I've been unemployed for the past 2.5 years, and with my job seeking process I'm just going through the motions. Even though I applied to nearly a thousand jobs in the past year, and gotten through interviewing at ~20 companies, I have no offers. I tend to just wing it with interviews. I don't like to rehearse, so I seldom rehearse. This all sounds like not enough interest and motivation to build my career on my part.
I actually still don't mind much programming on the job, but I don't like to treat the interview and job seeking stuff as work. Building a network and maintaining professional relationships feels draining, too. And I'd like follow the mantra of feeling like never working a day in your life if you enjoy your work enough.
On the other hand, I still find it enjoyable to write programs for personal interest. I have ongoing projects that I started this year. They probably have no impact on my ability to interview, given that I still have no offers.
But I feel like I'm over the idea putting on a front to be a developer just to earn an income. That works for a lot of people, but not me.
Financially, the only difference between recent graduate me and current me is I replaced my college debt with another kind of debt. My net worth hasn't really changed much.
I want to enjoy myself, and turning programming into a career felt like a big waste of time because my life and finances have not noticeably improved.
To me, this model absolutely applies: Writing code is little-picture, detail work. So is typing, so is debugging, so is deployment. So you can bury yourself in detail work as a coder.
And, I'm not a little-picture person. If I'm doing detail work, it's generally got to be really interesting to me, or otherwise highly relevant to my personal values, or I'm going to burn out pretty fast.
In that way, it's a very good fit as a hobby. Nothing super-important, but also really fun? Sure, I'll dive into those details for a while, and then get back to work.
In my work-coding then, the risk is that I overkill on detail that's not interesting to me. So I keep things as high-level and reasonably scope-defined as possible in order to avoid the downsides of this.
For example, I use big-picture plan to build the rationale for the work, then I schedule the work to happen in comfortable phases that jive with my overall schedule (avoiding a detail-crunch), I framework my entire coding practice from beginning to end, I reuse code when applicable, and so on. I always watch for ways to make it easier next time.
But going beyond that: I have something fun or interesting planned for afterward, I have interesting things going on during (music, movies I like, snacks I like, etc.) and I package my work for later in case I need to do the same thing again in some way.
I had to discover this pretty early on in my career but it's been helpful since that time.
As a subjective hobby, I find that programming is metaphorically the same as scheduling for objectivity (get with the program, theatre programs, object-oriented programming, and so on).
So at those times, programming as an interest that "strikes me in the moment" helps me to remember to carefully, patiently stay on track and accountable on objective passion projects that I suck at, and that I want to do anyway.
Bravo on the career reflection btw. If you're not enjoying your career, changes have just got to be made.
Some backstory - I started programming at a young age in the early 90s, I was building basic sites by reading from books before I even had internet access. That continued throughout my teenage years, coding almost daily on a range of software and languages.
When I eventually got to the decision on what to do for university/college I decided to go the business route and not CS. From a programming perspective I was confident (arrogant) my local educational institute couldn’t teach me much (I was already helping others on their coursework) but mainly I didn’t want the enjoyment I got from programming to be sapped away in a day to day job.
For me it was the right decision and instead I landed in product. I get to work with engineers and I’ll happily have technical conversations where necessary but for me I still get to enjoy programming as a hobby and I don’t think of it as work.
I'm a sysadmin, and I want to keep it that way. Sure I've written tools and utilities to help my life, and my colleagues, but I'm explicitly not a coder.
I've seen too many people spoil their interests, or hobbies, by doing it for money and I decided a long time ago that I wouldn't make that mistake.
(People sometimes throw money at me for photography, but I'm happy if that happens once/twice a year. I've no desire to become a professional photographer for the same reason that I don't want to be a full-time coder.)
When you do your passion as an actual 'job' it'll kill you. But do it on your own terms and you can have your cake and eat it too.