Ask HN: How happy are you working as a programmer? - kalzium
======
marknutter
Any time I catch myself complaining about my career I do my best to jolt
myself out of it. That's not to say I have nothing to complain about or that
aspects of my career and my job can't be improved, but my god, is there really
any other profession in the world that is as lucrative, open, and challenging
as programming? There are no bullshit certifications to go through, the best
tools and resources are free and open, and the more technology advances the
more important it becomes. In no other field can someone start a company with
basically zero capital and have a realistic shot at becoming profitable. I am
absolutely addicted to programming and the only real downside is that there
aren't enough hours in the day to do it.

~~~
dota_fanatic
Indeed.

But what about everyone else? The longer I work in this field and the more I
understand about optimization and physical processes, the worse I feel about
the work I do and the work of most programmers. Not "but it's just a social
app?!" people, but the people in medicine, law, education, small business,
hardware, logistics, etc, all pushing business forward bit by bit, automating
away the repetitive pieces and making it easier for those in monetarily
advantageous positions to capture the flag.

It's hard for me to be too happy when I see ubiquitous animal suffering in a
system I'm helping to persist, seemingly towards the end of life on earth
altogether. Why do I do it? I need money, and I'm only so strong for now. How
can I cooperate when the biggest and greatest are of a world of defectors?
Selfishness wins? It's all too easy to conclude, "I can't make a difference,
not really", and the probability of making a difference drops to 0, prophesy
fulfilled. After all, rent is due, student loan is due.

Count me in as someone who, given the support of basic income, can and will
live frugally and give my working self 100% towards ethical objectives, as I
understand them. In the meantime, this whole "but we have it so great compared
to everyone else!!" just makes me feel even worse, over-burdened. If I can't
make a difference with all these advantages, without seemingly herculean
efforts, then who?

~~~
cgopalan
"Count me in as someone who, given the support of basic income, can and will
live frugally and give my working self 100% towards ethical objectives, as I
understand them."

Amen, brother/sister, amen. Exactly how I feel. Also I see you are empathetic
towards animals. I have adopted animal welfare and animal rights as my single
biggest ethical objective. After working for about 20 years on writing
software for domains like transportation, telecommunications, social media, I
have decided enough is enough and am going to work towards doing some work
(mostly software-related) in the animal welfare area this year and increase it
every year. I am not saying anyone who works in the other fields are bad,
since people working on different things is what makes the world work. I just
feel that I should separate work that pays the bills (Wb) and work that is
meaningful (Wm) to me. And the goal is to minimize Wb and maximize Wm in the
24 hrs available. With basic income, Wb would be zero, so that would be ideal.

~~~
Lawtonfogle
Just a side question on the issue of animal welfare, but how do you handle the
paradox of the spider and the butterfly? I'm not sure it has an official name,
so a simple description is that some animals kill other animals to keep
themselves alive (such as a spider hunting a butterfly), so how do you provide
for the welfare of both?

~~~
cgopalan
Good question. I am not opposed to the killing of animals, just the torture
involved in the killing. If you see videos of how animals are farmed in
slaughterhouses and warehouses, you wonder how humans have degenerated into
something so vile that they dont even consider the pain and conditions these
sentient beings go through.

~~~
marknutter
I'm fairly certain spiders are not concerned about the suffering of the
butterflies they consume..

~~~
cgopalan
Are you seriously comparing animals killing and eating other animals for food
with what we do to animals and birds in slaughterhouses? Have you watched
videos of slaughterhouses? Have you seen how fur is plucked off rabbits for
angora, and feathers off birds for down jackets? In almost all cases, the skin
also comes off and they are not even killed after the act but mercilessly left
to die on their own. Almost everyone, even if they choose to ignore it,
acknowledges the cruelty in the meat and farming industry.

~~~
marknutter
Have you watched videos of spiders eating their prey? It's more horrific than
what we do in most cases. They paralyze them, wrap them up, let them sit there
to contemplate their demise, and then suck the blood out of them while they're
incapacitated and conscious. Spiders are but one example of the horrific
predator/prey dynamic in nature.

And to be clear, I'm just as horrified by our treatment of animals as you are
but I've learned to make my peace with it. I'm just hoping that lab-grown meat
becomes a viable alternative some day and we don't have to grow animals for
food.

~~~
cgopalan
Just reiterate what you just said and see how it sounds. If everybody looked
at atrocities and tries to "make their peace" with them, you can imagine how
the world will turn out. I feel at this point you are just trying to defend
your previous points, some of which are on very shaky ground.

~~~
Lawtonfogle
>If everybody looked at atrocities and tries to "make their peace" with them,
you can imagine how the world will turn out.

Which brings us back to the issue of the spider and the butterfly. Do you just
make your peace that the butterfly will be tortured to death, or do you
intervene, thus indirectly causing the spider to die a torturous death of
starvation?

~~~
cgopalan
The point is we can have everything we currently have without resorting to
that torture (killing of cows and pigs in slaughterhouses, de-beaking of
chickens). Thats what I am trying to eliminate or abate. Animals preying on
other animals is natural, and also something they cannot avoid.

~~~
marknutter
I figure these chickens wouldn't be alive if it weren't for us, and if asked,
would they choose not to have ever existed in favor of existing and meeting a
horrific demise?

Another thing to consider - if we genetically engineered chickens that
couldn't feel pain, would it be unethical to debeak them?

~~~
cgopalan
Let me get this straight. Are you saying that animal cruelty is a non-issue?
Or that its just a matter of perspective? Animal farming to me is reason
enough for people to take up animal welfare as a cause. I could also add
myriad other examples - trophy hunting, dog fighting, pulling out tusks out of
elephants while they are alive.

~~~
marknutter
No, I'm just giving you my justifications for ignoring the issue.

~~~
cgopalan
At no point did I want or expect that. I dont expect my causes to be taken up
by anybody else. I can also give justifications for ignoring issues that are
important to you or anybody else. Doesn't really serve any purpose.

------
anexprogrammer
I quit.

I had a nearly 20 year career in software, excellent references and well paid.
I became completely burned out and hyper-cynical at the pointlessness and
shallowness of it all. I can't get excited or even much beyond passing
interest in an industry that is almost completely devoted to making the
problem of too much stuff far worse.

So instead of getting excited at another pointless startup or tech that's
"going to disrupt x" (it usually won't, and often it isn't even a sensible
idea to), or "change the world" (nope, not that either), I gave it all up to
work with my hands doing something. It's nice to actually feel like I am
/doing/ something I can feel proud of, and is sustainable. Moving electrons
around is just so unfulfilling.

I'm utterly jaded at the constant replacement, or latest shiny framework
that's going to improve little, just change lots and sell more crap. The web
has become an almost unusable mess where a single page loads 30 or 40 domains
of ad, crap and tracking bringing us back to dial up speeds unless you block
most of it.

I still follow tech, but my personal projects are dead as even when i have the
time to (I have far more of that now and I feel so much better for it), I
can't bring myself to code any more.

The money was nice, but I don't even really miss that. I do regret not being
able to afford aerobatics as a hobby any more though!

Many of my peers have quit tech too, and of those who remain some would like
to do something, anything else, but mortgage or other commitments keeps them
tied to the money.

After three years I'm happier, healthier and don't miss it in the slightest.

~~~
lolptdr
I'm curious; what do you consider of something working with your hands? I came
from the opposite background (former chemist, process engineer, chemical
engineering) and opposed the minimal work that hardly anyone cared for. With
programming, moving electrons makes it a much bigger impact with much ease.

~~~
Ronsenshi
I can sympathize with anexprogrammer and I think by working with your hands he
might mean something like woodworking, metalworking, generally working "in the
shop" making stuff.

I'm not unhappy being a programmer, but from time to time I immensely enjoy
fixing things at home myself - I see result of my work here and now. Being a
programmer I may not see finished result of my work for a long time.

I think it is quite beneficial for programmers to dabble in some hobbies that
involve some handiwork - be it knitting or making playing dices out of metal.

~~~
anexprogrammer
I'm now in conservation and restoration, so a bit of all of those.

I considered restoring old vehicles, but didn't want to end up "just" a
mechanic. It was working on cars that was my trigger to get out - I felt so
much more satisfaction from restoring a car than I ever did from meeting a
ship date. I think because it has a tangible sense of progress and completion,
and there's something to point at that's more "real"

~~~
lolptdr
Ah, I agree, we all need to see progress and potential eventually. I was
previously working in semiconductor and it would take 3-8 months to see any
effect of my work. That long cycle time pushed me away. Now I am a front-end
developer and love it. The feedback of aesthetics, no matter how small,
reminds me that I can still have an impact. Thank you for sharing your new
found love!

------
lhnz
I enjoy programming but 'working as a programmer' is infuriating.

There are so many interesting product ideas yet 'me-too' CRUD app recreations
of previously successful incumbents products are highly desired. This is
particularly true in the startup ecosystems where kids talk about
'interesting' problems and finding 'purpose' and yet are blindly following the
mantras and motivational speeches of trite capitalists.

I currently work as a freelancer/contractor in London and I am happy as I make
enough money to finance my own intellectual and creative interests for months
on end. I hope I'll soon meet other intellectually curious people doing the
same thing, and hope we'll be able to join forces to teach ourselves things or
perhaps even work on small projects together.

Of course I feel extremely lucky to be in this position which has nothing to
do with wanting a slower pace and everything to do with wanting to exert my
whole self. And I can't say whether it will be good for me or bad for me; I'm
certainly learning a lot about myself and the practicalities of doing this.

~~~
herval
Do you have any advice for freelancers looking for interesting clients?

I'm mostly able to find clients that either 1) want full-time employees or 2)
are working on 'me-too' CRUDs (sometimes both).

~~~
lhnz
My suggestion is actually not to find interesting clients. My suggestion is to
find high-paying clients and then to become your own 'interesting' client
(aka, reduce your lifestyle cost to a point in which you're able to use this
money to sustain months of self-directed work).

Nothing is perfect and I've no idea whether this particular idiosyncrasy would
suit other people - I'm still undecided whether it's for me.

~~~
bobwaycott
Exactly this.

I've been consulting with various clients for the last 4 years. I make a few
multiples more than I _need_ to survive, and do not work more than 50% of the
working days per year.

This is relatively easy to achieve:

\- I have no debt outside of a couple school loans, which I prioritize paying
down to zero. Everything else is either living expenses, or discretionary
spending.

\- I ensure my clients pay for _everything_ they need—hosting, Github, any and
all services. This is an easy sell, as it keeps everything firmly in their
control and they can replace me at any time.

\- I charge by the day, not the hour. My clients have never complained, and
they seem to find it easier to think and budget in per-day terms.

~~~
therealdrag0
Can you give more specifics on the typical project you take on?
Genre/technologies/size/price.

------
49531
I worked in landscaping and then as a custodian making $7/hr before I started
learning to code. Working as a programmer has transformed my life. I've got a
lot of autonomy in my days, I enjoy solving technical problems, I get to work
from home and see my 2yr old grow up.

Yeah it sucks when your manager puts heavy deadlines on your team, or having
to do things you don't necessarily agree with, or navigating corporate
politics, but at the end of the day it's the best. I don't come home
physically exhausted, I don't make shit money, and if I ever end up in a job I
don't enjoy, I am able to find a new one fairly easily.

I think it's easy for programmers to hate life sometimes. Most people who are
good at this line of work started doing it because they enjoyed it before it
was making them money, that's how it was for me. Sometimes I miss haphazardly
stringing code together to make something fun, but at the end of the day being
a programmer has made me feel fulfilled.

~~~
dev360
I joke with programmer friends that we should become gardeners instead. I
guess the appeal of physical labor is you get to leave work at work.

~~~
hellameta
The appeal of physical labor? People only do physical labor because they are
either unlucky or simply lack the knowledge to choose another path. I don't
expect that to be the popular perspective on "PC" hacker news but that is the
real world for you. Show me a gardener who wouldn't want to make 6 figures
instead of breaking their back day in and day out for close to if not minimum
wage? Appeal? Yeah right.

~~~
softawre
You are right. But... I'd be a gardener. If it paid me the same I make now. At
least for 3 months a year?

I worked at Lowes in college hauling lumber and I miss it dearly (rose colored
goggles and all). I was in the best shape of my life, I didn't think about
work (lumber?) at home. It was a simpler life.

~~~
tdsamardzhiev
Last summer I discovered I particularly like gardening. I think I'd be a
gardener too if it paid the same.

~~~
dev360
I guess its something that grows on you as you get older.

Ive toyed with the idea of buying a little house in south europe, cut my
expenses, work IT part-time/remot and have some land to grow stuff on.

------
laxatives
6/10\. I'm less than 3 years into my career, but I think I've worked for some
of the best companies with great pay, benefits, environments, etc, including a
tech giant and two startups. End of the day though, work is boring. Its always
work. Your time and effort is going towards making someone else rich and their
priorities are more important than your own.

The only things I really look forward to are vacations and events outside of
work. Learning things is always exciting and sometimes its extremely rewarding
getting a project (or even a feature) off the ground and seeing a company rise
and beat projections. But then a few weeks later, its just back to work and
nothings really different. Its a temporary victory at best, then expectations
just get higher and more grind.

The best you can possibly hope for is enjoying the people you work with and
getting a couple good exits. I'm never married to my work and I would be
incredibly depressed if I allowed it to define me as a person. It pays the
bills, and generally pretty well.

Even compensation wise, it peaks very early and probably won't get most rich
without a ton of luck. Its depressing to make comparisons, but 99.9% of
developers will never make half of what a specialized MD or successful lawyer
or someone in finance might make. Granted, the barrier to entry is much lower
in CS (sometimes nearly nonexistent depending on the line of work).

edit: Reading some of the other comments made me realize how dissatisfied I am
with this line of work. On average, the people really are incredibly boring,
especially at large companies. It is true that it is dominated by men and many
are socially awkward. Its even worse that I think being on a computer for so
many hours a day for years at a time makes everyone a little less socially
adept, at least compared to the sales folks who spend most of their days on
the phone. I'm literally spending my weekends looking for the most reckless
and dangerous things I can do (lately its been surfing 2-3x head high waves,
before it was motorcycling through snow/ice storms) to compensate and its
completely unhealthy.

~~~
onion2k
_Its depressing to make comparisons, but 99.9% of developers will never make
half of what a specialized MD or successful lawyer or someone in finance might
make._

Why not make a much less depressing comparison and compare developer wages to
manual labourers or retail staff? Compare a typical developer to a typical
retail worker and we get way more money for way less stress. We're not at the
top end of the scale, but we are nowhere near the bottom either.

We get to sit in comfortable offices, working on interesting projects
(mostly), building things that make a difference to people, without getting
dirty or abused by the public, and we're pretty well paid for it on the whole.
And there's always the possibility that we might hit on an idea that returns
_literally billions_ of dollars. Or work for someone else who had that idea
and walk away with _literally hundreds of millions_ of dollars. Most people
don't have that sort of opportunity.

I've been a professional developer for over 20 years, and I've enjoyed most of
it. It afforded me the opportunity to do my own startup for a while, and when
that failed it was easy to get back in to work with a job that pays quite
well. I certainly wouldn't want to do anything else.

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
Less stress? Retail workers turn up a 9 leave at 17:30 - they dot get called
up outside of work in an emergency to fix some one elses code that causing a
problem.

~~~
dizzystar
In retail, you don't get free food / liquid. You have to stand on your feet
all day. Customers are allowed to scream at you and you have to figure out how
to make them happy. Bosses are more than happy to fire you because, let's be
honest, there are 1,000 others that can do your job. No guarantees of a 40
hour work-week. No paid holidays, no benefits. Raises are like 25c, and that
is only if the boss really likes you and you aren't in a union, shifts well
past midnight on Friday and Christmas Eve... (don't care to continue)

~~~
Amezarak
> In retail, you don't get free food / liquid.

 _Water_ is free, most likely. I've never had free food programming, beyond
nutra-grain bars, once.

> Customers are allowed to scream at you and you have to figure out how to
> make them happy.

Toxic clients exist in the programming world, too. And as a low-level peon,
you have a lot more leeway in telling an abusive customer to get out than you
do a multimillion dollar client.

> shifts well past midnight on Friday and Christmas Eve...

Still happens for developers.

As strange as it may sound, I think I personally was happier waiting tables.
But it wasn't going to pay the bills. In general, I totally agree that most
people, all things considered, are better off programming. But let's not
overstate our case. :) There are definitely _some_ programming jobs which are
light-years better than any retail job because e.g., you don't have to deal
with customers, but that's not _all_ programming jobs.

~~~
chrshawkes
Try crawling around in asbestos filled attics or rat infested crawl spaces for
12 bucks an hour.

Programming is much easier than so many professions I've had in the past it's
absolutely unbelievable.

~~~
callinyouin
I was a "pest control technician" (exterminator) before I started programming
professionally, so I know how you feel. My life now is a cakewalk by
comparison.

------
phatbyte
Move!

Here's the thing: I love programming, I've been working has a web dev since I
was 18 (34 now), but I always loved design and creating desktop apps. And
recently I've been learning Swift and mobile design.

This year, the startup I was working with went bankrupt, and I just dive into
depression and self-confidence as a developer. I couldn't stop thinking to
myself: "oh no, not again all those web dev interview processes and more
JavaScript, PHP code..."

I got burnout of web dev, I just couldn't see myself doing it any longer. I
hate JavaScript and the whole current ecosystem, it's a fucking mess, I don't
want to have anything to do with it. PHP bores me to death, it's getting more
and similar to Java syntax. Traditional web apps are dead. Everything is an
API with a frontend-app, and that's fine, but I'm done.

So I decided to move, I'm now learning design, UX, Swift, iOS. And I'm loving
it. The creativity and motivation spark are back! I feel so free, the web was
a burden to me, a constant pressure to keep up with frameworks and trends.

So before you quit, think of moving to something different. Learn a new
paradigm, try something different. Tired of C++, learn Ruby. Tired of Ruby:
Learn C# and Unity 3D. Tired of the web? Try building an iOS TV app.

~~~
vdnkh
I'm just the opposite - I was going mad making microservices with C# and have
jumped ship to being a full stack webdev guy. I love JS, it feels so freeing
and easy after working with such a heavy compiled language (I still like C#
though). I really enjoy doing front-end work and I feel that I can utilize my
creativity in ways I couldn't working on the backend exclusively.

~~~
therealdrag0
How did you get into JS? I have avoided throwing myself into the "front-end"
because I feel like I don't have any artistic bent and I don't enjoy pixel
pushing.

~~~
vdnkh
I pushed for a project at work for months. Practised JS/web dev for about a
year before that - when the time came I was ready. I go to a lot of JS meetups
and I'll be speaking at my first this month!

------
tluyben2
Been programming for 32 years 25 of which professionally. I never had a job as
such; I always started companies based around tech of which I was the lead
coder/CTO and it gave me a great life. I have other hobbies but I love coding
and find it hard to imagine living without it; the creative process, the
making of something that did not previously exist, the idea that you can make
something without any funds; be it with or without money. If everything fails
today, I can start another company tomorrow without spending any money. I do
not know of another field where that works like that.

I still get happy when something I worked hard on works and even sells.

That said; I would not work in circumstances some here work in; commuting for
hours a day, glueing together crud apps, tons of stress and no upside besides
money. I always say that if you are a decent programmer you do not have to do
any of that. Unfortunately people do not like to take risks and apparently
working like a dog makes them feel better.

In short; 10/10 happy coding more than fulltime for over 30 years. Hoping for
at least another 30.

~~~
noam87
What sort of companies / products did you build? How did you first start? Did
you sell the company, or is it a revenue generating model? How did you support
yourself while building the company?

~~~
tluyben2
My first companies were all services companies so they immediately generated
reveneu and were thus easily bootstrapped. I believe it was easier begin 90s
to 2000s to do that though. With that money and also during that period I
started building products: a dating site, a CMS, a freehosting OS and large
freehoster, a POS for grand cafe's and some niche LOB dev products. I sold all
of those after running them for a while; in the end they were all very
profitable and fun because of the diversity. The company formed around the CMS
grew to 300 people in the high times. That I did not like at all so I quit as
CTO and opened the R&D dep of that company with 2 colleagues.

Currently I'm working on the hardware and software for a smart credit card
while I have a services company to offload work to and do work for other
clients.

Services still work well as bootstrap; first do some freelance work in a
client office, start discussing working from home when the trust has been
built, start suggesting to get more people on board when it gets busy. Before
you know it you have a small team and you can start cloning that process until
you have enough portfolio to do less intensive sales. You will never run
losses: quite the opposite. When your team takes over enough you can work on
side projects if you want to.

------
bsenftner
Been coding professionally 37 years. Started as a self taught video game
developer back in the Apple II, Commodore era. I loved it at first. University
had me working at a 3D graphics research lab with Mandelbrot himself, later on
I was an OS developer for the 3DO and the first PlayStation. I worked on tons
of high profile video games, and later transitioned to VFX for film, and
worked on a ton of popular blockbusters. But the thing is: I love the work,
but the management of software development is stone age voodoo and witch
hunts, deceptive management, and psychological manipulation. Our career is
create on demand on schedule. It's a recipe for stress and burnout. And I
burned out. I returned to school, got an MBA (2nd in my class) and found that
no one would hire me because my technology past was "too exciting" and "I'd
never be happy with what they do". But that is exactly what I wanted! I even
tried not including my previous "exciting" past work, but that read as either
an unemployment hole or was figured out with a Google search of my name. I had
to eat, so I returned to developing. I created a startup for my technology
passion (www.3D-Avatar-Store.com : neural nets that 3D reconstruct people) and
now work in facial recognition. All the things I love and hate about the
career at still there. If I could do it all over again, I'd have thrown that
temper tantrum at 17 and gone to animation school rather than a normal
university.

~~~
lgieron
> If I could do it all over again, I'd have thrown that temper tantrum at 17
> and gone to animation school rather than a normal university.

Is animation that different? It's also "create on demand on schedule".

~~~
bsenftner
Animation tools do not go obsolete as quickly as software frameworks, so an
expertise can develop that far exceeds the expertise we can develop because
our OS/language/framework foundations turn over over three years. Plus, in
animation one is dealing with story telling; much more satisfying than the
typical software project.

------
gregthompsonjr
Can't complain. Great company. Constantly wondering if I'm good enough to keep
my job, though. I'm trying to prepare for that day I'm told, "Let's talk. We
like you a lot, but we've decided to let you go. If you need referrals, let us
know." I mean, everyone says I'm doing well. I just don't feel it, so I work a
lot more than I probably should, and I'm always ridiculously paranoid. I'd say
I'm happy but I'm worried. I bet it's more common a combination of feelings
than I think. The funny thing is that the company is full of really nice
managers who keep it honest (as far as I know), and would tell me if I'm
under-performing. I'd hope so, at least. So I guess so far, so good.

~~~
sdrothrock
> Constantly wondering if I'm good enough to keep my job, though.

I wonder this quite often too. It would be interesting to see a study
involving programmers and their confidence in their skills compared to what
other people think and also how much they read about programming online.

My gut instinct is to say that because we want to read a lot of
new/interesting stuff online, we're exposed to (seemingly) tons of people who
know TONS of things that we don't know in the aggregate, so it affects our
self esteem...

~~~
gregthompsonjr
I'm surrounded by the people we read material from, the guys who write it all.
I try to learn everything I can from them. I'm just hoping I can express a
level of competence that enables me to keep my position. The longer I can keep
it, the more I'll learn, the better I'll be a year from now and after.

------
slavik81
It was the easiest and highest-paying job I've ever had. Unlike previous jobs
where I had to be at work somewhere between 5am and 7am, I never had to had to
be in the office until 9am. I regularly solved interesting problems, and I
could go home after 8 hours without feeling exhausted. I had a regular
schedule, and never worked more than 5 days in a row.

This is all past-tense, of course. It paid enough for me to work a few years,
then take several years off to pursue a master's degree.

------
tetraodonpuffer
I started learning how to code at 14 when my parents bought me a Sharp MZ-700
instead of a C64 like I asked (I guess the salesperson had a better commission
on that!) and since there were basically no games I had to write my own, that
was about 30 years ago and I've been programming ever since

I still love coding, getting in the zone, learning something new, in general
the feeling of being able to make the computer do what I want it to do, and I
am still good at it, but career wise it's getting to be not nearly as fun
anymore, since as the years go by it's a smaller and smaller part of my day,
being pushed more and more into team leading and endless scrum / standup /
grooming / planning / ... meetings, having to deal with politics and so on.

The money is definitely much better now than it used to be, but I would
honestly take a 50% pay cut if I was able to just deal with the code working
at home, I am a fairly frugal person and wish there was something like basic
income so I could just spend my days programming on projects that interest me.
You don't see musicians being forced to become conductors as their careers
progress and being given less and less time to practice their instruments, why
is it that we developers often end up doing that?

Unfortunately I don't have an entrepreneurial bone in my body so I am really
not sure how to get from where I am now to where I'd like to be, and I am sure
I am not the only one in this situation.

~~~
majewsky
> I would honestly take a 50% pay cut if I was able to just deal with the code
> working at home, I am a fairly frugal person and wish there was something
> like basic income so I could just spend my days programming on projects that
> interest me.

You're not the only one. :)

~~~
tetraodonpuffer
sometimes I wish that all these software-made billionaires instead of buying
the n-th yacht or mansion set up a fund where you could apply and get to work
on open source projects at reasonable living wages, sort of like a "basic
income for coders" basically.

Pipe dream, I know, one can always dream though, I definitely envy artists /
craftsmen that can live off their work, but I don't see that possibility for
us programmers as it's not like you could open a "virtual shop" with code you
worked on on your own because it interested you and people could see and "ohh,
this distributed database election system by teatraodonpuffer looks nice,
what's the sticker price? sure, I'll buy it"

------
chirau
Well, this weekend I'm particular happy. A private equity guy in NY paid me
$150 an hour to 'learn PHP immediately and fix his site.' He paid me for all
48 hours because he assumed 'I ate, drank, are his job the whole weekend.' I
told him it was too much, I usually charge $100 an hour. He said he hopes I'll
be available whenever he needs me. Best believe I will.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Reminds me of a time I was Skyped at 4 AM by a previous client who needed my
help. Told him it was 4 AM in my timezone and I was well past when I needed to
sleep. Offered an hour at double my usual rate for 10 minutes of work, you bet
I was wide awake.

~~~
chirau
Yeah, in my case, ithe work was very very simple. Slightly tedious because I
had to type up lookup tables, but once I familiarized myself with php, it
didn't take 5 hours.

------
J-dawg
I'm a programmer who doesn't really get to program. I work for a consulting
company. Most development work is off-shored, which means most roles for UK
staff are more client facing.

Right now I'm building a web front end for a bloated piece of enterprise
software. There's no technical difficulty, it's just frustrating and boring. I
can't leave to work in 'proper' software development because I don't have the
relevant experience, and because I keep being given crappy jobs like this, I'm
not getting the experience I need. Plus my educational background isn't great.
To top it all off, I came to programming late, I'm already in my 30s and I'm
painfully aware of time ticking away.

I'm in a strange mental state where I feel simultaneously bored and burned-
out. The day job saps my motivation so much I find it virtually impossible to
work on side projects in my spare time.

I don't think my experience is very typical of the high-achieving HN crowd,
but if anyone has been in this position and can offer any advice I'd be hugely
appreciative.

~~~
littletimmy
Why do you think you came to programming "late" if you are in your 30s? Have
you faced any age discrimination?

~~~
J-dawg
I don't think I've ever faced any direct age discrimination, I'm just aware
that there's no reason why anyone would hire me when they can have an
enthusiastic 22 year old who's fresh out of uni.

~~~
forgetsusername
> _here 's no reason why anyone would hire me when they can have an
> enthusiastic 22 year old who's fresh out of uni._

Have you worked with many "modern-day" 22 year-olds lately? Unless the company
is intentionally looking for naivete as a trait, there are plenty of reasons
to hire someone with more experience and maturity.

------
AndrewUnmuted
Though I've been writing software for 15 years, and have worked in the
technology industry exclusively throughout my life, I have spent only one year
of my professional career as a developer. My job was always a
managerial/project management kind of situation - I have equal competency in
technology and media/content, so I could always carve out a niche. Then, one
day, I decided to abandon my cushy job at Amazon to become a developer for
startups that I was interested in working for.

I spent all of 2015 pursuing this goal - it was a mistake. I loved the work,
but really, really disliked the work environment with which I had to put up.
Startup environments are noisy, and I could never really hear myself think.
Despite all the flashy tools like Slack, Trello, and Google Docs, my teams
never got quite as much done as the enterprise environments running Office
2010 that I was growing sick and tired of the previous year. Other team
members would routinely stay home, not coming in to join the team during the
work day. Scrum was held remotely every single day. Frankly, it was a mess.

I am now back in a cushy, boring office job. Didn't have the stomach for this
insane brogrammer NYC startup culture. 5/10.

~~~
johnnyfaehell
I think you're problem was going for a start up and not going for Enterprise.
Majority of start ups have no idea what they're doing.

~~~
dev360
There is still something to be learned from startups. I worked enterprise for
most of my career and it was always the same story. Ambitious projects, large
teams, lots of red tape + politics, inferior technologies; and by and large
'UX' that was largely an afterthought.

I'm still incredibly thankful for the experience, but the lesson was not in
actually learning how to do things right. Instead it instilled in me a deep
yearning and desire to overcome organizational dysfunction, mediocrity and to
overcome technical ineptitude.

Startups is a different animal. You ship things fast, and for the most part,
you work with teams that care deeply about all aspects of the product, working
with the best tools for the job. Sure, theres cargo cult tendencies - the
beginning of this paragraph is evidence. The downside of many startups is that
you move so fast that many times you never get to perfect anything, and the
constant pivoting in unsuccessful startups tend to wear you down over time.

All in all, I learned much more about shipping code, adapting to the unknown
and building products from startups than I did in enterprise.

~~~
AndrewUnmuted
This is a very insightful comment. I found myself realizing daily, during my
2015 adventure, that the likelihood of success for me would have dropped
precipitously if I did not already have a solid idea of how to handle version
control, test-driven development, etc.

The speed at which startups move is a cause for concern, however, because many
of the people with which I worked were simply "lean in" types, and would have
been able to get a job doing just about anything. The problem was that many of
these ninja rockstar 10x efficiency evangelists didn't really work with Git
well and didn't really value the command line. Linux knowledge was very
minimal.

I worked for four startups, and found that only one of them had ONE employee
who had a solid computer science background.

------
abalashov
I'm not. I have been doing it since I was 9. I pulled most of the heavy-duty,
hardcore all-nighters during my teenage years; I grew up writing C, and was
hacking on socket code and compiling kernels when I was 12-16. So by the time
I was 20, I was utterly burned out. Most of my peers discovered the crazy,
hyper-caffinated, 24/7 techie life in university years, and still have a few
years of this insanity left in them. I don't.

I'm 30 now, and feel like I've been running on fumes ever since. I am still
interested in software architecture at a conceptual level, of course, but
suffer from immense fatigue at the keystroke-based deliverables aspect. It's
always a motivational struggle to write even a little code, with few
exceptions. I procrastinate horrifically, because I find it tedious.

Some of it may be because my work entails dealing with fairly uninteresting
and unexciting things, and some of it is the cash flow schizophrenia of
constantly operating at the very margins of economic survival, but above all
else, it's just psychological, cognitive and physical fatigue. I'm also fairly
extroverted and have always been interested in the social and political
dimension of what I'm doing, but, through eight years of self-employment, have
pigeonholed myself into a solipsistic role without a collective--rewarding to
those who crave peace, quiet and code, but not at all catering to my
particular reward centres. I love selling what I do, but the dreaded
implementation of what I just sold is like pulling teeth. Deprived of a
collective, recognition, the competitive aspect, and any sense of larger
purpose, it's a real challenge to get myself to work on code.

In retrospect, I probably would have been better off sticking it out in
corporate America and tracking myself into technical management. However, I
left the employment world at age 22 and decided to hole up in a business model
where I'd be most economically rewarded if I could get myself to write more
than a few lines a week.

I am deeply specialised in a niche vertical that can pay well, so one would
think the money would keep me going (I can easily bill $250/hr for what I do),
but it doesn't. Some of that is a business and life problem, but some of it is
that I just don't care enough to pound code anymore at virtually any price--
though, of course, that's not to say that taking the bricks of economic stress
that come with a bootstrapped eight-year consulting-turned-product death march
off wouldn't help.

I still do it, but it's taken me five years to write a slightly half-assed
software suite that an energetic and motivated programmer could have done in
far, far less time.

~~~
spoiler
Have you considered that there's something wrong with you emotionally? You
sound like you're constantly under stress and even anxious about your economic
survival. Those two can very effectively dig you into a slippery hole of
depression which would just amplify them and you'll falling into that
depression even further.

It's like a loop that nearly impossible to break out of, and even when you do
returning to a comfortable life rhythm will take considerable effort, too.

Also, for a lot of people there is no rock-bottom, you'll just keep slipping
deeper and deeper.

So, my advice is to ask for professional help—which I realise is one of those
"easy to say; hard to do" type of advices, but try to ask for support from
your friends—and try discovering something new, which can be completely
outside of IT!

Another thing that you can try—which is very effective, but doesn't require
you to dish out money is downloading some CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy)
tracks or guidance applications. There is quite a few of them and they can
help a lot (although they might not be as effective as with professional
guidance).

Also, something "odd" which I can also recommend is 7cups.com (which is an
online therapy platform; you can have 1-1 sessions or group sessions, it's
great if you need to just talk to someone). You can even try becoming a guide
(called a "Listener"), helping others can also help you (and this especially
true, if you're an extrovert).

~~~
abalashov
1\. If there are objective sources of stress (e.g. problems of economic
survival), I don't perceive that to be an emotional problem. Emotional
problems, as I would use the term, are problems which are strictly endogenous
in nature.

2\. I generally go about my business just fine and am quite functional. But
since the OP asked if I'm happy per se doing software work...

3\. I'd probably be happier in engineering management, or in technical sales
and marketing (i.e. of the highly consultative sort). I seem to have a pretty
healthy - even cheerful - appetite for those things, when the opportunity to
do them arises.

I'm not depressed. I'm just beyond burned out on coding as a mode of
existence, and then some.

~~~
spoiler
> 1\. If there are objective sources of stress (e.g. problems of economic
> survival), I don't perceive that to be an emotional problem. Emotional
> problems, as I would use the term, are problems which are strictly
> endogenous in nature.

I meant psychological problems rather than emotional, but I feel like those
two are intertwined, anyway. Sorry for the confusion.

Being burnt-out is also a type of stress. What I meant to say is that, if
you're constantly under stress it can have an impact on your
emotional/psychological state as well, and you shouldn't underestimate the
damage psychological stress can do to your personality.

~~~
abalashov
Duly noted! But the question was about whether I'm happy working as a
programmer, not whether there are large, existential and cosmological life
issues to solve here apart from and beyond that.

------
restalis
After a decade of doing it, I'm trying to get away from it.

To detail a little bit, I got into programming computers out of passion. The
pay and the life was an after-thought. I'm still passionate and that is both a
gift and a curse.

It's a curse because it slowly consumed me, my life, and much of anything else
besides computers, throwing my life out of balance many times before, and each
time I had to go to lengths to become "normal" again. Even now I have things
in my (life's) program that I had to force them there to keep me straight and
healthy.

It's a gift because despite reckoning all the damage it did in my life it
still brings me joy. I'm like a sort of junkie in this regard, and now just
like a junkie I feel the pain of getting away from it.

Now, looking back, the funny thing is, if I have to chose again something to
invest into like I did twenty years ago, I'll repeat my choice (for better and
worse). The take away would probably be that if you get into it and you're
passionate about it then your passion will serve you well (feeding you with
happiness), and if you're less passionate about it then your lack of passion
will also serve you well (by keeping you human, the job itself being a
relatively healthy one).

------
Joeri
I have been programming for 22 years. There have been times where i hated it
and wanted to get rid of my computers. However, presently I'm really happy
working as a programmer. The key for me is curiosity. How do things work? How
should i solve this problem? If I'm not curious then I'm not having fun, and
if I'm not having fun I'm not happy. My job at present doesn't feel like a job
because I'm learning all about Hadoop and solving new and interesting problems
with it. I'm sure I'll have down periods again, but i know i can find ways to
regain my curiosity by switching tech stack or problem domain and get through
those rough patches.

~~~
LoSboccacc
How's the job market 20 years down the line? I'm ten years in the field and
trying to switch into management, becase growth prospects and scarcity of
senior opportunities scares the hell out of me.

Basically I live in constant fear of the day I'll hear 'overqualified' at a
interview

~~~
Joeri
Only half of those 22 years have been spent as a professional programmer, so
I'm still young enough for it to not be a problem. Besides, i have spent my
entire professional career at the same company which is big enough for there
to be enough internal opportunities to switch focus. Still, if it ever does
get to be an issue I'll just become self-employed. I doubt that age matters
all that much if you're a consultant / contractor.

I have been offered a management track several times and always say no. I
don't think i would be happy doing it.

------
bechampion
I've installed my first linux(Slackware) at the age of 14 (im 35 now) .. since
then I think i've been "programming" until i started working , when it became
the thing that pay the bills. Now... i think it's like everything in life ...
i have bad days and good days , I've worked for places where i felt challenged
and for other places where i was in only for the money (that never worked) ,
at the moment it kind of sucks ... I'm only in for the money (so is everyone
else) so the job i do is not very challenging leaving a feeling of sort of
emptiness , but as i said , it will change ... I've been here before and i
know it can change very quickly . So all of you that feel quite down , have
some patience and make a move , things will get better.

~~~
sumitppawar
Same thing happening to me, in my good days I worked with giant tech people,
and I left them because of money and another reason.Now each and every day I
feels like doing nothing, don't know how to get out. Just looking where to go,
where to concentrate. I really love programming but now days I feel Im lost.

~~~
bechampion
It's a complex place to be , I'm looking for other jobs that seems to be the
light at the end of the tunnel , and it makes you feel good that you're
working towards a solution in a way, good luck!

~~~
sumitppawar
Thanks buddy !

------
juandazapata
I love it. I've been programming since I was 12 (I'm 32 now). For me, the key
to avoid burning out, is to constantly keep learning new things. I currently
work remotely for a NYC dev agency, and we have a massively good team.

I have a couple of side projects, and one of them is generating an income of
$500/week. Just keep building stuff during the weekends. Try to learn
marketing, UX, UI, etc. Apply those new skills to your side project, and
iterate again.

It's also important to not work in isolation. The most effective way to become
a better programmer and keep learning things, is to pair constantly with
better programmers than you are.

I spend about ~14h/day in front of a computer. If I don't enjoy what I do,
then I'd be wasting my life.

~~~
disruptalot
How did you fall into side projects like that? I've been doing some side
projects and while I could comfortably do all the mentioned activities, I
don't even dream that it would turn profitable one day. Do you have some sort
of method to determine these projects you work on?

~~~
juandazapata
I co-founded a startup and sold it ~3 years ago. There's no secret in turning
something into profit. Just put your thing out there and ask for feedback.

At the end, users won’t care about the underlying technologies used in your
startup.

They don’t care about what programming language you used. They don’t care if
your website is a Single Page Application or you used Turbolinks. They don’t
care if you have a micro-services oriented architecture or if you created a
monolith.

They only care if you solve their pain or not. And they will pay you if you do
a good job. That’s all.

If you build the wrong product, it won’t matter how many sound technical
decisions you made along the road. Technical decisions are important to keep
the team morale high, and to maintain momentum and speed, but your users don’t
care about that. That's all there is. Really.

If your users don't like your product, get feedback and go back to the drawing
board. Iterate.

Read a book or two about marketing, experiment and learn. Bad products win all
the time, not because they are better, but because they are better marketed.

------
peterhartree
9/10

I'd say that's roughly half because I enjoy the work and half because over the
years I've got better at looking after myself, being self-aware and
cultivating positive habits.

For me, the big wins have been:

(1) Regular exercise (daily cardio, weight training 3x a week)

(2) Daily mindfulness meditation.

(3) Flexible hours, remote working.

In some circumstances, (3) can be hard to negotiate. But (1) and (2) are up to
you.

See also this excellent survey of positive psychology:
[https://www.coursera.org/learn/happiness/](https://www.coursera.org/learn/happiness/)

------
dacracot
I'm 33 year veteran of programming. I'm more or less 7 years from retirement.
I've worked as a civil servant, at two startups, a large corporation, and for
a three letter government agency. I made a decision early in my career not to
move into management, but to advance to the "team lead" position at most.

I love and hate my job every day. I have no better time than when I am coding,
but I hate frameworks pushed in lieu of design and architecture. I am a
polyglot (C, Java, SQL, PL/SQL, XPath, JavaScript, XSLT, bash) and enjoy
coding in all of them. I am looking to learn a few more (Python, Lua) giving
the time. When a team pushes something like an ORM in order to be "pure Java"
it makes me sad since it is seldom accompanied by rational comparison for
design factors and true reasoning. I make a good living, well above average,
since it is our industry that is driving the world economy. I believe it will
continue to do so for some time. My personal motivation to do insanely great
things is nearly expired. I have not the will to fight for better
implementations with my current employment. I'm generally too tired at the end
of the day to work on my personal projects, but not entirely. If it were not
for the cut in pay, I would love to start teaching programming. Maybe I can do
it part time after retirement.

In re-reading my text prior to posting, it seems like a description of burn
out. Perhaps, but I am not unhappy, just unmotivated by the mundane nature of
my work. I work to pay my bills and make it to retirement, not to change the
world. I hope that whomever reads this can find both motivation and
compensation. Good luck.

~~~
robertcarter
I'm at the start of my career but am starting to notice some of the downsides
you've experienced. Any advice on how to avoid some of the trappings?

~~~
dacracot
Easier said than done, but I believe you need to be in charge. This can take
many forms, but I lean toward self employment creating a product the customers
use as a black box. Let me elaborate on the points of that last statement...
"Self employment": I talking small company where you are in charge. Trying to
be an entrepreneur in a large corporate setting or another founder's startup
means that at the end of the day, they decide what is next, not you.
"Customers use as a black box": Again, this is about who is in charge. If the
customer is familiar with the inner workings or the possible features, they
will leverage their investment in you to change priorities. What does this
mean? You need to find a way to produce a product that people will pay you
for, and pay you enough to support yourself and others (depending upon the
complexity of the product). As you can see, I value self determination above
anything else (as far as work goes). My motivation currently is fear of loss
(albeit very little of it) of employment. I don't think that would change much
if I were "self employed creating a product the customers use as a black box",
but it would pivot much more closely to my choices than choices made for me.

------
aaronbrethorst
Programming is a means to an end for me, not an end unto itself. I like to
make products, and—in many cases—the path of least resistance is to write code
to make that happen.

As a result, my happiness as a programmer is directly correlated to how much
user impact I see in the work I'm doing.

I also love my immediate coworkers, which helps immeasurably :)

edit: I'm in my 13th year of professional software development, and I have
worked at a company where I can reasonably expect a 40 hour work week for the
past 2.5 years. My stress level is at an all time low, which helps my
happiness, too.

------
onmywayout
After 21 years in the business I am finally starting to realize that I want it
to be something that it isn't. In the past, I have always been interested in
programming as a means of creative expression. The last thing a programming
team wants, however, is creative expression. You are successful as a
programmer to the degree that you are able to make your thoughts, your
solutions, your algorithms, and your code consistent with those of the rest of
your team. Creative expression is ground away through application of best
practices and through code reviews.

I have a healthier relationship with my work, and am thus more successful, now
that I view it as assembly-line work and don't try to express any creativity
at my job. That said, I don't find the work to be the least bit fulfilling,
and I am working to make a career change.

I find programming to be an easy path to a steady, but ultimately empty
living. I would only recommend the field to those who want nothing more from
their job than a paycheck and who find meaning and fulfillment entirely in the
nonwork parts of their lives.

------
codingdave
I loved it when I was younger. The older I get, the less satisfying it is. At
this point, I just tolerate it. I realize more and more how damaging it has
been to spend 25 years sitting at a computer. It is not all bad - the career
is great for supporting my family and the life we have built. I work with
decent people. But I do not intend to take another programming job after my
current one.

~~~
rocky1138
What are you going to do with your username?

~~~
askafriend
Make an offer

------
foobarbazz
I'm not, at least not really. Started to code at the age of 15, been doing
this for 16 years everyday now. Currently working in a big corp, where you
have the feeling that people won't let you bring any positive change, won't
let some innovation coming to their desks, you just have to do what people
have been doing for years because "hey we've been doing it for years for a
reason". It just feels like trying and trying but nothing will change.

Its been pounding on me for years now. I have no reason to complain yet I feel
sad, empty, I reckon I'm useless at my job and yet my boss is way more than
happy of what I'm accomplishing, I don't understand.

I wanted something great from my career, I thought I'd be surrounded by
passionate people, but to this day it's been a huge joke, you just have to do
what someone higher in the food chain tells you to do and use that bullsh*t
bloatware because he's got some present from another bigcorp placing its
product making you more entreprisey and more agile, to no avail. You just have
to accept choices made by someone. You just have to contemplate others on the
market using something exciting while you're stuck with Java 6 with no one
around you wanting to move on.

I feel I have no reason to complain, because life could be so much more
painful, I'm well paid and I could be working on an assembly line for way less
or living in a country where fear for your life is the only thing in your mind
all day long. But... It's just that it's not the big dream I was expecting,
and I feel that for someone not working in the bay area but following HN all
day long, I'm suffering from an immense sadness of not being part of it, it's
like I'm just watching people succeed on my TV screen, eating junk food. I
know this is a biased vision and a lot of people aren't happy there too, I
just can't help feeling this.

------
throwaway456123
8/10

Pros: \- I get paid a lot of money doing what I did as a hobby when I was
younger

\- I come in whenever I want and leave whenever I want

\- I can work from home whenever I want

\- My work is intellectually stimulating

\- My coworkers are smart and interesting

\- I get to play with dogs at work

\- If I don't like my job, I can get 5 other offers within a week

Cons: \- I still make less than I would have if I pursued law, finance, or
medicine

\- Most interviews are some sort of hostile, cargo-cult nonsense

\- Those 5 offers would not offer me anything significantly different from
each other or my current job

\- Nearly all of my coworkers care more about playing with the latest
technologies and building unnecessary frameworks than actually making things

\- The best companies/jobs are all in Silicon Valley or SF, whereas I want to
live in NYC

I don't really like the "industrialized software development" model most
companies follow. Wherever I work, I am 2-5x more productive than the average
developer. When I start, I usually am on a team with people who are similarly
productive. But, as our success grows, we hire more people who are less
productive (against my wishes), and the people I used to work with either
leave or get promoted to management, which means I don't get to work with them
anymore. I also get promoted to management, which means that I spend less time
programming and more time doing things I don't enjoy.

Yes, I get that it's hard to hire exceptional people. I get that companies
would rather consist of many easy-to-replace mediocre people than a few hard-
to-replace exceptional people. I get that, at a certain size, predictability
matters more than speed, and having more people on the team allows their
idiosyncrasies to cancel out.

I just wish that I could work on a small team of really smart, really well-
compensated people. Does such a thing exist? Should I take Google's job offer
(from what I hear, they over-staff every team)? Should I look into hedge funds
(not super interested in building stuff I can't use)? Should I say "fuck it"
and try to get a job as a quant or trader (I've gotten offers in the past)?

------
wanda
As a programmer, very happy. As a lone dev propping up a design agency as it
clumsily transitions from print to web, developing static sites and WordPress
junk, not so much.

Occasionally something interesting crops up but I generally want to find an
in-house role working on a web app or something.

I don't have to be happy because I am putting my partner through university so
they can pursue an academic career and putting food on the table.

------
democracy
I am doing contracts (enterprise java), it pays well so my wife doesn't have
to work and takes care of 2 kids while paying mortgage. Happy? I believe it is
about the people who surround you at work - where you spend most of the time -
i like my team and many other people in my current company.

The work is boring in general but i am trying to make it more interesting in
getting more involved in production investigations (can be exciting quite
often) and helping other people at work find some crazy bug or better
understand something...

------
yason
Working as a programmer, very happy.

Working, not necessarily that happy.

Programming is a manifestation of curiosity. Therefore, programming is a spark
that, once ignited, probably never really dies. You can suffocate it and
pretend it's out but when things free up again it will come back. If I
wouldn't be working I would simply be programming on my spare time more than I
do now. I can only speak for 30 years down the line, though, so YMMV.

Working is a whole another thing. It's a great opportunity to work on
interesting and challenging things. It's also an opportunity to see those
interesting and challenging things serve goals you don't find so interesting
and challenging. That's obviously because the owner of the company gets to
decide what the company makes. The problem is decent income and good benefits.
There's really no other way to fix that problem except to stop working and get
your income from a company of your or your investment returns.

Much of what I do at work is not programming even if I am a programmer. Most
of it is communication, maybe comes down to fixing bugs so that other people
can continue their work, and then there's a slice of actual development in
between, at times. It's not necessarily development that would always be fun
but it's still interesting and challenging. I could imagine doing something
else but the nature of work wouldn't change except that the payoff would
likely be lower. I could work on something else but not as an employee.

------
cauterized
Well, it's intellectually engaging, and (if you have halfway decent
ergonomics) not particularly physically taxing.

Is it what I'd do with my time if I didn't have to make a living? Maybe a few
hours a week.

Is it more enjoyable than most of the alternative ways I could imagine making
a living? Hell yeah!

Does it have its exhausting, hellish days and political bullshit? Doesn't
everything?

Could I stand to do it in a bureaucratic corporate setting, doing nothing but
maintaining a small corner of some horrible enterprise monstrosity and filing
TPS reports? Probably not.

How happy am I doing it in the small company / startup setting I've been in
for the last 15 years, with plenty of autonomy and a decent proportion of
green-field work? About as happy as I'm going to be working any "day job".

------
art0rz
I think in general programmers tend to be happier when they are constantly
learning new things, so I set myself up for a job which is constantly
challenging. I work in the advertisement and campaigns industry (no, not
tracking or banner ads) where we build large campaigns for global brands with
technologies such as VR and WebGL. In general, I think we build the type of
projects that tend to get a lot of hate on HN, but it's really challenging and
fun and I've won many awards (Cannes Lions, dozens of FWAs, Awwwards, etc.)

Over the past 3 years working in this industry I've learned more things about
more topics than I have in the past 10 and I don't see this changing any time
soon.

I've worked for several different companies over the years; a Java shop that
builds large web-shops and corporate websites, a local startup focusing on
science, a local radio station maintaining their site. All of them bored me
after 6 to 12 months of learning their tooling and technologies. Many tech
companies tend to stagnate on their stack and are afraid or too invested in it
to change which is a huge contrast to where I'm working now.

Sure, the work I do isn't saving the world or disrupting a stagnant industry
like many startups claim to do, but it's certainly challenging and keeps me
happy as a programmer.

------
shawnps
I enjoy it, but only if I'm treated with respect, not micro-managed, and
trusted to do my job. Ironically when managers set deadlines and add process,
it demotivates me and the code ends up shipping later. The silver lining,
however, is that I learn what not to do if I decide to start my own company (I
have a note on my PC called, "Mistakes from previous companies that you
shouldn’t make"). So in general, even if I'm unhappy at a job, I try to
consider it a learning experience and move on to the next thing.

Edit: I should add that working remotely has been absolutely fantastic and
adds to why I enjoy being a programmer. I feel lucky to work in a profession
that allows this amount of flexibility.

~~~
unfortunateface
Would you be willing to share your list of mistakes with the group?

------
jboggan
Pretty damn happy. I'm a little over 3 years into my career programming and
I've just started at Google which has been a goal of mine for awhile. The
challenge is pretty immense (in terms of having to learn so many new languages
and pieces of tech) and the compensation is unbeatable. Years ago I never
would have imagined I could make such a good life for myself programming.

I have also met some wonderful friends and intellectual peers through my
programming jobs, and I'm even trying to write my own language now for laughs.
I'm trying to encourage everyone with the aptitude to get into it because it
is rewarding in many different ways.

~~~
i336_
Ooh, new languages are always interesting to know about. Do you have any
sharable things about the design or implementation? :D

~~~
jboggan
I'm still at an early design phase but I intend to be loud about it when I am
at a sharable point. I'm building it as a "rapid prototyping" language that
combines some of the best (and to some, worst) features of J, Perl, and Ruby.
One of the design principles is that every Project Euler problem will be a
sub-80 character one-liner.

------
maxaf
Being forced to work for a living is absolutely the worst thing that could
ever happen to a human being. As far as that goes, I would do almost anything
to break free of this yoke and enjoy my life.

Alas, reality is only what it is. I suppose writing code in an office beats
manual labor or a life of crime.

------
hugovie
As a programmer, I see some benefits that make me happy. I can list here some
of them:

\- I have ability to automate something. I can tell the PC import data
automatically instead of doing by manual, or make apps let me store some
sensitive data that I don't trust anyone else (and their apps, of course).

\- I have opportunity to be a digital nomad, work everywhere over the world.
Yeah that's just my vision, but now I can work everywhere in my country.
Travel and work, perfect couple, especially when I'm single now. I'm trying to
do all things that a husband cannot do, before I find my spouse out :D.

\- I have skills to turn my ideas to real products which may help someone. Now
I'm an iOS Engineer, and yes, making several apps, not big ones but helpful
for somebody. But at the first, I always try to resolve my problems, then
believe that someone may in trouble like me, they may find my apps useful.

\- Because of making apps, I found a romantic approach that I can give my
friends as I made an app exclusively for a girl, a drawing tool let us remind
our moments in the past.

------
enahs-sf
My cynical elevator pitch is, we're internet construction workers on a good
day and Internet janitors on a bad one. That said, I chose this life at 17 and
haven't looked back. I'd be miserable as a lawyer or some other professional.
Programmers are treated like professionals, but we get a lot more leeway when
it comes to how we live our lives.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm happy, but working at a startup is hard
and that can sometimes be depressing.

------
synesso
9/10 - Interesting problems; working remotely, to my own schedule; living in
paradise; pants optional.

Prior to my current gig it was

8/10 - Interesting problems; well fitted-out office with great people to work
with and coffee nearby; the opportunity to grow technical and people skills
and mentor.

In the 90s I worked in public service doing accounting and marketing gigs. I'd
rate those jobs about 3-4/10\. So I'm pretty happy with the transition.

------
luu
Right now? I'm pretty unhappy. I don't think I want to talk about exactly why
publicly while I'm still in this job, but to give you an idea of how bad the
situation is, literally all of my friends have been trying to get me to quit
for months, with the exception of people who have given up because they think
I must be insane.

On the other hand, I have a decade of full-time experience and I've been happy
for about seven out of ten years. All things considered, that's not too bad.
The other way to look at it is that I've had maybe five roles at one company,
two another another, and one at a third, and I'd say four of those have been
good. That's only 4/8, but it's possible to bail on bad roles and stay in good
ones, which is how it's worked out to being good 70% of the time. Considering
how other folks I know feel about their job, I can't complain about being
happy 70% of the time.

In retrospect, some of my decisions have been really bad. If I could do it
over again, I'd bail more quickly on bad roles and stay in good ones for
longer.

My dumbest mistake was the time I was in an amazing position (great manager &
team, really interesting & impactful work), except for two problems: an
incredibly arrogant and disruptive person whose net productivity was close to
zero who would derail all meetings and weird political shenanigans way above
my pay grade. When I transferred, management offered to transfer the guy the
guy to another team so I'd stay and I declined because I felt bad about the
idea of kicking someone off the team.

From what I've heard, the problematic dude ended up leaving the team later
anyway, so not having him kicked off didn't make any difference, and the
political stuff resolved itself around the same time. The next role I ended up
in was the worst job I've ever had. And the one after that is my current job,
which is, well, at least it's no the worst job I've ever had. Prior to leaving
the amazing job, I thought that it was really easy to find great jobs, so it
wasn't a big deal to just go find another one. Turns out it's not always so
easy :-). If I hadn't bailed on that and just fixed it, I'd be 4/6 and I could
say I was happy with my job 80% of the time. Oh well, lesson learned. Looking
back, I was incredibly lucky to get the roles that I did, but that same luck
blinded me to the fact that it was luck and that there are some really bad
jobs out there.

~~~
mordrax
4/6 is 66%, and yes there are some _really_ bad environments to work in,
mostly related to people.

------
dfraser992
After 25 years of this, I now see the logic in communism (though it is
idealistic). So no more working for suits and getting nothing while they
extract the profit from the surplus labor I produce. Capitalism is all about
exploiting or being exploited, and I haven't the temperament for it, given
that I've taken too many red pills by now.

So ... it's going to be contribute to OSS (because the creative part of still
worth something), become a truck driver, and write plays in my spare time...
Art is the only thing that means anything in the long run - the fruits of
business mean nothing, especially in IT given how the "churn" is less than a
decade.

~~~
chilicuil
Completely agree, I'd prefer working in OSS full-time and accept a minimum
wage to keep looking for gigs to maintain my basic necessities.

------
naveen99
I love programming. I started programming to automate my work as a radiologist
in residency. I don't get paid for programming, but i think it helped me get a
nice academic job when market for radiologists was bad. I program mostly as a
hobby and as a way of life. But i help out my colleagues by sharing some of my
software tools or sometimes just solving their data problems from time to
time. Most of the time i am collecting computing power, bandwidth, storage
capacity, and ofcourse collecting and learning from data...

------
manish_gill
3 years since I graduated from my CS program. Enjoyed the internship and the
first year as a python developer. Then I had the bad luck of landing a Node.js
+ MongoDB project. I've been hating on programming (particularly JS) ever
since. Just like @abalshov, I procrastinate as much as I can. Side projects
and Open Source contributions have dropped to practically zero. It's
just...tiring. Assembling X library with Y framework and then spend 10 hours
trying to figure out that one bug. This isn't what I got into CS for.

The pay isn't amazing either. Though I'm good at what I do (a lot better than
some colleagues who are getting paid much better), I just can't get excited
for yet another startup job (which is where I've been most of my career) which
is working on a non-problem.

The work needs to be _interesting_ for me to be motivated. So far, it's
mundane. And given I'm not in the US or any western country, I haven't found
many companies working on interesting stuff here. It's all ideas copied from
the valley and hammered into the ecosystem here.

Perhaps I need some inspiration or some creative idea to put things into
perspective. But yeah. Things could be a lot better. I've recently started
getting into Statistics/ML and learning Clojure on the side as a distraction
and that's been going well.

------
agentultra
In a word, yes.

Is there an implication that work should be fun and fulfilling so as to make
me happy? Work does not make me happy. It affords me the money I need to keep
my family healthy and safe. Happiness comes from within: art, literature,
mathematics, science, family, friends... life.

I just make money by selling some portion of my waking life to the pursuits of
others by helping them realize their ideas in software.

The ideas I have are just not marketable. My curiosity hasn't led me to dream
about ways I can extract rents from financial tools or make advertising more
profitable. I find myself to have more in common with Donald Knuth or John
Conway than Larry Ellison or Bill Gates. If I could find a way to work with
hard, fundamental problems or pursue hunches that may have no fiscal utility
I'd be happy as a clam at high water. Alas I never had the privilege and
opportunity to pursue a career in academia and, given what I understand of the
current climates there, probably wouldn't find it fulfilling either.

So I content myself with tinkering and following my own hunches and try to
maximize the dollars-per-hour exchange I make so I can spend less time with
the mundane world of markets and value and return to the land of whimsy.

 _Update_ To clarify, I don't want to put myself in the same esteem as my
heroes, Knuth or Conway. What I do find in common with them is a curiosity and
propensity for selecting problems merely because they are interesting and with
disregard for external factors such as economic utility.

------
AsyncAwait
I'm a final year undergrad with a real passion for programming using modern,
well-designed languages like Rust, Swift or Elixir and I enjoy it so much that
I spend most of my free time contributing to open-source.

Lately however, I've heard a lot of "I hate programming..." kind of talk from
my classmates and by talking to them, I came to realise that most of them are
in just for the promise of a good pay, that they do basically no programming
or side projects outside of labs and that they had an illusion that the basics
of C++ the university taught them is the whole deal and are only now
discovering memory management, templates and such, which makes them
frustrated. Also, very few of them have tried anything outside of C++, mostly
because they didn't know anything else existed and didn't bother looking.

This frustrates me a great deal, since I quite frankly think that if pay is
your only concern, you're better off in law, medicine, the finance/banking
industry, or hell - oil & gas management for that matter.

This is the reason that the tech industry over here, (UK/not London) is so
old-fashioned and extremely boring, new players not able to spring up; because
these recent graduate students everyone's hiring can't do anything more
complex than what a repetitive Java shop can offer.

------
pluma
Extremely happy and thankful. I think it depends more on where you work than
what you call yourself or how much you make.

I enjoyed programming as a kid but after learning more about how much
programmers were often exploited (especially in the games industry) and having
a few bad experiences doing small contract jobs I figured it wasn't for me.

Luckily I somehow stumbled into it again half-way through university and
started doing full-time contracting.

With some of my clients, work was a nightmare. They'd demand the impossible
and wouldn't be satisfied no matter how much effort and thought I poured into
it. The work was unrewarding and I constantly felt like a fraud.

With others it was complete bliss. I got to work with clever people who are
good at what they're doing and learned a lot from them. My input was
appreciated and I was given a lot of control over my work. The teams were
great and the people I enjoyed spending my lunch breaks with.

Over time I earned enough money to be able to search for more of the latter
kind of work while turning down more of the former. These days I can pretty
much pick and choose and make sure to keep an option to walk away if I'm not
certain about a job I'm taking.

I have never been happier. But if you had asked me when I was in long-term
contracts with the worst clients, I would have told you a very different
story.

------
AndrewDucker
Pretty darn happy.

It's inside work with no heavy lifting, I get paid way above the median wage,
and I get to intermittently learn new things, and build new stuff.

I'm not a constantly ecstatic ball of happiness, but that sounds more like a
drug-induced dream than something that real people get to be. Instead I'm
"mostly satisfied, with occasional peaks, and some bits that annoy me." \- and
that's a lot better than the non-programming jobs I've had.

------
Udo
I'm in my forties now, I've been working as a programmer since I was 18. I
love writing code, I love doing it as a job and in private projects. I could
not imagine my life without having this skill. I haven't gotten rich off it,
but I very well could have, and it's still a profession where monetary success
and upward mobility are common.

Writing code for work can be a mixed bag, though, since you don't necessarily
always get to work on things you like or in a manner conducive to
productivity. But even in "not-fun" projects, the reason why I often perform
better than other programmers is because I love it. As a rule I have learned
that people who are going it nine-to-five with zero actual interest in the
skill set aren't as happy or as good.

So how happy you are working as a programmer depends on many, many factors. Is
programming a creative outlet for you? Are you working on something you care
about? Are you getting paid and appreciated? Are you susceptible to burnout?
All things being equal, if you already _are_ a programmer, chances are you'll
eventually be happy _working_ as a programmer.

------
revanx_
I'm happy if I follow this golden rule : "Premature optimization is the root
of all evil -- DonaldKnuth"

I so often spiral into an endless loop of "this could be done better, rewrite
from scratch, must have more decoupling!!".

~~~
nibnib
Perfect is the enemy of done!

------
amatxn
I've been programming for 15 years, since I was 21. It used to be my passion,
work, and hobby. Over the last 3 years I've gradually shifted from development
to managing projects and product development, and recently moved to the team
leader/manager.

Right now I really like the product and management side of the work, but the
technical / programmer side I am very burned out on. I used to spend my free
time consulting, coding, researching, and had dreams of starting my own
company. Now I want to go home and relax, work with my hands out in the
yard/garden.

I've been at the same company for 7 years now, we typically have enough
freedom and project variation to learn new skills and keep from being bored.
There are simply to many frameworks/languages to keep up with to stay
relevant. I don't see myself finding another development job after this one,
at least not without time off/a break. The money is great, and I've been
fortunate to save well, and we live will below our means.

Honestly, I'm working on a plan to be out of the industry by the time my
daughter graduates high school and I'm 45.

~~~
balls187
> Now I want to go home and relax, work with my hands out in the yard/garden.

I find that stuff you've mentioned to be a great complement to working in the
software field. Perhaps it's because we're exercising our creativity in new
ways, where we wouldn't necessarily be able to do in a routine software job
(there are only so many new challenges one faces day to day).

~~~
amatxn
Gardening is very enjoyable as is working on my home. Something very
gratifying about seeing your hard work in physical form versus virtual work.

------
grimman
Not in the least. I spent a good portion of the past 15 years trying
desperately to rekindle the flame that brought me into the business, but I
just couldn't seem to do it. As of November last year, I quit, and I'm now
back in school at the ripe old age of half_dead.

At present, I have no idea what the future has in store for me, but whatever
it is I hope it grants me some level of satisfaction at least.

------
ionised
I love programming (desktop software dev for an engineering consultancy), but
I have started to hate this company recently. It's my first dev job out of uni
and I have been here three years.

Everyone is really nice here, but it's the management. The boss acts like
we're in the 50's. Everyone must wear a shirt and tie, no headphones are
allowed because it's 'unprofessional', any talk of unions or the like is
'communism' and no plants allowed in the office because he doesn't like
plants.

Add to that we're woefully underpaid as developers. We tend to lose a lot of
developers after three or four years due to the pay and the slowness the
company has in switching to new technology and delivery models (web and mobile
apps are on our roadmap, we haven't even started implementing them and won't
for at least two or three more years) and they are generally replaced by
graduates, meaning the code base suffers as a result.

------
jlarocco
That's a difficult question to answer.

On one hand, it's a cushy job. I work from home almost whenever need to. I can
find remote work if that's not enough. I'm paid well. I get a decent vacation
time. It's easier than physical labor.

And I love to program. I enjoy solving problems and writing code to implement
it. I even enjoy debugging and tracking down bugs.

But at the same time, I haven't found working as a programmer to be very
enjoyable. It's rare that my interests and my work tasks intersect, so most of
the time I'm toiling away on projects I'm not really interested in, wishing I
was working on whatever small project I've come up with at home.

Also, as I've grown older I've become increasingly annoyed by the "culture"
around programming and computers.

TBH, I often wonder if I wouldn't be better off doing something else and just
programming at home in my spare time.

------
tway923jk
Not particularly.

I have few friends or hobbies. Most of my coworkers can't even hold a
conversation, much less go clubbing or play sports with me.

I've had chronic burning pain in both legs since age 14. The doctors say too
much computer usage led to poor core strength which damaged my spine.

I think computer use damaged my body as well as my social skills.

------
ebbv
Before my company switched to SCRUM/Agile and pair programming last November I
would have said like 4/10.

But right now it's a 9/10.

Formerly we were four separate web developers. Only consulting with each
other, and not really ever working together on projects. And two of the four
of us constantly had 6 or more projects we were juggling concurrently (I know,
right?) It was really rough, even with being able to work remote four days a
week and having a fair amount of autonomy, it was wearing thin.

Then we ran an experiment, two of us doing pair programming on a single
project. We loved it. Then the company sent some of us out for proper Scrum
Master training, and committed to doing SCRUM properly.

Since the switch we have become a cohesive team. We rotate partners every
sprint and we only work on one project at a time. I actually enjoy work now.
The whole team feels the same way.

------
jwdunne
I enjoy working as a programmer but I do not enjoy it as much as programming
as a hobby, which I do too.

I have found that my growing skills outpace the level of challenge provided in
my day job. I just think this is a fact of life when your work stems from your
hobby.

As an analogy, I think of someone who works with metals (e.g my father). The
type of work asked of him was routine stuff where as he was free to sculpt
cool gifts for his family. The unfortunate fact is that it's easier to make a
living doing routine stuff since those requirements are far more common.

Perhaps there is a company that would match skill growth with challenge growth
but somehow I think I'm in a sort-of 'limbo' where I'm not skilled enough or
hold the experience to work at those places so I must resign myself to the
less interesting jobs.

------
thex10
Really stoked!! I love what I do (front end, design, occasional dalliance
further back the stack). I taught myself HTML and CSS in my earlier years of
high school and kept building upon those skills through university. I actually
studied an unrelated field but getting an entry level job in it was difficult
even after a masters so started working in tech and it's a blast being able to
come into work every day, do an activity I love, and get paid more than I'd be
getting paid doing my credentialed field.

Some days I'm just in awe of how lucky I am.

I work for a nonprofit so we are more mission focused than the average company
and don't have to deal with certain kinds of bs to the same degree. My team is
great, I've got a nice range of people to learn from.

Now, time to get out of bed and go to work...

------
Pr0ducer
Super Happy. Happier than I have ever been in my working life, due in large
part to said job allowing me to enjoy not-working-life more than at any
previous point.

I was a Journalist, the video and multimedia producer for a medium market
newspaper. Pay was lower middle income level. Hours were flexible when
flexibility was an option, but revolved around an inflexible daily deadline.

I just spent my 4th weekend in a row snowboarding, and yesterday was 11" of
powder. As a remote employee, I still have deadlines, but they are from days
to months depending on the project. Pay is upper-middle income level. My boss
is great, smartest person I've ever called a boss, and extremely reasonable
and personable.

Right now, life is good.

------
shabbaa
Frustrated most of the day! But somehow strangely satisfied.

------
jeletonskelly
10/10 would choose career again. Just started my own consulting company at 30
years old. I get to work at 5:30 - 6:30am everyday because I can't wait to
start hacking and making awesome things that make my clients happy. I like to
swap between working on building stuff for my clients and a product and having
my own business gives me the time to do both.

I truly love programming and solving problems, so it never feels like work.
Well, that's not a completely true statement; not everything is going to be
fun and awesome, but 99% of the time it doesn't feel like work.

------
ThomaszKrueger
10/10\. Electric Engineer turned programmer, never looked back. I get to work
on a field for which there is absolutely no regulation, and mobility is very
high. I don't get paid as much as a lawyer or a doctor, but neither have their
stress level. I pretty much get to the office any time I want and leave any
time I want, or not at all if I decided to work from home. I get plenty of
time between project cycles, and over 30+ years learned how to establish
proper expectation on clients and managers, so it is very rare for me to get
in a crunch.

------
catwell
Happiness at work is not a figure, it's a curve over time. Programming has
high highs and rather low lows :)

When everything goes well, when I am working on code bases I like, on
interesting features or on Open Source software, I am pretty happy.

When I am tracking an obscure bug that annoys my users for days, in an obscure
proprietary code base and with a tight deadline approaching, I am somewhat
less happy.

Sometimes, it is a stressful job, especially when you are close to production
systems. But the rest of the time, it is so rewarding I would not for a second
consider doing something else.

------
eswat
I’m happy for the most part. When I am not happy is when I’m busy fighting
with time thieves, mostly bugs and oddities introduced by someone else working
on the same system that I would not have picked to work with if it was my
decision.

I’m at my peak happiness when I work on my own solo projects or on projects
where everyone is “one team, one dream”. Although I’ve built up some thick
skin over the users I’ve worked on too many projects with splintered goals
amongst team members, even well-meaning ones, that I start to think that I’m
too tired for that shit.

------
dccoolgai
I once met famous author Chaim Potok who said "You should never choose to be a
writer. You should only do it if there is nothing else you can do." I think I
feel that way about programming.

------
protomyth
I've gone back an forth between working as a programmer and working as a
system admin (plus some data stuff for grant programs). I have been happiest
as a programmer and the most depressed. Strangely, it wasn't legacy code, new
creation, programming languages I hated but was good at, or languages I loved
that made the biggest delta in experience. It was the policies surrounding the
programming that made or broke the job.

I think the single killer to programming is the production support rotation
that is something more than emergency pages. At the end of one job, I was
constantly being woke at 1AM because of database issues that I couldn't
correct (not the DBA). I really don't need much sleep to feel great, but the
disturbances for a week at a time was a killer. Worse, our team had no power
to fix the problems, and the team who could was really not that interested.
They would wake up (maybe) and fix their issues. Management didn't really care
because they thought it was part of the job. I really blame our immediate
bosses for not making the fix a priority.

tldr: programming is fun even in crappy languages, its the environment that
will kill you.

PS: SQR and T-SQL are the from the devil - when you're looking forward to
shell, awk, and perl you have issues - VB was ok, Pascal was "really, me, now"
moment, and Objective-C & C are still my favorite. Being only allowed to code
review other people's C and C++ was bizarre and painful.

------
junok
I`m not a programmer, but I want to be a programmer because I might be more
happier with programming.

It`s my third year of doing my current job, IT project managing/IT system
managing in Teleco company(Not in the U.S.) and I always dream about being a
developer which I wanted to be before I got this job, because I like write a
code I like learning something new. I don`t like my current job because it is
very monotonous, it has very little things to learn as an Engineer(As far as I
experienced). It`s just all about risk/cost/quality/deadline management + a
lot of paper works. At the same time, however, I also afraid that If I quit my
job and be a developer, I might lose everything that my job give me now - high
salary, job security, not bad work/life balance(9 to 6~7). Because, in my
country, most of developer cannot have those things like good salary as mine,
w/l balance(close to 10 to 10 almost everyday) and job security. Yeap. Being a
programmer in my country is quite tough choice.

Many of my friend having told that I have to stay in my job and write a code
as hobby, and some people says I should do things that makes you happy.
Someone says 'Working as a programmer is not as fun as programming for hobby',
but the other says that if I 'stuck' in my current job, there will be no
'improving'.

It`s really really hard choice for me.

------
zbarnes
I've only been doing this about a year but I have to say it was the best
decision I have ever made. Like some of the other here have said, I have never
found an industry quite like it. Not only is the profession lucrative,
exciting, and in constant demand, but it also has the best community around. I
mean how many other industries have an open-source community like we do where
we actively try to help each other. Every other profession I have seen is
basically dog eat dog.

------
edem

        6/10. I'm less than 3 years into my career, but I think I've worked for some of the best companies with great pay, benefits, environments, etc, including a tech giant and two startups. End of the day though, work is boring. Its always work. Your time and effort is going towards making someone else rich and their
        priorities are more important than your own.
        The only things I really look forward to are vacations and events outside of work. Learning things is always exciting and sometimes its extremely rewarding
        getting a project (or even a feature) off the ground and seeing a company rise and beat projections. But then a few weeks later, its just back to work and
        nothings really different. Its a temporary victory at best, then expectations just get higher and more grind.
    

I can second this. I have been working in the industry for 10 years and I
figured that while I work for (probably big) companies and code someone else's
ideas I'm stuck. Not to mention that the bigger the company the more
enterprisy the software.

That's why I started to do my own development on my own ideas at home. Ever
since I started to do so I'm feeling much better. I regularly contribute to
GitHub projects as well. I also feel rejuvenated by being LEAN and using the
fewest possible 3rd party libraries. Now I know the code I'm using since I can
see the source of all libraries I use and they are much simpler than the
enterprise stuff. I'm sure that after a number of successful side projects I
will be able to work on my stuff full time. This is my primary focus at the
moment and the thought of achieving this makes me more happier now reaching a
7/10.

------
sambalbadjak
Pretty happy. I was stuck for ahwile on php, and then found out you can do
stuff in Python. So I can imagine that a switch of another language can make
you happier. (Feeling like a beginner again and getting more confident by each
thing you learn new).

Also, programmers like to create things, and if you're just maintaining
projects, you're probably less happy. So for me moving from employee to
freelance (creating over maintaining) increased happiness.

------
ido
9/10.

Been working as a programmer since I was 18 (32 now): on and off (worked part
time & took some time off for studies), but mostly on.

I like the project I'm working on. I only go to the office twice per week and
work from home the rest of the time. I like my coworkers. My pay is pretty
good (enough that I don't have to worry about supporting my wife & son).

On the downside sometimes xcode crashes or git behaves in weird ways that I
don't understand.

------
krisdol
I like programming but I'm tired of the hours, of being salaried, and of
employers that could lay their filthy hands on everything I make outside of
work. I hate "unlimited vacation" but it's nearly impossible to avoid. I like
how my small company job is much more intellectually stimulating than my old
big company one, but the work never ends and I should be making a lot more in
this city.

~~~
hartator
Which city? and why you don't like unlimited vacation? I personaly don't like
it because it's a bit hypocritical.

~~~
krisdol
Boston, and because I feel like the culture at companies with unlimited
vacation is that people are much more afraid of taking longer vacations. When
I had 4+ weeks guaranteed, I took advantage of it every year without guilt,
even the full amount all at once, as did most engineers. Now I feel guilty for
every day. I don't feel like there are any borders between work and leisure.
Slack is always active even with inane dialogue.

------
reustle
I worked for a few years as a programmer but also exercised my people skills
over time (being in NYC). I eventually realized I didn't want to write code
for work anymore, only for fun. I eventually did a bit more management related
stuff at one of my gigs, and now I run a small development shop which requires
very little coding on my part. I'm really happy with how things have turned
out.

~~~
ryandrake
Great story, I'm jealous! Assuming by "run" you mean you own the shop, I would
love to learn in more detail how you were able to leap from day-to-day
programming to being able to afford your own company.

I see a lot of responses like that in this wonderful thread: I used to program
for a few companies, then I got into management a bit, and now I own my own
company. That's listing step 1, 2, 3, and then jumping to step 59!

~~~
reustle
I had been freelancing on and off for years, so I understood how those
relationships worked. I started off freelancing on my own, then brought on a
part time contractor to help take on some of the extra worked and scaled up
from there. Now I have multiple contractors working all the time. I did the
jump while also moving into the "nomadic" lifestyle, backpacking around se
asia while building everything up, which kept expenses way lower than my nyc
rent.

\- sent from ho chi minh city, vietnam :)

------
TurboHaskal
I have mixed feelings about it.

I wanted an intellectual challenge and to serve my community, yet what I'm
mostly doing is glueing libraries I don't even understand together and
squeezing out performance and page impressions to make someone I don't care
about richer.

I wanted to consider myself an artist, not an interchangeable cog in a
materialistic machinery. A craftsman that truly cares about his work and
learns from others, not blindly following imposed cargo cult and so called
best practices with the ultimate goal of optimising for the lowest common
denominator and promoting cheap labor.

I wanted to learn and discover new things that are truly useful, but what I
see is an extreme focus on tooling. The latest new cool framework on the block
while showing complete disregard for already existing knowledge and tools.

They said technology was to make our lives better, yet it has become a means
to an end in itself. I wish for a more perennial school of thought in
software, a back to the basis, and I'm not even 30.

But I have to pay my bills somehow.

Then again, we have it much better than other labor in the workforce.

------
imdsm
I like programming. I like architecting. I like ops. I like putting things
together and seeing them working. All the things that make me good at me job,
the technical side, I like this. It's the projects I don't enjoy, where I have
to take a technical implementation and make it ready for the user. It's the
maintenance of projects. Adding in features that were never supposed to exist.
Butchering code because of deadlines. Working with other developers who really
don't care, and don't read documentation, and don't try to understand things.
It's explaining why we shouldn't do something a certain way, or why we should,
to someone who doesn't care or doesn't understand.

The thing I don't like is everything that got added on when I turned my hobby
into my profession. But it's all that stuff which is the reason why my family
live the way we do.

I'd be happy doing something I truly believed in, but at least I'm not working
in a mechanics garage in mid winter for national minimum wage.

------
vespergo
I love programming. The first ten years of my career I was doing hardware and
networking, nothing programming related as I had yet to learn it.

This has been the best career change that I could have ever had.

I've also worked construction for five years. I don't think I'll ever want
another job. Probably because I've already been on the other side and I know
what life is like there.

------
johanneskanybal
I'm not a programmer, I'm much more, if you have 10+ years in software and
only think of yourself as a programmer that's likely the root cause of your
unhappiness. Like dilbert creator blogged a while back, be pretty good at two
things is much stronger than being very good at one.

to answer the op's question 10/10 I'm very gratefull.

~~~
reidrac
I've been programming for more than 20 years, slightly over 10 professionally,
and although I'm more than a programmer... programming is what I love most of
my job.

I guess I'm around 8/10, probably because I'm not always writing code that has
some impact in the business, people or whatever; mainly because I'm more than
a programmer.

OT: I downvoted you by mistake, so I'm replying to cancel the effect (if that
doesn't work, my apologies).

------
SCdF
I've been doing this for 10 years now and I can see myself trending away from
it honestly. To stave that off I'm taking jobs which pay less are more
interesting: firstly I did some functional stuff and now I work for a non-
profit that does mobile healthcare for hard to reach communities.

It's very easy to get jaded. It's very easy to stare at the bespoke insurance
application you and 6 other people have built (or slotted together from
hideous technologies your client has already purchased) and wonder what the
point of it all is.

Writing code for something you're passionate about helps.

Working out how to do things--not even important things, but just _other_
things--outside of work helps.

Remembering that the effort / money ratio in programming (esp if you live in
fancy parts of the states, which I do not, or want to sell your soul to the
London bankers, which I also do not) is really pretty fantastic helps as well.

------
jack9
9/10 - I program for work and for fun. I am doing the thing I was born to do.
I haven't become wealthy doing it, but I'm upper middle. I am enthusiastic and
amazed and lucky to live during the time of nascent technological marvels
(that I expected to happen) with virtualization and massive scale solutions.

------
meekins
While doing custom enterprise apps in Java isn't the sexiest or the best
paying job in IT I enjoy it quite a lot. Working on a standard and stable
stack with well-established conventions minimizes the hassle of jumping
through the technical hoops and allows me to concentrate on the actual
business problems.

A couple of years ago I moved into an architect postition and while the high
level of abstraction, customer interface and leading and instructing the
development team is enjoyable I feel my personal development has slowed down
significantly because I have very little time to contribute to the actual
code. On my spare time I'd rather concentrate on my other hobbies and when I
do programming it's mostly dabbling in Ruby, Clojure and other stuff I'd
hardly be using at work. Currently I'm looking for a new gig that would be a
lot more hands-on.

------
rorflcopter
Depends. My current job is cushy but very badly paid.

By cushy I mean they have flexi time and let me work 100% from home even
though the office is less than 10 miles away. The boss is not pushy about
deadlines and the work is not challenging.

By badly paid I mean I make about half of what I should be at my level of
skill and experience.

I live in a small town. I could move to a big city and get more money, but I
think my happiness level would drop. I really like it here. Life is good.

Of course, at least once a week I start getting paranoid and thinking that the
company will eventually go under (we've had a few rough patches) and I'll have
to move. And then I'll have spent 10+ years being underpaid with nothing to
show for it, and it won't look good to a potential new employer. I worry that
I'll be too old to be employable. That I should move now for my families sake.
But then, I wonder how many successful well paid programmers look back over a
career and think "well, I'm glad I spent less time with my family, because now
I have all that extra money"

As for the work, as I said, it's not challenging. I've been tinkering with
computers since I was a child, and its been a natural career path for me. I
really don't think I could have been anything else, it was always going to be
code. There are moments when I think I'm wasting my life standing in front of
a monitor for 8 hours a day, but there are worse jobs, and I have to put food
on the table. And that's really a complaint about society in general, not an
issue with my particular choices.

I code outside of work hours, making apps and web-services mostly for my own
use. I've never been very good at making money off any of them, but that's not
really the point. I do it because it's who I am. My worst nightmare (sad but
true) is coming down with some kind of a medical condition that would prevent
me from typing or looking at screens. It would kill me.

------
Kovah
It depends on the project I'm working on. If I have to work on a Wordpress
site and write plugins I really want to quit. But then there are interesting
(hobby)projects where you can decide on how to build your app and how to solve
problems which is rather fulfilling. Overall happiness at the moment: 60/100

------
cwt
I am moderately happy. There is no one big thing right now that would
dramatically change my happiness as a working programmer/dev. There are little
things that could be changed by me or the people I work for that would
increase my happiness. But I am happy with the big picture and how things are
moving. Day to day is a rollercoaster. Finding new bugs can be frustrating.
Bashing your head against bugs that don't make sense can be horrible for
happiness, but at the same time, once you solve it and the weight is lifted
off you feel great. The hardest part for me is believing in myself, that I am
capable of solving something that I am having trouble understanding. That and
dealing with corporate America.

I don't see myself working as a programmer my entire career. I have about
5years professionally, but how much longer, I don't know.

------
mej10
I love it. My job is full of interesting challenges and the things I do really
matter to the business. My ideas are thoughtfully considered. There is
something to learn from everyone on the team. I feel like the company cares
about its employees and there is a lot of room for growth, both personally and
for the business. There are occasionally tedious things we have to do, but
they at least have clear reasons that they need to happen -- it isn't just
bullshit being handed down by management.

But it wasn't always that way -- my last job wasn't very challenging and it
felt like I was just a cog in a giant machine (which, I was). It was pretty
soul crushing despite being a "good" job. I felt bad about hating it so much,
because compared to most people's jobs it was still much, much better in every
aspect.

------
CuriouslyC
Being "just" a programmer was okay. I'm loving life as a software/information
architect and "general problem solver" though, it's fantastic. I get to play
with lots of interesting algorithms, data analysis/machine learning
techniques, data structures and storage tools; I write the most interesting
part of applications, and I get to hand off most of the boring
testing/CRUD/user interface/etc stuff.

Another benefit is that at this level management is more concerned with the
quality of my work than the volume, or whether I get in at 10:00 or take a two
hour lunch break from time to time. I like to say "you're not paying me for
the code I write, you're paying me for the code other people don't write
because I'm here".

------
zoffix222
I think it's a job like any other. There are days when you hate it; there are
days when you love it. One thing I do notice is I actually do programming on
my own time, coding my own projects. And on bad days at work, I wish I could
instead work on my own projects (so it's not programming per-say I dislike). I
guess the same idea works for a carpenter or an electrical engineer; it's a
lot more about where and for whom you do the work than work itself.

Programming, however, is definitely a field where you can learn the profession
and get a job making good money without getting formal education. I notice a
lot of recruiters are more interested in your passing a sample test or viewing
your past projects than necessarily with your University diplomas and
certificates.

------
jerven
I am quite happy with my work and work environment. I think for the following
reasons: Management that knows the field and knows how to manage. A delightful
combination that is rare. steady release cadence. Every 4 weeks a release, new
features land as ready. Always more data. Long term vision on product
improvement and let us programmers decide on how to improve it. Combination of
research and production work. Can be on the edge,but make sure it doesn't cut
to much.

In summary we are treated like professionals and work professionally.

It's not pure commercial work at uniprot.org but it must deliver. The site is
popular enough and constraints are interesting. All in all happy.

The job pays decent and allows me to be flexible with time. Which is important
to me as a dad.

------
pessimizer
I like the work, but I don't like who I have to work for: it's all marketing,
finance and/or surveillance. Looking for a moral job that doesn't rely on
dishonesty, misdirection, or the invasion of privacy for business advantage.
Hopefully manufacturing?

------
AlexisOhanian
What makes me happy depends on what type of work I'm doing.

\- Scripts, tools, etc. Here I really enjoy being able to automize tasks. Then
being able to combine scripts, tools, etc. into even more useful things makes
me even more happy. Some things almost become magical once they have been
automized.

\- Games. Here I enjoy being able to create something fun out of nothing.

\- Debugging. Finally finding a hard to find bug can give a quite unique rush
of happiness.

\- Research/innovation. Working on something brand new which no one has done
before and finally releasing a product which people enjoy is sheer pleasure.

\- Web development/user interfaces. Finally finding the right combination of
simplicity and usefulness to create a really usable product is also a very
pleasurable journey.

------
ali_ibrahim
Well, as the old saying goes: "Choose a job you love, and you will never have
to work a day in your life."

I think its pretty much what I am doing. But the big question that pops up
after a certain period of time: How long are you going to love something? 5
years, 2 years, 1 year or 6 months? That truly varies from the project i am
working on. As long as its all fun, i continue the job. If not, i move to my
next job or a next project. There are so many IT, programming jobs (for more
or less money). I think what matters is that you are loving what you doing. So
far, for last 9 years of professionally working at 8 different companies that
has been my norm and I don't think it's that bad or worrisome.

------
throwaway456123
8/10

Pros: \- I get paid a lot of money doing what I did as a hobby when I was
younger \- I come in whenever I want and leave whenever I want \- I can work
from home whenever I want \- My work is intellectually stimulating \- My
coworkers are smart and interesting \- I get to play with dogs at work \- If I
don't like my job, I can get 5 other offers within a week

Cons: \- I still make less than I would have if I pursued law, finance, or
medicine \- Most interviews are some sort of hostile, cargo-cult nonsense \-
Those 5 offers would not offer me anything significantly different from each
other or my current job \- Nearly all of my coworkers care more about playing
with the latest technologies and building unnecessary frameworks than actually
making things \- The best companies/jobs are all in Silicon Valley or SF,
whereas I want to live in NYC

I don't really like the "industrialized software development" model most
companies follow. Wherever I work, I am 2-5x more productive than the average
developer. When I start, I usually am on a team with people who are similarly
productive. But, as our success grows, we hire more people who are less
productive (against my wishes), and the people I used to work with either
leave or get promoted to management, which means I don't get to work with them
anymore. I also get promoted to management, which means that I spend less time
programming and more time doing things I don't enjoy.

Yes, I get that it's hard to hire exceptional people. I get that companies
would rather consist of many easy-to-replace mediocre people than a few hard-
to-replace exceptional people. I get that, at a certain size, predictability
matters more than speed, and having more people on the team allows their
idiosyncrasies to cancel out.

I just wish that I could work on a small team of really smart, really well-
compensated people. Does such a thing exist? Should I take Google's job offer
(from what I hear, they over-staff every team)? Should I look into hedge funds
(not super interested in building stuff I can't use)? Should I say "fuck it"
and try to get a job as a quant or trader (I've gotten offers in the past)?

------
sebringj
Saying I love my work is an understatement. I get to work remotely as a
consultant paid well over the market price but treated like a long term
employee and travel as I please. I know the CEO and VP and its a fairly large
company with 5 large high-rise buildings throughout the world, 2 in
California. I get to work on my side stuff pursuing my startup AND the boss
not only knows about it but thinks its cool as long as I get my stuff done.
How can you possibly ask for more than that? The only downside is I don't
relate to anyone having to drudge through traffic each day, having an asshole
boss or caring if its the weekend or not. Hell yah.

------
wilblack
I am happy at the moment. Doing contract work, have clients I've known for
years, and getting into my own IoT projects. Life is good for now. I just told
me wife though that it feels like it could all come crashing down at any
moment.

------
spdy
Some years ago i was not so happy to be a programmer for life thinking about
what i wanted to be 10-15 years down the road, after getting older i started
to realize how good it is to have this skillset and that its worth my time
venutring into new fields of informatics.

Programming always brings oppertunities from small stuff like side projects up
to your own company. And we are in this one profession which has a bright
future ahead in a society that is owned by programms. Right now we have the
freedome of choice if you dont like your current job you can easily find a new
one with the same or better pay.

We are the Artist, Stonemasons and Architects in conjunction.

------
citeguised
8/10\. Four Years ago (with 26, after studying Design) I started working as a
front-end-developer, and two years ago started learning proper JS- and
programming-skills. The work is mostly rewarding and the pay is much better
than it would have been as Art-Director in a design- or advertising-agency.
There is no overtime and the co-workers are really nice. The only small
downside is that there is no senior front-end-developer with more experience
than me, since the company consists of ~100 Java-Consultants and 5 Mid-Level
Front-End-Devs. Sometimes I could need a mentor, like the Junior-Java-Devs
have.

------
joeblau
10/10 - I'm extremely happy after I decided to stop pursuing web development
and switch to native mobile. I started doing web development in 1996 (15 yo)
and around 2012, I was extremely frustrated. There were too many frameworks,
databases, and tools which just made tradeoffs of solving one problem for
creating another. It seemed like web products weren't getting better and the
brittleness of development was increasing. I started mobile development in
2008 when the first iPhone SDK came out and fully switched over as a career in
2012 and I couldn't be happier.

~~~
amelius
Are you also maintaining Android versions of your apps?

At least the web, with all its faults, targets all platforms at once.

~~~
joeblau
I don't. I recognize that Android is definitely a more dominant platform. My
best experiences in mobile have been working with a strong native Android
developer. I do love the web for some things, but for what I'm really excited
about, the web is just the wrong answer--yet people keep trying to make it the
right answer.

------
hharnisch
Very! But being a programmer does not necessarily make you happy though. In a
similar way that having lots of money doesn't necessary make you happy. If you
invest some time in looking for a good team, at a company that encourages
learning - you're getting closer. Work on something you're interested in. If
you're missing one of those things, change it... Keep changing it until you
find something that works for your lifestyle. You'll either find it or figure
out programming isn't for you.

------
jonsterling
I hate programming, but I couldn't think of a better place to "sunset" my
programming career! I'm really lucky to be working with such kind & talented
people.

------
atemerev
Happy. Broke, but happy. :)

(I earn around $100/hr, but my life organisation skills are so miserable that
I can't yet make the ends meet. And I have to travel around 50 times per
year).

Scala/Java.

~~~
phatbyte
$100 an hour? If u work 5h per day for 22 days it's like 11k per month. Unless
you got some serious addiction/debt problems I don't see how can u be broke :P

~~~
atemerev
50k debt, living in world's most expensive country (Switzerland) as an
immigrant, working remotely as a consultant with sporadic work patterns,
having a diagnosed ADD. :)

~~~
phatbyte
Sorry to hear about that man, hope things improve soon.

------
steven2012
I've been programming for ~25 years and I still love programming. Last night I
resurrected my old Xeon 8-cpu server and spent all night trying to install
centos on it. Turns out my specific bios needed special settings to boot from
USB.

My goal is to learn vagrant and spin up vms to handle variable load tasks. I
want to be able to process website data using Hadoop and store the various
outputs to my database. It's not novel but it's all new to me and I'm excited.

------
vukto
We should have a website to centralize all of these testemonials

~~~
phatbyte
There kinda is: [http://devpressed.com/](http://devpressed.com/)

------
pjaytipp
5/10\. Finally working on my dream project, a medieval rpg. Was scared off by
Breshenham's algorithm to doing web stuff in the noughties, followed by small
iOS titles this decade. Slowly getting to be a competent 2D game developer.
Taught myself graphics and am proud of every small victory. Love the
programming aspect and the literary aspect of story & world creation. Why only
5/10? Because ...life, bills, health, taxes,drama etc.

------
delphinius81
My satisfaction as a programmer comes and goes with the project and the team.
While I love building programs and working through the logic, the thing that I
am building matters more to me than solving the problem. So as long as I and
the people I'm working with personally care about the project, I'm happy. If
I'm not interested in the project, I'll do the work (work ethic is always
important) while finding another job.

------
smutton
I enjoy an environment that respects developers, their comfort, and their
passions while pursuing new techniques and technologies to better their stack
and make developers' lives easier.

However, I temporarily gave that up to see how I'd like the corporate world of
Java programming. Although I don't mind working around people (previously
worked from home), I will say this: I care more about the software instead of
someone's weekend.

------
Nursie
Depends on the role. I change roles a couple of times a year. The good ones
give me freedom to come up with novel solutions and have major design input,
growing my skills and giving me a good sense of ownership and respect. I look
forward to work each day on these contracts.

The bad ones just want a grunt who asks no questions and turns out code
without contradicting the project leads or architects, even when they're
talking shit. No fun at all.

------
x0ry
I don't like being used to make people money. That part of it sucks.
Programming is great, the fact that you are making things is incredibly
challenging and fulfilling. Being viewed as a boy genius instead of a human
being is the trade-off. I feel like this industry has forced me to become more
anti-social. Always on the lookout for the next snake trying to steal your
work or use you for their next big promotion.

------
kyled
Watch out for repetitive strain injuries and high stress levels. Don't burn
yourself out. Keep work at work, even though it may be tough because you love
what you do. Make sure your current job and product are aligned with your
goals in life. Be passionate about what you are working on. Keep yourself
challenged and you will love it all. Don't undervalue yourself. Make an impact
and change the world.

------
timwaagh
not happy but at least i can feed myself and go on a date. I was hoping I'd
receive better compensation than I do. I certainly did not go to college for
this. however I have been able to afford a (not big but okay size) appartment
in a bad neighbourhood. this I use to rent out rooms. SO far it's been a very
smart investment. which means hopefully I'll be able to move on to a better
life someday.

------
coderKen
When I first started out as a self-thought programer and worked for the first
company where I really enjoyed my work, the second was horrible, third was
cool at first until it began to suck. I am now usually assigned tasks like
changing the margin of buttons and other annoying stuff, I don't feel my
skills are improving and am not gaining any knowledge. Really horrible

------
mattiemass
I definitely go through times where I struggle with the team dynamics, product
direction, management. Perhaps all fields have similar analogs. But I'm not
sure I'd be able to stay away from programming. It's been a lifelong pursuit
and I have just as much fun now as I ever did. I am definitely happy, and I
think I would be quite unhappy were I to stop.

------
Lord_Cheese
Honestly, I really love it. Yea, there can be insane deadlines and it can be
frustrating work, but it's so satisfying overall. In my job, I get a lot of
freedom to do my own things here and there, and we're getting into a major
rewrite of internal systems to use Azure. Currently it's a huge amount of fun.

------
crablar
If you are unhappy as a programmer you should quit your job immediately and
try sales/marketing/anything else.

I was disappointed with the way companies I worked at organized their
programmers so I started Software Engineering Daily, a podcast about software.

This economy rewards software skills and general acumen as much as
programming.

------
julian55
I'm happy working as a programmer, I wouldn't have done if for the past 35
years if I didn't like it!

------
leftforfinance
Hate it.

I started coding at 14 and had my first paying contract at 16. Worked in a
large startup once and freelanced until 22. Even though I was making 6
figures, I was extremely unhappy and depressed with the monotony and boredom
my job had become.

I was fortunate (and probably lucky) to have been able to move to finance
(hedge fund) at 23.

~~~
morgante
> I was fortunate (and probably lucky) to have been able to move to finance
> (hedge fund) at 23.

Would you mind sharing more about how you did that?

I like programming and enjoy the challenge, but it depresses me that I'm in my
early 20s and have already hit the salary ceiling.

------
goddessdivine
I love programming. The line between work and play is very blurred for me. The
only thing that makes me cringe every morning is the fraking drama. I became a
programmer cause I thought I would have less interaction with people(among
other reasons). Why are office politics like freaking high-school?

------
mohsinr
Working as a freelance programmer for last 10 years. I am happy working as a
programmer from home.

However being lazy on exercise, and social life makes me hate it for few hours
in any given day of the week. Then I bounce back, get out ... get stuck in
traffic.. and then working from home seems great again :)

------
arisAlexis
Very interesting comments itt. My take is that can be happy when doing stuff
that is either very (very) well paid, super cutting edge/interesting or have
the power to change the world. Is my current job like that? It pays well but
no. I try to make side projects then and iterate.

------
pnathan
I like the field, but as someone who's done graduate work and peered into what
is _plausibly possible_ , seeing the industry's preferred technologies is like
reading Donald Trump's twitter feed. More, I will defer to email, as it'd
cause flamewar. :-)

------
napperjabber
There was a moment were I wanted to quit. Then like most things, I accepted it
for what it was and moved on. My current focus is saving enough money to go
back to school and get a Ph.D in Mathmatics. I need another 300k saved before
I can do it with my family.

------
Ambrosia
I find my job real boring (not programming itself) and I'm not sure if it's
going to change. I'm not sure if I could risk getting a better programming job
and my workplace would be left in a bad place if I actually do leave. It
depresses me.

------
dovdov
I pretty much enjoy iOS dev for 3+ years now, with all its quirks and
annoyances.

Apple drops new frameworks and features every year, so there's always
something new and interesting to learn. Not to mention Swift.

So yeah, I wouldn't really do anything else in this field.

------
pawelkomarnicki
I'm like 8 years into my career, and CTO-level now, and I'm happy most of the
time, depending on the non-technical situation at a moment ;-) (dealing with
requests from non-technicals can be exhausting sometimes :D)

------
arunkumarl
Very. Used to be an accountant. It is much more satisfying to create
something.

------
pcglue
Back when I was working at a MegaCorp who kept trying to turn me into a tech
lead/manager? Miserable.

Now at a small company where I just code all day long and nothing else?
Extremely happy.

Where you work and who you work with matters.

------
beefsack
I absolutely love being a programmer and wish there were more hours in the day
for me to tinker with stuff and spend time on toy projects.

I'm impartial to working as a programmer, though it pays the bills quite well.

------
DrNuke
It probably helps to see programming as a tool and being employed / acting as
an entrepreneur from a field or a cause you care about. That way, the daily
job and the stress may become more bearable.

------
nutmeg44
C'mon, quit with the 'software engineer'codswallop. We're programmers, p-r-o-
g-r-a-mm-a-r-s, and the sooner we all come to terms with that, the more karmic
our profession will be.

------
danmaz74
I started programming a C64 at 10 yo - that was 31 years ago OMG. I'm happy
_when_ I can work as a programmer, even if that is just a very small
percentage of my time now.

------
josephan
I am really happy I have a job that pays good money and get to meet lots of
new people. It's good to live normally again.

------
hacknat
I worked as a programmer, briefly, after college, it sucked, expectations were
ridiculous, pay was crap. I would never work as a programmer again.

I really enjoy my career as a Software Engineer though. It's been, mostly,
fun, and as I've learned and grown I've got the chance to work on more and
more interesting things.

Currently I'm helping to build a cloud provider for a specialized sector of
the economy that has eschewed the cloud (until now).

------
julian55
I'm happy working as a programmer, I wouldn't have done it for the past 35
years if I didn't like it.

------
yatin2401
Programming is no work.. It's fun

------
ogsharkman
Ehhh, like a 7/10.. One of the many reasons I ended up applying to med school.

------
maplechori
I don't even think about retirement, that is how much I like programming.

------
galfarragem
"I enjoy X but working as a X _er_ is boring."

------
ravin1729
i enjoy programming. but with projects that come and all the politics take the
fun away & also make the product nonsense till heads are counted.

------
shove
Hahaha! If you have to ask, you can't afford it.

------
known
Plan your retirement by 40 in programming career

------
Oras
12/10 :) \- Working with interesting problems \- Finding better ways to do
things \- Great people to work with and learn from

12 years experience in web development.

------
anOwl
Currently, I'm not happy working as a programmer.

I really love the job, I've done coding and software development as a hobby
since I was 14, maybe 15 years old, because it was always my dream to do this
kind of thing.

After I've finished my apprenticeship as a java ee / android dev 2 1/2 years
ago, I continued to work for the same company who hired me as an apprentice in
the first place. After that, I decided that I need a "change of scenery" and
to explore the big world of professional software development.

The second company, which I currently work for since a year now, is however
somewhat very different. I've started my career with an already existing
business project (imagine your typical java enterprise project here -> rdbms +
application server + java rich client), supporting it, making the clients
happy with _everything_ they want.

It was in a really bad condition (architecture, software design, ui design of
the main application, the client was fed up with), but it was doable, so I
decided to make a change. I started developing a new client, with modern
design and a cross plattform approach, and everyone loved it, I got great
response from everyone and the project even got a stockup of developers from 2
to 6 - just because of my work and the resulting interest of the client (=
more money++ for my company for a project which was theoretically thought
dead). Everything was great.

The last 3-4 month however were terrible. I learned enough about this project
to understand of what hell im into now: the client hasn't the slightest idea
of what this project is doing anyways. The team leader had no experience in
leading teams or even projects, because he was actually an architect which has
done a solo job on this project for 4-5-6 years now.

After all, the project was developed because the client's company had money.
But this is a different story, however...

The feature requests of the client were getting more and more, the time to
accomplish goals was getting less and less. There wasn't even time anymore to
test things, (I know, testing - haha, but this company is pretty well known in
the world of testing and test-consulting, every other project there is heavily
tested for example), or to get rid of technical dept. - every accomplished
jira task was just a patch of code and hopes, pushed into the project git,
hoping that everything will work - but of course, if you changed something,
everything fell down like theres no tomorrow.

I just couldn't work like this anymore, I've tried it several times to talk
with my boss or my project lead to get rid of, or at least, minimize the
impact of technical dept on this project, because it was the main problem
which consumed most of the time AND budget, when solving features for the
client. After the "critical path" of this project, and 2 happy clients, we had
a sit in with the whole team, including the team leader, and my boss.

We talked about everything, what went good, what went wrong, how to improve
ourselfs and how to manage clients in order to prevent something like this the
next time and I was really, really happy with it.

As the time went by, the project lead was taking a break because of way to
many additional workhours, I was fine with it. It was just one month to go
until new year, and after that, I thought, everything will be fine - of course
it wasn't.

The workload doubled in this month, no team lead, just me and my coworkers who
had just half of an idea of this _great_great_ project. Anyways, we've made
it. Everything the client wished for was done and even more, they were happy.

As my vacation began and the new year started, I fell into a deep depressive
hole. Me and my project lead were so terrible burned out, that after 3 weeks
of vacation, I needed another 3 weeks just to get into real life again. Today
is my last free day of this 6 week timeout and I hope that I've got enough
power and endurance to get back on track.

I've learned a lot about company politics in the last year, how to handle
clients, new coworkers, bosses and a lot of do's and dont's on enterprise java
development. But I've also learned alot about the "darkside" of software
development.

I love the craftmenship and all the clever thoughts and every single person
I've worked with - but if you start a career in that industry or a new job be
aware, that money is the only thing that counts at the end of the day. So be
grateful if you're getting paid to play with the newest technology or just try
stuff out.

P.S. - Sorry for the long personal post and the horrible spelling, english is
not my native language. I feel better.

~~~
anOwl
Edit: Unless you work for a international company with budget.

------
nutmeg44
eh, pretty happy.

------
cgag
I just want to note that there's strong social pressure to not to claim that
you don't love working as a programmer on this site. The odds a future boss or
coworker is an HN regular is extremely high, and "passion" is high valued.
Weigh the responses accordingly.

~~~
abalashov
Well, as you can see from my comment, I, at least, am quite immune to this
pressure. :-)

It's funny to feel like an old-timer at 30, but I've been doing it for 21
years. Everything old really is new to me again. There's nothing less exciting
to me than the latest 100-line .js dependency to include or yet another API
reference to glaze over.

~~~
ry_ry
You have been a professional developer since you were 9?

~~~
abalashov
Not a professional one, of course. :-) However, I think it's fair to say I've
been programming since that age because of the sheer amount of it that I did
before I was 18, as it relates to the theme of burnout. I wrote fairly complex
systems all throughout middle and high school. As I recall, I wrote my first
multiuser server when I was 10 or 11.

------
jrcii
I'm 30 years old, I started programming BASIC on my Apple IIc when I was 7, so
this is the only life I've ever known. It's difficult to see the forest from
the trees enough to known if I like it, it just "is." What greatly troubles me
is that to continue to push the envelope in the fields I work in as I always
have and always looked forward to, I am essentially compelled to violate my
personal code of professional ethics and build super creepy technology that
violates the privacy of other people. I know that if I don't do it someone
else will, but that doesn't help me. It leaves me very conflicted.

------
dschiptsov
Programmer, like a poet, or a coder, like a typist?)

------
antocv
Im not even working as a programmer, but everyone says so and pay me well for
that title, I get to do perhaps 5-10 minutes per 40h week of "work", actual
programming.

The rest is listening to bullshit from coworkers and reading hackernews,
reddit etc.

Ive changed workplaces, this is my 3rd in 5 years, and its the same in my
experience from those 3 very different "enterprises", "way of working",
"agile" and other scrum bullshit methods, manager talk, backstabbing,
backtalking and bad coffe.

At work I am quite miserable. Working with technologies I loved and grew up
with, Linux, python, distributed systems, yet I look forward to just quitting
one day. Maybe start working as a window-cleaner or similar.

