite happy to cobble together income from other sources. But I am curious to probe the extent and permanence of the loss. Learning something new is my approach - Clojure, for the combination of lispy paradigm challenge with practicality (it suits a couple of projects I have in mind). So far I'm enjoying it more than I expected. It's refreshing.
I don't know what the results will be in my case. But learning/discovery is so close to the heart of what attracted many of us to programming, I suggest reconnecting with it as one approach.
If you enjoy making pretty things to show others, then I warmly recommend http://ldjam.com/ - the next game-making contest is this weekend! Join in!
The joy is from taking part. Don't discount yourselves and think you can't enter because you are a beginner. Take part! :D
So basically, take a break from programming and do something else for a bit, and don't sweat the little things that annoy you day-to-day -- try to appreciate instead all the creative freedom and chances you get to really test your intellect.
I.e. some time ago I discovered https://github.com/janestreet/learn-ocaml-workshop and I blasted through the exercises and it was fun :-)
While I have not really lost the love for programming, I've discovered the sheer amount of work one has to do in JS/TS for the smallest payoff. Sure, the languages I'm using for fun might require a lot of study before they can be used effectively (PureScript especially, since it's practically Haskell), the productivity gained is phenomenal.
At work now, I feel like I've got the pedal to the metal but the wheels are spinning the the movement forward is measured in inches per hour, or sometimes per day.
But that's just what every frontend dev job is going to be. There are a few here and there using something better than JS/TS, but not in my area, and they are so few and far between that I probably cannot compete with their other candidates (who, for example, likely have a degree while I do not). So instead of burning out on programming, I've burnt out on the stagnation of the whole market. I'm certainly not the first and of course I will not be the last, but it's really killed my motivation to go further in my career despite still enjoying what I actually do.
I don't want to be a manager, I don't want to run a business, I want to be a programmer.
What resolved it for me was pretty simple in the end: I joined a company where I really believe in the mission, and I'm surrounded by like-minded people. This has given me a great amount of motivation and reminded me that programming is a superpower. I was simply lost on where to apply this superpower.
Solving important (to me) problems has re-ignited my love of programming, and now even writing yet another piece of CRUD is fun because I believe it will make a difference in the world. I'm looking beyond just the code I'm writing down and thinking about how it helps our users, effective communication, how growth will be affected, how malleable it is, how quickly I can achieve the goal, and so on.
Another thing that helped me was researching other careers. I found a couple of things I think I would get a great deal of satisfaction from. I felt very trapped in a career I hated, and looking at another 30+ years of this was like a dark cloud over me. Giving myself an escape route gave me a lot of clarity and lifted that cloud. I can walk away at any time, if I want to.
Although he was a tyrant boss that I couldn't stand, he taught me what I would need to know to go on and stay focused on the "task at hand" when it came to programming. I started getting into web design and development at the time as well, and made the switch. Been at it ever since.
I used to be a gamer in high school. I'd skip school to stay home and play Asheron's Call. I was so addicted to the game that I was the first to max out on the server of Harvestgain. Had a whole bunch of people come watch the fireworks. It was awesome. Anyways, it was a year after high school and I had been playing that game for 5 years, before realizing that I was just "wasting my life away" playing video games, which is what escalated a push for me to go to college and kind of taught me a valuable lesson: what if I could monetize something I enjoy doing? Programming = being creative, coming up with new ideas, making them a reality, etc.
I work for the media, I freelance for a few companies, started a blog, and started my own business ( https://notetoservices.com ), developing web apps for a variety of different purposes. So I tend to just keep myself busy, coming up with new ideas, and a lot of ideas stem off of other ideas, some free, some monetized. Keeps things... joyful.
The students needed a project to show on their resume so I got together with them to have weekly sprints like a mock engineering team. I taught them good coding practice and slowly built up an engineering team of student engineers during my free time. It helped me rediscover engineering practices and finding open source tools that mirror what I use at work is really eye opening and made me a stronger engineer at work. I understand things with a greater depth.
I don't contribute any code, I just code review, do product planning, and conduct weekly sprints. We try to document a quick summary here: https://github.com/garageScript/c0d3-app/wiki/Sprint-H1-2020
I used to have various side projects and programming passions but as soon as I think about them now my mind just numbs out. All the creative programming energy is going into other things.
So I kinda gave up on trying to hobby program or think of it as something I like to do but as work, and when not working try to do anything that is not involved with it basically. I still wonder if sometimes I could find another small business or job that wouldn't involve programming so I could do it as a hobby again but the money is too good to pass up so not sure what I'll end up doing. I feel like if I could retire I'd soon go back to hobby projects and enjoy it more again. Who knows.
So, I had a Mac and iPhone, some hobby projects I'd dabbled in, and just went all out to learn Macos and iOS development, starting with Objective-c and later swift. I know many here will balk at MacOs, and it is a bit niche, but iOS was really interesting and led to a new job. I think iOS can still offer some challenges that older programmers might enjoy, there's still room for optimising and tweaking perfomance, memory and file size, and it's fun to find out how powerful modern mobiles really are. It's really easy to get started, and you can quickly get to building something really powerful, play around with the AR tools, look at the machine learning. There's good frameworks to get started and powerful stuff like using Metal once you feel like really tweaking things.
http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
In order to actually make that shift I personally was recommended the book "The Artist's Way" by Julia Cameron. If you are anything like me you may experience an intense aversion to something so "artsy", and I 100% understand. BUT I decided that since following that instinct had led me to what I thought was a dreary dead end of bad code forever, I should at least give it a chance, and it was indeed as effective as promised.
Joy is out there, don't lose hope, and good luck!
Look around for a charity that you value, and that you think could make good use of your skills. Local charities often lack people with programming skills, so your contribution might be very valuable to them.
If things go well, you might revisit the old thrill of overcoming unfamiliar challenges. You may take delight in the fact that you are making a difference to something important that goes well beyond you and what you thought was your career. Almost certainly, you'll also make some new friends who can teach you a thing or two, perhaps about things you've never pondered before.
Keep an eye out for someone you can teach. That way, your skills will be magnified, and you may find yourself looking forward to each new day in a way you haven't in a long time.
Good luck.
Another example group might be drones, autopilot systems, and software defined radio.
I lost my enjoyment for programming. I wrote very little code for about 5 years after burning out. One of my friends wanted to do a joint coding project and he suggested Haskell, so I solved one or two hundred project Euler problems in Haskell. I never got good at Haskell, but I really do enjoy writing smaller projects (less than 5,000 lines of code) in Haskell.
Haskell inspired me to read two fairly easy books on Category Theory. I really enjoyed that also.
I still don't write a lot of code. Every few months, there will be a problem at work that needs my help and then I write the equivalent of 3000 lines of C++. Or, there will be a math problem that I want to solve on the computer. I really enjoy writing those shorter, self-contained programs.
(PS: I started writing code in 1980.)
Try to understand what makes programming unpleasant for you. Is it the language? Is it the framework which you are using? Is it the tools? Is it a particular ecosystem? It's about what you are tasked to do? It's about how the development process at your organization is set up?
Try to change what bothers you. Try to identify what you would like and make a goal reaching that point.
If you end up discovering that you don't like anything about programming, so be it. Maybe it's time for a caree change.
In my previous job I was a game developer and I began to dislike what I did. Now I am a web developer and I enjoy it.
I've had times when I don't feel that I'm enjoying programming, followed by times when I'm really into it, there was this talk called "The Art of Code" that might interest you, the presenter Dylan Beattie shows what I now think is what makes programming interesting, it's about doing things, the programming is the how, not the what
I did start a project for a friend recently and working on a fresh codebase makes it a lot nicer (then I had do import messy data from Excel and it was back to disliking it again).
Around 2011 I started a fresh system for my work and learned Django along the way. That really encouraged me at the time. Everything seemed so well thought through regarding Django and it ramped up my productivity a lot, despite being a new framework and a new language to me.
I think the creative part, designing and coming up with something new helps. Most of jobs hoever are just fixing other peoples crappy code.
The first thing is that as a hobby I worked with Go, just on the occasional friday project; it felt quite liberating to work in a fairly low-level, yet productive language, working on projects where quality is not an issue. I did random projects and Advent of Code projects.
The other one was Pico-8, a virtual console with a built-in editing environment. The language is LUA I believe, but since you work inside of the constrained environment, which has a screen of only 128x128 pixels, it's a very low-resolution font with only just over 30 columns wide. The code you write can be hacky and use tons of one- or two-lettered variables, it doesn't really matter; it's your code, nobody will ever collaborate on it, and with the constraints in place you can't ever write more code than you can keep in your head at one time. In theory anyway, I mean if you get ambitious you'll end up minifying your own code to make it all fit.
But anyway I digress; I managed to get a new job where I can work with Go a lot, which is giving me a fresh lease on the developer job. It's also a job where I'm the sole developer (for now), meaning I don't have to fight any political or ego-driven fights (or, much less) to do what I think is right (and in a lot of cases I just have to prove myself I'm right or wrong).
Learning and living are really the same thing. Both are just the formation of new synapses in your brain.
Practically speaking, change things up! Maybe find a new job, start a new personal project on something you've never worked on before. Take some time off if necessary and possible. But be sure to fill your time off with as many new experiences as possible.
Also, _passion is a skill_. Sometimes it comes naturally, but it can be cultivated, too. This is called the "growth mindset" (See Carol Dweck's book, "Mindset"). The growth mindset has been extensively studied over the past 3 decades, but only as it relates to intelligence. Now, psychologists are discovering that it applies to passion as well as intelligence[1].
So what does a growth mindset entail? You can only grow (in passion, intelligence, etc.) if you believe you can grow. So 1) believe that you can cultivate a passion in your career and 2) learn new things.
I had a pretty severe burnout 2 years ago. In my personal experience, the above is how I rediscovered a love for computers.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200306-the-surprising...
1. Take a break, preferably a long one.
2. Code something that serves no useful purpose. Make it playful.
I hate to say it, but I have given up on "enjoying" programming while it is still my career.
I will retire (or change careers) soon enough and will go back to enjoying coding as a hobby again.
In the mean time, I'm trying to enjoy all the fish.
Personally, when it comes to putting code on the screen I am motivated mostly by two things:
1. I am excited to put a puzzle together. The same thing that makes me interested in finishing a basic puzzle like a sudoku applies to writing code. I want to see my end result work, and putting all the steps together in my code is enough to keep me up late.
2. I am oddly excited about learning and applying best practices. Often I initially solve a problem by mimicking existing patterns. Then I will spend hours pouring over man pages and standard library documentation in order to figure out the best way to do something.
For me, everything else feeds into those two basic motivations. In my career I get to apply those concepts at a larger scale. I'm finding that my motivations extend to domains other than code, both in my career and in my personal life.
I encourage you to reflect and consider the moments when you felt the most joy and the moments when you felt the least joy, and what was different between them.
He then places burnout at the foreign element stage of the Satir Change Model (see, e.g. [1]): Old status quo - foreign element - chaos - transforming idea - practice - New status quo... with the intent of using your present discomfort to evaluate changes you might want or need to make. If the idea seems helpful, have a look.
[0] 'More Secrets of Consulting: The Consultant's Toolkit', Gerald Weinberg
[1] http://dhemery.com/articles/managing_yourself_through_change...
I had to discover this on my own though. If I were waiting on the corporate world to show me fun and ambitious things I would have long since given up programming in its entirety. Constantly listening to people cry about how hard life is without megabytes of tools and frameworks to do their jobs for them and never having to write original logic, while enjoying all the amenities in the world, is really off putting.
You'd probably enjoy building sand castles by the sea, but wouldn't like working as a construction worker building sky scrapers.
If some of that applies to you, then perhaps the answer is that you should do programming that you enjoy. That could mean doing hobby projects on the side, it could mean trying to start your own business and seeing how that goes, or switching jobs and hoping you get lucky. If programming for 20 years has made you rich, then you could also try living off your savings (and the interest/dividends of what money you invest) and doing some of the above without a 9-5 and seeing how that goes.
Most fun job I've had constantly required me to learn to acquire new problem domain knowledge. Most boring job I've involved technology that was interesting to learn but rather mundane problems to solve and only really stayed somewhat interesting because of boredom driven architectural choices that introduced new technology to the projects to solve the same old problems.
And it's OK if a job isn't super fun for as long as you find something to do in your own time that's stimulating and interesting.
Code reviews, agile “stand up” meetings, sacrificing one of quality or features — all that kills interest, for me. Don’t do those.
I sometimes go months without a fun project. Fortunately, I have one while in quarantine.
A little trial and error aids in discovery.
Initially you won’t know what it is you want to do but you’ll have some sort of curiosity about a project.
You can follow the trail and see where it leads.
Most trails are only five centimeters long. But don’t be discouraged.
When one thread disappears, another often takes its place.
Do this for long enough, protect that sacred time, and you’ll discover some passion.
I don’t doubt programming will find a way to re-emerge again in your life some day (in a pleasant, not tedious way). It encompasses so many fields.
You’ll sort of know when you’re on the right track, because what you love will be oddly peculiar and unlike many other people’s interests. You’ll have trouble explaining why you like doing it (as if it needed justification).
True interests (when properly followed) always looks a little crazy to outsiders.
I think work related programming is the second kind (even if you're working for yourself) and working on projects which you make only for yourself is the first kind.
For me the trick is to not have any expectations (including any secret ones like getting github stars, upvotes, money or any deadlines). Also one thing that took the joy away before was not really programming related (which was always enjoyable) but the regret I felt sinking my time into it not doing anything"productive". Once I let go of the feeling it started becoming fun again.
Effectively programming is like writing or maths - as such it is intrinsically not that interesting to most people, but what you can do with it is.
I.e. most people find books more exciting than grammar, and specific application of math more interesting than just doing calculus disconnected from any practical problem.
While getting started with programming is more difficult than acquiring basic literacy, once you have it, it's not that big of a deal and to grow you need to move onwards (i.e. apply it to real problems or continue studying the theory).
Once you've mastered a certain level of basics, just learning a new language or API is quite pointless unless there is some value proposition tied to it.
But every now and then I discover something new and this is when I get excited again. This is what keep the little coder flame burning that is still left within me.
So I try to find something new every month or two that get's me excited again. Doesn't take much time and is very rewarding.
I mentor people, I architect and manage projects. I lean on communication skills and relationships so that the answer is easy and simple rather than complicated. I do code sometimes, but not the super heavy lifting. It may not work out great in the long term and I might have to take a break, or it might turn out that what I'm doing isn't as valuable somehow, but its working alright thus far.
My fondest programming memories are those aforementioned passion projects, but they're often fleeting. What tends to happen is I go all in on something, write a blog post about it then it kind of drifts away and ultimately I drift too.
It's hard, I'm not sure how to solve it other than saying these feelings come and go - you'll find something/inspiration in the most unexpected places.
When I was a kid programming promised to allow me to make incredible things. It was harder than it looked. I mostly abandoned it as a teenager, and then took it up again in college for the same reason. I've been doing it professionally ever since, for over 15 years.
Personally, the joy of any given task is mostly commensurate with how much effort and frustration is directed at the goal, rather than the technology that is supposed to help me get there. This is a big problem with software, because the medium is so complex, but it applies more generally. If I'm making something in the wood shop, it's one thing to be frustrated because I split the end of a board. It's much more deflating to find out that the power saw is broken.
It's partly practical: if I'm in a wood shop, I have the means to deal with a split board. I often do not have the means or the knowledge to fix the power saw. But just as importantly, it's about my own attitude. What would my 12 year old self do? My only choice was to grab the rusty hand saw, make a wobbly cut, and get on with it. Now that I'm older (I can drive and I have money) I'm more at risk of stopping everything to fix the power tools in the name of quality.
I'm currently working on contract and it has felt like an uphill battle. On reflection, I see that only a small fraction of my time is spent making the software that I was hired to build. The rest goes into fighting with the stack and the business side of the job.
The hobby project that I have on the back burner is a single page of javascript (which I am learning) with a horrendous 500 line function that draws stuff. It pays no regard to web development best practices. These are intentional constraints that limit what the output can be for the sake of my enjoyment. It's a ragged, broken mess, but it holds my interest. If I can just get it working, my friends will appreciate it! That for me is the childlike spirit.
- fear free: I worked a min wage gig and coded on the side
- due to the previous I could extend my code by small chunks, pleasure often comes from small and regular victories
- work for somebody else (makes you less tempted to postpone stuff)
pps: also question your motives, if they're subconsciously neurotic (some deep fear or anxiety) it will lead to parasitic short term actions rather than fulfilling mid-term experiences
1. Stop programming when you don't feel like you want too. Forcing yourself to do anything turns it into a chore. Let yourself relax 2. Stop programming what you don't like. If you hate java, stop programming in Java.
[Note, I realize the above two are difficult if you have a demanding job. I hope you really consider it though in any case, because long term it will help you]
3. Try building small things that you're actually interested in, in languages you love -- i.e playing in lisp or python, on a problem you're curious about, for a short time, can be very fun.
But I would also say, I don't think there's anything wrong with not enjoying it any more. Few people can do something for decades and still take joy in it. It's great if you can rekindle the fire, but it's also okay if your interests drift elsewhere.
That is one of the main reasons I moved into a devops engineer role at a company that doesn't quite understand that devops is not a role, so while frustrating at times, it's actually quite handy, no more developing on a daily basis on stuff I'm barely interested in.
So far I've done a bit of developing at work for things that I've volunteered and doing some embedded programming in C because why not?
Try this way of programming.
I'm not following mail.python or any dedicated python-related blogs in the same way or with the same passion I was doing 10 or 15 years ago, but I still do enjoy using Python daily (and some JS) for implementing some of my hobbies (many of them relying on collecting, manipulating and presenting data).
TL;DR take a sabbatical if you can afford one, and don't go back to coding until you actually want to
When I left my full-time job (where I worked way too hard) to do consultancy I started to de-compress and it helped me enjoy life a lot more. If I won the lottery I would still be quite capable of not touching a computer for 6 months though.
I mean- burnout, depression, PTSD, ...?
Are there things you're highly passionate about and would want to do instead of software engineering or it's all grey for everything?
Teach yourself forensics or android programming or anything new and different to keep your skills from becoming '20 years of a career'.
I was making clones of arcade games from my days as a kid in the 1980's. This really awoke a joy inside of me to do this.
Scratch is such a cool concept for kids.
Using Jira made me hate coding. The fix was to not work for anyone who made me use it.
There is a lot of good advice here, but some things will just never return. That is life. Read the Bible.
also try teaching children.
When I discovered programming in my teens it was the single greatest thing I could do. I spent all my time doing it, constantly learning new things, breaking into new areas of discovery and then finding still more interesting thing. I wrote code for entertainment, I wrote code to relax, and sometimes people even paid me to write code.
Fast forward 20 years and I felt like it hurt to write code. So many things were in your way between the writing and the running, useless hoops to jump through, arbitrary changes to things that used to work just fine and now worked in a different way, why? why? WHY? I was pretty burnt out about it.
That lasted for a few years (okay probably closer to six or seven years) when I got a chance to help a teen learn to program who was super excited about it. I showed them the opaque APIs and they were thrilled, I showed them the crappy IDEs that prevented you from seeing what was really going on and they loved it, I showed them tool kits that created guard rails around what you could and could not code and that was just fine. They wrote line after line of code and marveled at each new thing.
It struck me that they were me and I was them and why were they so excited about this when I was so offended? After a lot of introspection I came to realize that the answer for me was that nothing had changed.
The reality I was missing was that computers haven't changed a whole lot since the IBM 360. The only thing that changed is that they got faster, smaller, and way cheaper. But their nature hasn't changed at all. They have registers, they have machine code, they have fast I/O devices and slow I/O devices, they have memory and displays and peripherals of various kinds. But at the end of the day, and this is especially obvious with various recreations and emulators, the computers of today are not really all that different in nature from the ones I learned programming on.
That in itself might not have been a killer, but the killer was software was by and large unchanged as well. After 20 years of programming, every single programming task felt like a remake of something I had already done. And for what? To implement it in the language of the day? Because you couldn't get the source to one version so you rewrite it from scratch to get better licensing terms? Lots and lots of software was done in the sense that there really isn't a good reason to re-design it, but there are a zillion reasons while you might be asked to re-write it.
Imagine if you were a screenwriter or a songwriter and someone said, "Ok we need 'Gone with the Wind' but now its going to have a gay couple, take place during the Syrian Civil war. Don't change any part of the plot or the story or the relationships, just swap Arabs for Southerners, Syria for the South, and have the love interest die of MERS or something."
Wouldn't that be a crappy job? What can you do with that? Where is the creativity? Where is the opportunity to express a fundamental truth in a new way?
I realized that I had come to hate programming because everyone was asking me to program the same stuff that had been written before but now in the Fluff Framework. I could do that with my eyes closed and so could any teen fresh out of college. What did they care that it had been implemented twice, three times, maybe five times previously in different ways?
Once I understood my problem I could start working on the solution. I decided to start writing software in areas where I had never written code before (like DevOps), or in areas where hardly anybody had re-written code before (like software radios). I also started to meticulously develop a workflow that ran on every operating system I might have to work on (Linux, Windows, and MacOS) that worked for me and saved me from having to relearn a new thing "just because" someone got it in their head that they could "improve" text editing for coders. When the friction between thoughts and code and execution are low, and the problems being coded or solved are novel, I love programming. Because I know what to avoid (arbitrarily complex tools and rewriting CRUD code again and again) my level of joy has gone up significantly.
I don't know if any of this will resonate with your question but it worked for me.
Try side projects. Could be something you're been thinking of trying out (scratching an itch), or to learn something new.
For example, recently I made a macOS Quicklook plugin for displaying the Basic listing for program files for the first 8-bit computer I learned to code on (https://github.com/sebastienboisvert/ZX81QuickLook).
Another one I'm working on is modernizing support for a USB video capture device (https://github.com/btrask/EasyCapViewer).
The first one was a lot of fun for me, as it got me back to my 'roots' (re-acquainting myself with Z80 assembly, besides the nostalgia aspects), and along the way I learned some of the newer features of CSS and JavaScript (it had been so long since I worked in JS that I didn't know it had async functions now!). The second one is out of my 'comfort zone', and is forcing me to learn some new unfamiliar frameworks that need to replace the old code.
Initially, I wanted to only allow myself to start on them once I had completed doing a lot of other things that needed to get done (being such a procrastinator) - but I found that just doing them without those restrictions relaxed me more, and allowed me to get those things done more easily anyways (it served as a diversion, but a good one that I didn't need to feel guilty about).
If you're coding day-in day-out, doing the same routine, think about 'tuning out' at night - leave the computer off, and do something else altogether; take up a new hobby, or read some books, or anything that interests you. The point is to change the scenery a bit to recharge.
If it's available to you, you might consider taking on (or asking for/seeking) something that's new to you at work, that opens up new opportunities, both for learning and potential advancement. Any good employer should recognize and appreciate that.
As others have noted, 20 years is fairly long time, especially if you've only done the same general thing; as such, it might also be worth considering a bigger change. Maybe it's time to take on something else that's more challenging, that can help you grow. That could be something along the tracks of a more managerial nature (or simply taking on more of a leadership role, if that sound too scary), or perhaps something in an entirely new direction.
There's a lot of good feedback here - soak it in, think about it, and consider what might help you get that excitement back. Making changes doesn't mean you give up what you love doing - it might be simply the thing you need to rekindle your interest in it.
Instead, I wrote free software -- initially just for a month. I got up in the morning, had a shower and worked on whatever project seemed interesting to me at the time (which was actually the GNOME Corba ORB -- that's how long ago this was ;-) ). At first I was pretty unproductive (and I'm not sure I ever actually made a contribution... can't even remember). I watched the stock market go up and down on the TV and occasionally turned the channel for more educational content (I invented the "Teletubbies Drinking Game" -- Drink whenever they say "eh oh" and drink twice whenever they say "again!"... which is to say that I don't think I ever lasted an episode).
Anyway, one day I was having a shower and I had an idea about programming (I can't remember what it was). I ran out of the shower and started typing away. Every day after that I had a similar experience. It took me a week before I realised that I was so preoccupied that I often wasn't wearing any clothes. (Actual awkward conversation: I was chatting with a woman who was moving out of the apartment. She recognised me: "Oh you are that nice man who programs by the window every day. Such a shame I will miss that from now on"...)
After about 6 months of doing this, I realised that I loved programming. I hated my job. The hatred of my job so overwhelmed my natural love of programming that I got to hate it too. But, like a starving man, as soon as I had the time to get back to my passion, I was ravenous. After that, I was much more careful to take jobs that I liked. I often worked for incredibly low salaries just because I liked the people or I liked the project. I was also careful to save enough money so that I could always take a "sabbatical" -- just quit my job and spend half a year writing code that I wanted. I was single (despite/because of my proclivity for exhibitionist programming), so it was easier, but I think it can be made to work in a family setting too.
I think the best thing I can say is that when taking a job, it's important to find a win-win situation. I find that when I get in trouble it's because I end up doing things that I think are important for the company, but which I don't want to do. Often these are things that my management don't want me to do either, which leads to a bad relationship with the management. I usually think, "Oh this is crap! They are totally dropping this stuff on the floor. Someone has to clean up this mess" and then get trapped into doing lots of stuff that saves the company, but destroys my soul (and somehow makes me an enemy of many of the people around me). So instead, I just try to do the things that both my management and I want me to do. Usually there is more than enough stuff that I want to do that we can find a mutually beneficial overlap.
The most important point: I let the company burn down around me as I play my fiddle. Um... Maybe not the most apt analogy. But I hope you get the point. I only do the non-fun parts of my job, if I really get the impression that somebody wants me to do it! That makes such a massive difference, it's incredible (although I often make the same mistakes of the past, but I try to correct it). When the company is intent on flying into a wall at 1000 miles an hour, I don't stop it. I just start looking for another job ;-)
YMMV.
But maybe let me add some random points:
- I do side projects from time to time. All of the open source on GitHub. Either in some new programming language which I want to learn about and just try out, or some preferred well-known programming language but a new fun (maybe challenging) task. Or maybe not challenging but actually easy but still fun, e.g. like writing a small game. There are many possible variations and options for side projects, and each case can be rewarding. As you start from scratch, you can try out whatever you want. If you set the scope small enough, you can soon get some nice results. Maybe really the most fun side project is to write some small game. Side projects is also one of the best ways to widen your scope to new areas. Maybe also the only option. In some cases (but this should not be the focus), you can integrate the side project back into your day-to-day work.
- Maybe the project you currently work is too big, buggy, unorganized, and annoying to work with. Take a step back and think about ways how to solve some of the annoyances. Maybe some subsystem can be rewritten. Maybe the startup time is too long and this can be solved somehow. Invest some work in making your workflow easier. Turnaround time for development is important. Maybe you can develop a testing environment where the turnaround time of development and testing can be much faster. There are many options here. Many of the will require some initial work but this can be greatly rewarding. In general, for me the most annoying thing is when something is slow. When I need to wait too long until I see the result of sth I just tried out. It could also help to get some better hardware.
- Other hobbies despite programming can be important too. Probably most relevant is some sort of sport, or any activity for the body. Hiking in the nature can be nice too. Take frequent off-times. Make this regularly such that it becomes a routine. E.g. I have a couple of sport courses, some in the mid of the day (so this is my extended lunch break), some in the evening. They force me to stop the work I'm doing right now. This is often a good thing because it forces you to take a step back and rethink about what you are working on right now, if you really tackle it from the right angle, or if you maybe should shift your priorities on other things. And also this gives you time in developing some new ideas, maybe about your work, or also new fun side projects, or new other unrelated hobbies.
- Socialize. Talk with other people. If you live alone, maybe change that. Talking can also be technical. I enjoy it, to get some new input, or talk about some new technical thing I read about, or maybe also something I don't know too much about. Talking can also be non-technical, about random stuff, about your hobbies, etc. If you are in a group with other shy people, just talk whatever is in your mind right now, even if the other people might not have a solution. Just talking about your programming problem, or whatever, helps.
Also I feel that there is a lot of pressure within communities like HN that implicitly (... or outright explicitly) makes you feel like you should always have a side project on the go, or you should be working on some amazing start-up idea, or you should be contributing to open source etc. All of that is basically a second job I'd say - you need to apply the same mental energy and rigor doing that sort of thing as you would in your job. I feel like this is an unhealthy mindset and unfair expectation.
I don't know about you but when I was a kid just starting out in programming I just messed about doing whatever I fancied without any expectations of "releasing" anything or turning a profit etc - I just scratched my own itch and left a chain of unfinished ideas and projects behind me as my mind wandered and I had zero mental attachment to any particular idea or objective. I was free to follow my own path without feeling that I needed to give an idea justice and see it through to some kind of release or public distribution etc.
I now personally try to do the same now too - I try to avoid letting any ideas about "releasing"/sharing/distributing any of my spare-time work from creeping into my mind. If I go into something knowing that I might close the IDE the same evening and never ever open the file again, or I can write hideous hacky messes because why the hell not, or I can just forgo any kind of tests or repeatable builds etc etc then that is freeing and removes a lot of the mental baggage of doing a "good job" and let's you concentrate on satisfying your own needs.
Oh and also unlike other people on here, I personally recommend JavaScript as a great language to use for personal messing about - flexible, universal, performant, and most importantly it has absolutely zero barrier to entry - you can litterly just open your browser's dev console right now and you are up and running, or just create a .HTML file and you are up and running that way too without any joy-/motivation-sapping bullshit or ceremony related to setting up build files/python anaconda bollocks/environment variables/installing compilers or other nonsense - it just works right now with what you already have on any computer you sit at (... or you can go deeper and install typescript compilers or node+npm etc if you want to) Ignore comments about churn or change-fatigue regarding JavaScript - the language itself is separate from the libraries people use and you can go a long way with the core language and modern standards-based APIs without ever touching an external library.
Good luck!
Open source work.
I was a manager for over 25 years. I'm a really good manager. I could probably be an ideal CTO.
But I don't love it. I love writing code.
As my management track progressed, I found my technical work deprecating. It did teach me to be a lot more "strategic," and "architectural" in my approach, but I found that I was sitting down and banging out code less and less.
To make things worse, I kept reading about how the tools and techniques were progressing to levels far beyond what I had learned.
I didn't have a "shower clause" in my employment contract (where the employer insists that they own the ideas that you come up with in the shower before work), so I was free to write software in an extracurricular manner, as long as I didn't use employer time and/or resources to do so.
So I started to do open source. In the beginning (about 25 years ago), there wasn't a good infrastructure for shared configuration management, so most of the work I did was published "after the fact" (otherwise known as "deliverable"). I would make the source available, "on the side."
Nowadays, with things like GitHub, GitLab and BitBucket, you can actually run a distributed collaborative open-source (or closed-source) project, with the process open. It also works great for single-engineer projects.
The result, these days, is that I have a GIGANTIC portfolio. Hundreds of thousands of lines of crafted, artisanal, small-batch, single-source code, in dozens of repos. I like to use the MIT license for my work.
I tend to design architectures; not apps, and some of the designs I've done have lasted decades (although with many changes along the way).
I found a need in an underserved community, and designed an ecosystem to help them meet their needs. For free. It's now becoming the global standard (but for a small demographic).
If you can find a need that usually can't afford your level of skill, you can find a home. It can be quite challenging, but that which does not kill us makes us stronger. It taught me to plan for the future, and for limited resource pools and budgets. It taught me to support my work, and do work that can be supported and passed on to others.
Ironically, my open-source tech work informed my "day job," as well.
Open source work.
In the movie "The Graduate," the equivalent of the "OK Boomer" (in those days), lectures a young Dustin Hoffman with "One word: 'Plastics.'"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSxihhBzCjk
So this "OK Boomer" says "Open Source." It worked for me.
I've spent the last couple of years "reinventing" myself to be a line programmer again.
It makes me happy.