I've found that the further away I get from "hacky, simple, works" scripts that wow the uninformed the less I enjoy my work.
I wrote a Greenhouse bookmarklet for our Head of People a while back. All it did was click buttons, poll the page for content, and copy/paste some text. It took me two hours. It was such a magical experience hopping on a call, demoing the bookmarklet, and being told I'd saved someone tens of hours.
In contrast, I spent the last few months building out a greenfield, microservice architecture that product wanted in anticipation of a new feature that was going to need to scale to the moon. It was a real technical challenge but, in the end, business needs changed and it never saw the light of day.
I know that when I first got into programming - I didn't know all the complex stuff. I just saw things in the world I wanted to affect with programming - and then did. Over time, I learned to tolerate all the BS that gets in the way of making magic happen in exchange for an ever-growing paycheck. Each step along the way made sense, but, upon reflection, the magic has been incrementally bled out from my passion all in an attempt to best utilize my abilities.
Consider building something simple for a non-techy friend who needs some help. You might be able to catch sight of the magic you feel you've lost by looking into their eyes as you deliver what you've made.
I'm in a similar position and took up coding random projects for micro controllers (e.g. Arduino & ESP32) precisely so that I could get a kick out of writing small amounts of functioning code that did stuff in a single evening. I was inspired to do this by somebody else who did exactly the same (although working in industrial design).
You're absolutely right - the pure excitement that I felt at the beginning was mainly because I could do all the hacky, simple things. Nowadays you have to write 3 million tests before you can write any real code. I just feel like the red tape involved in doing anything is ridiculous.
I mean, I don't want to completely dismiss testing, but it was a big part of the reason I started moving away from development, and more into the DevOps realm. The other big problem is working for medium/large companies, which require so much administrative overhead to get anything done.
> ...I've found that the further away I get from "hacky, simple, works" scripts that wow the uninformed the less I enjoy my work...Over time, I learned to tolerate all the BS that gets in the way of making magic happen in exchange for an ever-growing paycheck. Each step along the way made sense, but, upon reflection, the magic has been incrementally bled out from my passion...
Wow, its like you just wrote the intro to a chapter in my life!
I wrote a Greenhouse bookmarklet for our Head of People a while back. All it did was click buttons, poll the page for content, and copy/paste some text. It took me two hours. It was such a magical experience hopping on a call, demoing the bookmarklet, and being told I'd saved someone tens of hours.
In contrast, I spent the last few months building out a greenfield, microservice architecture that product wanted in anticipation of a new feature that was going to need to scale to the moon. It was a real technical challenge but, in the end, business needs changed and it never saw the light of day.
I know that when I first got into programming - I didn't know all the complex stuff. I just saw things in the world I wanted to affect with programming - and then did. Over time, I learned to tolerate all the BS that gets in the way of making magic happen in exchange for an ever-growing paycheck. Each step along the way made sense, but, upon reflection, the magic has been incrementally bled out from my passion all in an attempt to best utilize my abilities.
Consider building something simple for a non-techy friend who needs some help. You might be able to catch sight of the magic you feel you've lost by looking into their eyes as you deliver what you've made.