Ask HN: How do you keep yourself interested in coding as a career? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you keep yourself interested in coding as a career?

I started coding as a kid in 2010

I dabbled in about everything besides embedded and OS development

I can still enjoy working on small sub 1K lines projects in my spare time

But I'm really bored at work and it's getting worse, I'm late on all my work, and everything feels like a dread

How do you keep yourself motivated/interested after years/decades?

I don't really have any other skills, and don't have the means to start another career, so doing something else isn't really an option right now

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I'll be perfectly transparent - I'm not interested in coding as a career. But I do it every day anyway because I am interested in the paychecks it brings me. Some days I enjoy it, some days I despise it. But most days, I just sit down and do my job, just like most everyone else.

There are a lot of interesting stuffs outside of work. All the fundamentals are pretty interesting; Reverse engineering is interesting and can absorb a whole life; Hardware hacking...just too many.

However, work is boring. I'm not good enough to work in those interesting fields so I just do the plumbing work. It pays the bill but I tend to stay away from it as soon as the ticket is marked as done. None of the surrounding tools or techs is interesting enough too, after all those are just plumbing tools.

I guess you can try to switch to a career that deals with the more interesting stuffs. But TBH all of them require a ton of experience and intelligence so good luck if you want to switch from some easy but boring stuffs to the harder but more interesting ones. Maybe ask around and one of your buddies can help.

Side projects can be invigorating if you can find something you've always wanted to build.

I know GPT-4 in particular has made exploring new, small projects fairly easy.

You could do something similar. Mix up the tediousness of doing the same thing day after day. Or find ways to automate certain portions of your work, if possible. I always get a kick out of that.

Or talk to your boss and explain the problem. You could explore switching things up a bit. That's always an option as well.

When you are allotted work, is it in bite size pieces, or are you being given larger more sweeping features?

You seem to enjoy solving more tactical problems and if you are given more strategic problems then perhaps as a first pass you might try to divide and conquer them.

Perhaps you already do that but if not I would try to include that as a fust step.

I think at first you need some rest. Second, you need to accept that work cannot be interesting all the time. If that is a problem, consider moving to another project or role, not necessarily now. Different tasks and responsibilities often provide some entertainment.

I cannot say that I fully understand you, but I was in a similar situation many years ago, and I changed my role to engineering manager. However, I am currently feeling that it is not the most exciting thing too, so I have decided to make a game about my role to give more meaning to my work - https://devmanager.carrd.co/

I'm not sure if I answered your question, but maybe there are no good answers to your question.

Coding is just part of job, just like designing, testing, collaborating with others, writing documents is.

Do you feel work you are doing is intellectually challenging ?

Did you zoom out and asked yourself what do you feel passionate about? now that you have been writing code for quite a while.

Sorry to hear it's become a bit of a trudge...

For some people, coding is more like a personality trait. They naturally think directly in code terms. Less some specific syntax...

Others don't do this so much. Maybe they see outcomes in their mind rather than having a dialogue about process, piece by piece. But for these people there's also a lot of opportunity in leveraging those tools that fall outside of the coding mindset.

This dichotomy can provide a good opportunity to think about whether a break from your main direction might be more appropriate, or if a change in direction on a career basis may be a better idea.

> How do you keep yourself motivated/interested after years/decades?

You should also be focusing a lot of the investigation here on your environment and circumstances. Things will get more tractable in a big-picture way.

So, "how does your environment keep you interested..." Might also be a really helpful question to ask people.

You'll still need to be responsible for yourself, but it'll be far easier to try different mindsets, ideas, outlooks, and projects if you shift your environment.

This is especially true if you are generally a more responsive person than a directive one (one is not better than the other, but it's good to know about yourself).

If you find yourself generally responding to the demands of your environment as if to prove yourself and your grit, skills, tools, or attitudes--problematic environments can be very toxic in a sense because you'll be more likely to blame _their_ problems on things that _you_ lack.

You can also change directions dramatically without changing your career, by the way. This can be a really interesting experimental process within a single workplace even.

And some people end up being an _invite_ away from changing careers anyway, not an _impulse_ away, as they previously thought. "One day some co-workers approached me and...(etc) now I'm doing this other thing and I'm very happy".

Just some ideas for you though, good luck with everything.

Because I'm not good at arts and crafts, or playing the guitar. I wish I was good or at least interested in music or painting or soccer, because then I could do coding purely as a job.

Have you done any other form of work that you don't find so disinteresting? To be honest most office work is quite banal, coding is probably amongst the most interesting roles in the building.

When i'm boring or get bored, i just do coding.

Yeah, i treat coding as a hobby, then i'll never get bored.

It’s possible that this has nothing to do with coding.

coding is not a career, it's just part of the work that you do in a career

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