this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life.
"Nothing is fun 8 hours a day" isn't an advice but at least it's true
In the 90's before I was doing it professionally, I used to go on massive 10 - 15 hour binge programming sessions only stopping when I realized I hadn't eaten in that entire time. It was some of the best fun I've ever had. But it happened rarely and organically, not 5 days a week on a predetermined schedule.
I like programming, and I program for a living, but there is nobody on earth who gets out of bed every day and is like "Aw yiss I'm gonna go code a bunch of salesforce integrations!"
I've been working long enough that at this point my work goal is like, I want a job that 95% of the time I do not actively dread. I don't need to be excited about it, I just need it to be fine.
Same! Last time I had a programming all-nighter was around 10 years ago
Totally relatable! As you already pointed out, it's the "a day" part. I like listening to the radio but I talked to a former car radio tester who said that his car radio is never on and he enjoys the silence. It's one thing to do stuff you like when you want to, maybe even binge, and another to have a schedule.
I started programming at school and when I studied computer science, another student asked me after the first semester what I'm going to program on vacation. I stared at them and said I have vacation. Now I programm full time and barely in my free time.
Did the formal education before the job ruin it for you, or did the job itself ruin it?
My experience may be an outlier but...
Formal education was great for me, promise of working with cutting edge technologies. Vast amount of opportunities working in the IT sector. I was excited and happy for starting my second career choice.
As for the job I've landed, acceptable-better pay/benefits than most, the most backwards tech to work with and managing environment. I'd like to fantasize about leaving but with the work ethic in my area I can't escape it without a drastic move.
Ah, that's fair.
I'm having the opposite experience, unfortunately. I loved working at {co-op company} where I had a choice of developer environment (OS, IDE, and the permissions to freely install whatever software was needed without asking IT) and used Golang for most tasks.
The formal education has been nothing but stress and anxiety, though. Especially exams.
Ah wow that's a great experience for your co-op! You know maybe i'm rose tinting a little bit now that you've mentioned exams haha, but yeah I'd still say it's been interesting working in the field for me to say the least.
Yep! I ended up doing my entire co-op with them, and it meshed really well with my interest in creating developer-focused tooling and automation.
Unfortunately I didn't have the time to make the necessary changes and get approval from legal to open-source it, but I spent a good few months creating a tool for validating constraints for deployments on a Kubernetes cluster. It basically lets the operations team specify rules to check deployments for footguns that affect the cluster health, and then can be run by the dev-ops teams locally or as a Kubernetes operator (a daemon service running on the cluster) that will spam a Slack channel if a team deploys something super dangerous.
The neat part was that the constraint checking logic was extremely powerful, completely customizable, versioned, and used a declarative policy language instead of a scripting language. None of the rules were hard-coded into the binary, and teams could even write their own rules to help them avoid past deployment issues. It handled iterating over arbitrary-sized lists, and even could access values across different files in the deployment to check complex constraints like some value in one manifest didn't exceed a value declared in some other manifest.
I'm not sure if a new tool has come along to fill the niche that mine did, but at the time, the others all had their own issues that failed to meet the needs I was trying to satisfy (e.g. hard-coded, used JavaScript, couldn't handle loops, couldn't check across file boundaries, etc.).
It's probably one of the tools I'm most proud of, honestly. I just wish I wrote the code better. Did not have much experience with Go at the time, and I really could have done a better job structuring the packages to have fewer layers of nested dependencies.
That is truly so amazing! Honestly experiences like those are so worth it, but I feel for you not being able to make it open source then. If you haven't already started on something else, I'm sure it'll be some motivation for you down the road. Sorry for delayed response, crazy ass week for me lol.
On the other hand I avoided going into the field until I hit 30 because I didn't want to spend all day on a computer and then have it effect my willingness to use a PC at home.
Of course you don't have to be a programmer to be stuck in front of a PC all day so I figured I might as well do something I'm good at. The main shift was that I now strongly prefer console/couch/tv gaming over PC/monitor/desk gaming.
That said I still find I come home unmotivated for hobby dev, if I'm going to work on my hobby projects I need to get out of bed 60-90 minutes earlier and do that while I'm fresh.
This is the big one for me. My co-workers all wonder why I switched from pc to PlayStation, and I'm like, "dude, you just watched me troubleshoot 10 machines that failed our OS upgrade, and you think I want to come home and find that Windows update just broke my sound drivers again?"
Fastest way to kill your passion is to make it your paycheck, I say to those people.