Do you genuinely enjoy your developer job?

Nope. The spark is gone. Now it's just monotony.

I thoroughly enjoyed it in my 20s. I was fascinated by code and prolific. Now I struggle to just motivate myself to get through a workday.

I don't know why, precisely. Maybe I'm just bored with it. Maybe I just hate the direction it's all gone. Gone are the days of just a shell and vim. Now it's all yaml, dockerfiles, scrum meetings, ERDs ,et cetera. It kinda feels like too many weasels got their hands in the pot.

I don't know what's next, if anything. I can probably ride it out another 15 or 20 years and retire. But I hope I find some calling that pays maybe 60% as well. Guess time will tell.

Full stack, been doing this a few decades now. Not really. Every new front end feature just feels like such a chore. You tire quickly of building new CRUD endpoints and pages pretty quickly. You need to write so many mind numbing tests with dynamically typed languages. I really dread writing test after test. I do enjoy hunting down bugs. Performance optimisation can be fun too. But sometimes the bugs are ones that I introduced, so anyone who has worked in this business long enough knows it weighs on you a bit to be the cause of a problem. I tried to get into strongly typed functional programming a bit, but realised after a couple of years doing Haskell that it just swaps one set of problems for another. I've always liked games, currently trying to do a late career change into gaming. I think I just need to believe in the underlying product, then I can put up with the pain. Pay is dreadful though. Getting a new job now is quite time consuming, you need to solve riddles online while someone watches. I think the market is going to become quite illiquid, maybe salaries will go up?

My current situation is ok. FE dev making a relatively very modest salary remotely. Very little overhead and lots of agency compared to previous gigs. But, idk if I'd say I like it, but I've accepted that's not the point. It has its ups and downs, I work well with my colleagues for the most part, often times that's enough.

I got it by sheer luck after a stupid relentless gauntlet of interviews and happening to find one that worked out for no particular reason.

The spark is definitely gone for JavaScript or frontend related anything. I still enjoy learning new things that make a substantial difference in productivity or performance, but I've learned through numerous burnouts that it's just tech and things basically don't matter as much as you'd like to think.

I'm upper-20's and been at it professionally for about 10 years if you count college co-ops; longer if you count craigslist websites to get myself a gaming computer as a teen.

My first co-op was gotten through my University's internal job board, and my first "real job" after graduating came from a part-time internship I took one semester.

I still love the actual development part of my job -- being pointed at a problem, mapping out a solution, and then actually getting into flow to solve it (and I'm damn good at it too).

It's all the other stuff that has started to wear on me (currently a tech lead at a small startup). The planning, the estimates, the never ending negotiations for trying to get more in without adjusting timelines. The recruiting, the dealing with unmotivated reports... and did I mention estimates / planning?

Going to stick it out a little longer, but at this point I think I was meant to stay at the senior engineer level at a laid back company.

I worked as a petroleum engineer running reservoir simulations. While not a "developer" per se, I had to run FORTRAN binaries on a Linux cluster, know shell scripting, run servers, git for code tracking, writing reports in LaTeX, Linux desktop and dependency hell, list goes on. I did this in industry and research (corporate projects, Department of Energy) both as a consultant and full time employee for 9 years counting Internships.

How I got my job: I was an average student in college and can't interview. I've actually never gotten a job I've applied for, but I digress.

I emailed everyone in my home state for a job because I thought I wanted to live there when I was through with school. I lived in a small oil producing state, not a Texas. Long story short, I ended up emailing the lobbyist for the local coal council asking if he knew anyone in the o&g industry in my state and that I was a young college kid looking for an internship. He hooked me up with a local company and I got an internship, and ended up doing simulation and chemical research that universities love. Went back to college and networked with some professors and research groups there and got on a Department of Energy grant. Built skills / reputation and then went off solo consulting.

All this is to say while I enjoyed "the process" of messing around with computers, figuring things out, and going to engineering school, I don't enjoy it anymore. I hate the office life and looking at a screen all day, and politics and meetings. It's just not for me. I found out I really like turning wrenches and seeing physical things being built. I like "blue collar" work more.

I think I put up with it for as long as I did because I was chasing money. I wanted to save money, but it was also a measuring stick for "let's see how much I can charge and justify my ability."

Not sure if any of this helps or not.

It's alright. After doing it for more than a decade, I can't think of doing anything else. Although, the spark is gone and now it's more of a chore sometimes.

Reason to keep going is the good pay. Earlier it was all good, but now it feels like doing CRUD in one way or another. Not to mention, the work hours are always atrocious. The thing I hate most about is the middle management or leadership who always over promise things and have quite a myopic view of technical aspects of software.

Another thing is the constant bombardment of new tech that one has to keep up with. It's as if there's no downtime and you can't just switch off and get back to your daily life after putting in your regular hours.

Sure, it pays well and I work about 4 hours a day and make myself available to others if needed the other 4. Fully remote.

Frontend work for a midcap household name. I have a lot of autonomy and am insulated from all the BS that happens at the mid-manager level. My 1 on 1s with my manager usually becomes more of a therapy session for him.

After years of freelancing and nightmarish interviews in the Bay Area, it took a simple conversation with a cool Aussie guy to get the contract. Once on the team everyone saw I could produce so was asked to come on full time. Moved out of CA to AZ. Been almost 3 years now.

Nope. Absolutely hate it and I've been doing it for a decade and a half. I love messing around with computers and technology but getting myself in the mindset to be writing code for my job feels like pulling teeth. I'd rather be looking at music stuff, home improvement stuff, beer/brewing, etc.

No. I never wanted to get promoted past senior "engineer", I really enjoyed that level. But a few years back I was looking to move on from my then-current role. I got an offer from a startup at the senior level. The money wouldn't work but they really wanted me so they offered me a promotion to staff and more money. I accepted but have hated it ever since. I'm now actively looking to get back to a senior position but $ECONOMY.

Yes, absolutely. This is way more fun than anything else I could imagine doing for money. Certainly not for this much money.

I only ever do contracts. Short ones preferably, so that I can have as much time off as I need to recharge. My current one is a part time, 2-3 day week gig with a startup that's building a popular product. It's mostly young kids, so they choose stupid but fun tech to build their thing on, which means there's always lots of fun cutting edge technology to play with. I treat it more as a hobby than a job, so I'm happy if they decide they don't need anything built for half a year

My main income comes from a couple feature complete SaaS products (that are also fun to work on) with enough paying customers to keep the bills paid, built on a sensible, boring, stack so that they don't need my day-to-day attention so that I can spend my days on more important things like bouldering, travel, and family stuff.

But yeah, I couldn't imagine being in this position with any other sort of profession.

The passion is still there but it's fading away. My plan now is to keep in tech but switch business to something more creative like video game dev or animation engineer or something.

The reason I want to switch is because things are "too healthy" right now, I start work at 9/10 finish at 18/19 (lunch hour doesn't count as work here) and then I just leave without a care in the world. I care enough for the business to do my work right, but that's about it.

I want to switch to something that makes me want to stay at work late with the rest of the team. Yeah I know, crazy, but right now it's just so boring that I want to completely switch it around.

Although I'm probably gonna get a pay cut if I switch, the creative industry probably doesn't pay as much as ecommerce. But we'll see.

I used to work as a developer, but found it unrewarding and stressful. Now I work in software vulnerability research, and I genuinely enjoy every day of it.

I've always been more of an explorer than a creator, so picking apart systems to understand their internal workings, and making a living off this, is pretty much my dream job.

I still do some development, like writing tooling, and proof of concept code to demonstrate vulnerabilities, so having that skill in my back pocket really helps there too.

Getting hired was fairly straightforward, I contacted a recruiter who is very well-regarded in this niche. He sorted me out for my last few jobs. Interviews have ranged from basically a chat about previous experience, to being sat down with an assembly code listing and asked to point out any vulnerabilities present in the code.

100%. Love it. I work at a bank so it's pretty awesome & rewarding work: barely any hype, tried and trued technologies that have been battle-tested to hell-and-back, and great work/life balance. If they allowed me to WFH permanently, I would never quit.

Yes. I work as a developer 20 years already, programmed everything from frontend, backend to microcontrollers and some scripting. I still like it. I could do other things, but nothing would pay as much and they would probably not be that fun when done as a day job.

How I got hired - a developer friend needed some help in his job, I've modified some sql queries, he recommended me (a student then) and they hired me.

I wish there was a job board for average companies looking for average devs. Every company these days want top talent for bottom dollar. But the daily tasks are usually medium level at best. Better adjusting the talent expectations would lead to better talent retention in my view. The current 'system' expects Michelangelos to do basic carpentry jobs.

Yup!

Software engineer in SF Bay Area for a popular medium size co, mainly front-end recently, Javascript all day.

Recruiter hit me up, interviewed, hired.

It can be very stressful to the brain, sometimes work late in to the night, need to constantly study up on new tech, sharpen skills. It's all worth it. Wouldn't want to work in any other industry except Victoria's Secret model photographer.

Kernel engineer. Yeah, I enjoy it. I like operating systems, data structures, security considerations, low level code... so that's a good fit.

It shifted my hobby projects to get even "lower" level though, which now has a lot of signal processing and electrical engineering, both in the analog (with some RF) and digital (including FPGAs) domain. I am determined to absolutely not let my job creep towards that direction, I want it to stay separate. Fortunately, I'm nowhere near experienced enough for anyone to consider that jump anyway.

By now a relatively long time ago, I was privately talking to a former employee of the company I'm now working at about hobby stuff. He said I seem to enjoy the relevant things, so asked for a CV and referred me. I didn't know where he was working at the time, so this was entirely organic, and got me an internship at first.

Work for hire always means that you do something you rather won't, and they pay you so that you kept doing that. Work has negative utility.

But a software developer job is the least worst kind of this. Among several areas I tried, engineering is the best. Compared to EE / embedded engineering work, a job of a backend software engineer is pretty pampered. It can be hard sometimes, but it's neither soul-crushing, not nerve-wracking, nor a constant race against the clock, and the pay is pretty good.

If I were rich enough to not need to work for money, I'd do much of the stuff I'm currently doing, only in somehow different areas. I think the only thing better than this is when you're directly paid do do you hobby, but it's rare in any area.

I don't even have my first dev job yet and I hate it. But we don't work jobs because we enjoy them, we work them because we like to eat, stay warm in winter, and dry when it rains.

I used to enjoy it. We make a platform and toolings for game devs and publishers. Back then when it was small everyone is thoughtful toward everyone else.

Then there's the hypergrowth phase. It's good for the money. But the culture downgrades for both the communication, the engineering, the product. People complain a lot but don't slightly ever make a plan to fix things.

It is tiring to be one of the few who still care.

I'm approaching 40th year on this planet, working professionally in software development for 15 years, another 10 years during my education, loved it during my uni time (non-CS faculty), loved it during my high school time. It always gave me a sense of exploration combined with feeling that I can build things I want. I still enjoy doing it :)

Not as much as I once did. Occasional flashes of the old magic; frequent enough to keep me doing it, and the money isn't bad.

Yes! I do financial risk modelling for a UK household name. I was hired 12y ago, after applying to an advert, to work with a (niche) language I'd not seen before. I enjoy solving the problems, learning new things, doing things the 'right' way, helping colleagues. Pay is good but not spectacular and not my main motivator.

Meh. There's an occasional interesting thing, but 90% of it you could do on autopilot. It does solve problems, it works reasonably, it's not too bad technically, but it's just not that interesting. I liked my SRE stint much more, but I just can't fit oncall into my life.

When I get to actually dev, totally. I work at an insurance company, I ended up here after I got hired by contract house (from a referral from a friend, who was hired by that contract house because they picked up grads), and they posted me here ~11 years ago, then I went permanent.

Hell no.

Senior folks who don't know how to code and ask me to fix their unreadable spaghetti in boring ass business logic... where's the closest cliff??

The good ol days are over. The problem with having too much fun is that it eventually backfires. Nothing lasts forever.

Application engineer at a large financial company for the last 10+ year. Direct hire.

I absolutely hate my job.