I enrolled in an IT course but switched majors to Business after one semester, as I hated staying up all night fixing my bugs. I generally thought I was good at programming (first in school, scholarship at university etc), but at the time I was 18 I fell in love with accounting & finance.
Fast forward to today, 15 years on, I am happy with my work in business, but I have really rediscovered my love of programming and through working on side projects, have advanced past what I did during my earlier life.
I wonder however, if my love for programming is because it’s not my job and I didn’t spend 15 years on - it’s like a nice hobby. If I stayed with IT when I was young and became a programmer, I wonder if I would still love it or if I would love business instead, since the latter would now be something novel for me?
So I’m asking on how your love for programming has developed over the years? Has working full time in IT reduced some of the charm and you now like spending your time on non-IT hobbies outside of work, or is your passion burning strongly 24.7?
These days I would love a job in IT, but I wonder if that’s because I have not been exposed to working for others and not simply on my hobby programs.
As a software engineer you have to:
- often focus on maintenance and refactoring over long stretches of time
- develop some knowledge of the domain you’re working in (like biomedicine vs educational apps vs language learning vs ...)
- be able to communicate ideas and build partnerships with other programmers, not the least of which yourself in 6 months when you revisit that code base
- interact a lot with non programmers to get the job done (UI designers, product managers, etc)
- compromise to your orgs development standards (languages, frameworks, etc)
- possibly be on call to support your project
And the list goes on...
I’d say there’s a pretty wide gap from the projects that got me into programming and what I do now as a full time software engineer. But I like all the things above too, as it means I’m building software for a sizable user base that will get real value from it...
At 16 years old I hit my thumb many times trying to nail something in my bedroom wall. My mum laughed her head off and told me very seriously "you better be good with computers because you're totally useless with your hands".
So I become a programmer.
I design and program full time, 90% self taught, whether low level stuff or high level stuff, I make games, I do all sorts of things that involve programming in many languages.
Technology changes, especially the front-end is becoming incredibly irrelevant. The abstractions are so high you wonder who knows how to write code anymore.
There are certainly technologies and languages I prefer. I focus on those. They sort of drive my next challenge, my next job etc.
I've always preferred talking to compilers than people.
Personally I do this professionally as well as after hours. I estimate I spend about 12 hours days in IntelliJ, commercially or not. When I'm procrastinating, it's usually programming _something else_.
My biggest concern is keeping fit and not dying of a premature death sitting for so long.
I think it helps that my company is small and I have wide latitude to do whatever I want at work, as long as it works at the end.
I'm not built like some of the people on here or Reddit who get thrills from solving interview questions or coding for the sake of curiosity about math problems. When I'm solving a puzzle with code where the reward is just knowing an independent answer, I think programming is just a chore. The feeling of it being a chore is alleviated a little if I have someone to talk to about the problem in question. Unfortunately, that type of person who loves solving code puzzles for the sake of solving them is not only the majority, but that type of person is usually in a position to decide whether or not I get to make a living writing software.
I'm a developer proffesionally but find I only spend about half my time writing code, so I still have plenty of energy for my own projects at home.
As for OP, I think if schools would teach debugging and code structure better, then he might have stayed with it. Surprisingly writing a parser taught me a lot about both.
To OPs current situation, why can you not be the SW guy in your group? I have met enough non tech professionals to know almost any group would love to have someone to do small projects. Typically they must have some domain knowledge, which after 15 years you should. Question is, can you percieve any projects?
I think maybe that's the same for any profession though, doing it everyday as a 24/7 grind would make you want to blow your brains out.
In work, if I'm not working on something that I like the end result of, I don't love it as much. It just feels like work.