
Ask HN: Feeling “bored” by software engineering? - programmer1199
I&#x27;ve been programming for 15+ years now, and in industry for 7+ years. I&#x27;ve used all sorts of languages: web dev (HTML&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;JS&#x2F;etc.), C&#x2F;C++, Hypercard, BASIC, Python&#x2F;Ruby&#x2F;Perl, Lisp, Go, Java...etc. I&#x27;ve worked at a very large company, and also small companies, and on lots of side projects. Of course I still have things to learn, but I feel very comfortable with most of the coding tasks that come up at work.<p>I&#x27;ve enjoyed programming since pretty much the beginning (BASIC on ancient Apple II&#x27;s in school :) but lately I&#x27;ve been feeling a bit &quot;bored.&quot; Most of my day to day coding work is around domain specific business logic and data modeling. There isn&#x27;t much that feel like inventing something new, or applying &quot;computer science.&quot; In-so-far as there are &quot;computer science&quot; challenges, like &quot;How do we handle X amount of requests per second?&quot;, those challenges are quickly and easily solved by using a pre-built DB&#x2F;library.<p>I&#x27;ve been browsing job advertisements (South Bay Area), and nothing seems to catch my interest. Startups generally have product&#x2F;market fit problems, not tech problems, and working at a big company (FaceGoog, etc.) doesn&#x27;t really appeal to me.<p>I didn&#x27;t always feel this way, as I mentioned before I&#x27;ve really enjoyed programming since the start. But I just can&#x27;t find anything to get excited about.<p>Have you gone through a similar phase in your life&#x2F;career? What did you do? Any suggestions?
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pedalpete
I think I've been in a similar situation. I'm not a fan of building simple I/O
apps, and I'm actually not very good at it either (even though it has been
done a million times by others). I do much better when people give me
challenging problems, so I think we may be similar in that regard.

First I'd ask how long you feel you've been bored for? It could be that you're
just in a lull of interesting things.

Do you have any of your own projects? Do you contribute to open-source? Have
you considered work outside the 'regular' IT space?

I almost always have a project on the go, and often find some interesting
challenges in there. What worries me most is when I don't have any side
projects, but a new idea always eventually pops up.

When you talk about 'product-market-fit' being the big issue with most
startups, that is what makes me think you're not looking at the start-ups that
are doing the challenging work. It often isn't in web or typical
software/service companies.

IoT security is something that constantly comes up as an area still in need of
being addressed. Or have you played with BlockChain and distributed contracts.

There are lots of problems to be solved, maybe it's just finding the ones that
interest you.

I think meetups can be a good source too, just don't go to the 'language'
meetups, but maybe pick an industry meetup or two where you might be
interested but wouldn't normally be in scope of what you're familiar with.
Worse comes to worse, you can always leave.

Those are my thoughts, but I don't think you're alone.

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lovelearning
I don't know about the nature of your side projects. Have you done any in
challenging computer science fields like computer vision, speech recognition
or machine learning, or anything electronics related?

The fun thing about them is that there are no dearth of problems to solve, and
if you really want to build an intuition in them to come up with new
techniques, you have to brush up on or learn from scratch multiple math fields
like statistics, linear algebra and calculus. For an autodidact like me, it's
like a kid in a toy shop.

I felt the way you did some years ago. I was good at stringing up frameworks
together in multiple languages and writing glue code to make some CRUD apps.
It made me complacent that I was "good" at this and then I got "bored".
Venturing out of my mental comfort zones to tougher fields has proven to be a
great way to avoid that boredom. Haven't got bored in past 5 years!

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jonny_storm
My two cents: get away from code awhile. Read a book on a mildy intriguing
subject that seems completely orthogonal to your other work. Take up a new
hobby for one week. Travel.

Looking for more "exciting" work is a recipe for monoculture, as you're likely
to only find more of the same. "Interesting" and "exciting" are things you
find in yourself and not in any particular problem.

Instead, expand your horizons and find something that motivates you to use and
expand your existing skillset, or at least see known concepts in a new way.
Replace "exciting" with "strange" or "curious" to help reorient your search.

I wish you success in escaping this momentary fit of ennui, and good luck in
your next endeavor!

