Programming as a career isn't right for me

When I was young, I really enjoyed programming - but for the sake of creating stuff. I viewed coding as a tool. Means to an end, really.<p>I wasn&#x27;t the type that really geeked out on things like editors, programming languages, etc. but I really enjoyed making stuff, that was the fun part. Solving problems with the tools I had.<p>Then I joined the workforce after Uni., and found out that I didn&#x27;t really enjoy the process that is called modern software development. I still enjoyed solving problems, but everything around it just didn&#x27;t vibe with me.<p>And then there&#x27;s the competition - I early discovered that I could never outperform my competition. I&#x27;m talking about the guys that live and breathe <i>everything</i> CS&#x2F;SWE related. The guys that will continue to work on hobby projects at home after work, the guys that are extremely invested in every part of the tool-chain, and are <i>passionate</i> about all the stuff I found boring.<p>Couldn&#x27;t really see myself transitioning to a manager role either.<p>So I chose to pursue a domain I find interesting, and become an analyst. Now I can solve problems - which I enjoy to do - and use whatever tools I want.<p>Coding is fun again, because I can do it fast and half-assed. I&#x27;m the only one using the code, and most scripts I write are use-once. Programming is once again just another tool in my toolbox.<p>The times I actually write more persistent stuff, I can take my time and still have a lot of freedom.

Good article, I can relate to it. Just this morning I was thinking, while interviewing an SDE 2 candidate: &quot;how did we ever get here?&quot;. By &quot;here&quot; I mean in a situation where it seems that software developers after 3-4 years of experience are forced&#x2F;coerced&#x2F;encourage to &quot;influence other orgs&quot;, &quot;execute through others&quot;, etc. instead of designing systems and writing code.<p>Every time I get a new team&#x2F;org, I just tell everyone that I will minimize the meetings and maximize the ability to write code and build stuff. One would think this would make me a popular manager, but feedback is always mixed: more experienced engineers complain that I am taking away their promotion opportunities by de-emphasizing &quot;influencing other orgs&quot;. Some leave.<p>I am also a prolific interviewer, and I have noticed that developers learned the game and are now emphasizing &quot;leadership and alignment&quot; skills vs. actual technical skills. Back then when I started, maybe 1 out of 3 candidates I interviewed were the hacker-oriented engineer who loved solving problems. Now it&#x27;s maybe 1 in 20 - all the rest are more concerned about showing how they aligned 300 product managers to build a batch job to remind the customer to buy shoes. It&#x27;s a depressing state of affairs.

Middle management have wrestled control back from developers with the scrum&#x2F;agile garbage. That is soul-sucking insofar as you are working a conveyor belt where if anything drops of then you are the problem. SW development has entered the factory automation phase where humans are still doing the &quot;automation&quot;. The sooner middle management can replace them with AI the sooner SW developers will be consigned to the dustbin of history. Right now, middle management hates the status quo.

I have absolutely zero advice to give, but I absolutely feel the sentiment of “I want to write programs, but I don’t want to be a programmer.”<p>I walk my dog around the US Capitol a lot, and every time I’m there I find myself wondering if I wouldn’t be happier doing landscaping for the architect of the capitol and writing code as and when I want, how I want, only as a hobby.

Interesting post. I feel the author has had a fairly unlucky stream of companies and work to come to this conclusion.<p>I&#x27;m in complete opposite situation. Programming is pretty much the only thing I can do and the only thing I&#x27;m good at. I&#x27;ll choose arguing with a compiler any day over people. I don&#x27;t particularly like people but I love code. Code is reproducible (arguably!), people constantly change their minds.<p>I hurt myself hanging something on the wall in my bedroom at 16 years old (a long time ago...) My mother laughed at me non stop and she told me &quot;you better be good with computers! Because you are shit at everything else!&quot;. That was my career councelling done at 16, thanks mum.<p>Programming, in a nutshell, saved my life and gave me one.

&gt; I aspire to settle the substantial $65,000 student loan burden that granted me the “privilege” of contributing to someone else’s vision during the conventional 9-to-5 grind.<p>It&#x27;s crazy to me that we let people do this to themselves. There&#x27;s no reason a student should have to take out that much debt for their degree and I&#x27;d bet there were probably ways for OP to avoid it if the right people were there to help. Ultimately it&#x27;s a huge systemic issue in the US but it&#x27;s also an issue with bad high school guidance counselors not helping students navigate the broken system

I really recommend people to take up niche programming languages (Clojure gets my recommendation) and find work in places where there aren&#x27;t thousands of applicants per position, because I have found in those places management treats you like a person, like an expert in your field, give you autonomy and respects your opinion. Doing JavaScript when there are 10 thousand other people who could take your job at an instant creates the sort of environment where processes rule everything, managers don&#x27;t value you because you&#x27;re just another cog in a machine. Either that or become a consultant. Or best of all, become a consultant in a niche language, like Clojure. I don&#x27;t know about the U.S, but in EU consultants are usually treated like experts in their field and paid much better than employees.

OP needs to get a different programming job. Writing test code all day sounds horrible. That should maybe be a portion of your job, but not the entire job.

I hope the author discovers that not all companies do software like he describes. It sounds like it is time he starts interviewing the company, too, instead of just letting them interview him. Ask about how the projects are structured, ask how much autonomy a developer has to make decisions about how the code is structure, whether developers have some input on the projects they work on, maybe ignore companies that are &quot;agile&quot;.<p>Another option is contracting, particularly building MVPs. Frequently these are solo projects or small teams. I don&#x27;t think this is a great choice for someone starting out since you won&#x27;t get exposed to people who are better than you, but the author has 6 years of experience so that&#x27;s less of an problem.

Seems like the problem is that &quot;programming as a career&quot; often means &quot;waiting&quot;. All the process stuff he mentions is (personally) fine with me, it&#x27;s just that you often have no agency over when it happens. Everything requires permission. Or there&#x27;s &quot;no budget for it&quot;.

He should go back to his 8th grade programming and drawing sprites on a screen and letting users move them around.<p>Life is to short to be writing tests for a somebody else&#x27;s font end code.

It obviously is the right career for you, because it&#x27;s granted you a level of privilege that few people experience. It&#x27;s enabling you to pay off your debt and save up loads of cash which you&#x27;ll use to retreat to a cabin in the woods. Most people cannot do that. Most people&#x27;s jobs are not the right job for them, but they do it because they have to, and they live paycheck to paycheck, and they&#x27;ll never be able to retreat to a cabin in the woods.

It&#x27;s something I&#x27;ve been thinking about lately. I feel like most of the value and importance of things come when people are doing things they think are worth doing in a way that they think is more or less the right way to do them.<p>On the one hand, there are many things worth doing that have sub-tasks that aren&#x27;t particularly &quot;fun&quot;, but I think in a fair number of cases people can make peace with those by understanding that they are part of the overall worth-doing task and are part of what it means to do it right.<p>On the other hand, a huge amount of value is sucked out of our world by &quot;business&quot;, which is basically a way to take things that are worth doing and wrap them in money so the actual thing people wanted to do (both as creators and consumers) is muffled and hidden.

It makes me think of Bisqwit, of a YouTube channel about programming <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;user&#x2F;Bisqwit" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;user&#x2F;Bisqwit</a><p>Form his videos, he is obviously a skilled programmer, and he seems to enjoy it a lot. And yet, as a day job, he drives a bus. I don&#x27;t remember the details but it seems to be along the lines of not wanting to think hard doing what others tell him to do. That&#x27;s why he makes his living with a relatively mindless job, while at the same time actively using his brain on the things he likes, doing them the way he wants to.

I can&#x27;t really agree with the testing part. I worked with many projects where I came across Issues which definitely could have been prevented by more automatic unit &#x2F; E2E tests.<p>I imagine the engineers who wrote the code for the Boeing 737 MAX MCAS or the Tesla engineers who accidentally wrote log files to the internal flash thought the same. Maybe another team member could show the author why these tests are important...

Computers have been a hobby all my life. I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion is. I don&#x27;t think the fact that the language I have mostly written code in in recent years is Emacs Lisp is unrelated to the above moment.<p>Yet I have never desired to work as a professional software developer. I majored in history and Spanish in college while working for the university&#x27;s Unix systems group. My computer skills got me my first job out of college, in an investment bank&#x27;s tech equity research group; my manager was looking for a CS major but I was able to convince her that I had the equivalent thereof.<p>I&#x27;m glad, for the sake of civilizational and economic progress, that others are able and willing to program for pay. Meanwhile I will continue to putter around with Elisp at home.

How do you go from basic via 6 years of working to 2023?<p>Regardless, start your own company, luckily you&#x27;re in the right place.<p>edit: or do like my friend and code in the forrest :) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thomasbacklund.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thomasbacklund.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;index.html</a>

It&#x27;s not about programming, it&#x27;s about the domain it&#x27;s applied in.

Most Agile is glorified middle management.....I have never once seen it do anything to improve an existing productive team or provide measurable benefits....it to not looks that way when you have no structure...because it&#x27;s better than nothing.<p>so it works....with mid-level efficiency and tends to push the feel goods up the chain and push the work down the chain..... direction still comes from the top in every attempt regardless of slogans like &#x27;developer engagement&#x27; stakeholder management etc.

This is why I transitioned to being a technician early on, and then transition to working on hardware. I still mostly do programming work, but not for (direct) pay.

Very normal realization. Also a healthy one i think. If you enjoy programming on side projects, do it. I stopped chasing fullfilment in my dayjob. Feels good.

Programming is amazing for me, but the problem with programming for a career is that you end up doing very little of it

Don&#x27;t tell the internet why you think a job is shit. Tell them why you think some specific alternative career is better. You have a decent chance of hearing from someone who&#x27;s gone the opposite direction.

“Then I’m going to a cabin in the woods.”<p>Consider the campervan.

I am waiting for the day AI replaces HR and Middle-management

I reinterpret Chomsky &quot;Students who <i>have such little foresight and so</i> acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to <i>acquire the capacity to</i> think about changing society. &quot;<p>The op is complaining about having a cush job. He should try construction, garbage, policing, working in ER, etc.