For me the joy of programming is thinking and making the simplest thing which accomplishes my need, and the regular intervals of satisfaction from a sequence of jobs well done.
When I started by career ten years ago that was how it worked. Around 2019 I noticed a change.
At some point coding was replaced with "HERE LEARN AND USE THIS NEW TOOL" fourty times a week. It is all kitbashing now. Software development has been completely replaced with devops. Low level devops does not require brain usage. It requires bashing your brains against the wall for hours trying to figure out what about your yaml file is wrong. Your boss and your coworkers are forcing you to use this and ten other antitools despite you already knowing how to adequately and quickly solve the problem with the tools you have. They advocate for the tools despite having never used them because the tools have a fancy (disgusting) react website. I have extreme new tool jadedness. Usually I hate when poeple show me new software tech, because they will demand I use it and I have to pay the price. I will never become an expert of these tools. They will be replaced in six months. Only 3-5 of our 50 microservices will use each one. Many of them will be redundant.
Joined a new startup a few months ago. The ceo had would take me asside five times a week and tell me we had to use this new tool. Kubernetes, helm, and 100 other tools appeared. At first I enjoyed the experimentation but it never ended. Work never got done.
At some point I told him "This is just a basic crud app. what the fuck are we doing. Can we stop playing around and get this done?" He didnt listen. I quit. Fuck it.
This is exactly it. You could show me the best, simplest, most elegant tool ever and my first reaction is going to be to throw up in my mouth as soon as you say "hey, check out...", because the last 50 things shown to me have all traded 100 lines of code for 500 pages of bad documentation while everyone around me fucking gaslights me into thinking I'm an idiot because I find bad APIs and documentation harder to work with than code.
I still have loads of fun when someone introduces me to a problem and lets me actually write code to solve it. That just doesn't happen in 2024 workplaces though. If you want programming work to be fun again, you need to start there.
When I started by career ten years ago that was how it worked. Around 2019 I noticed a change.
At some point coding was replaced with "HERE LEARN AND USE THIS NEW TOOL" fourty times a week. It is all kitbashing now. Software development has been completely replaced with devops. Low level devops does not require brain usage. It requires bashing your brains against the wall for hours trying to figure out what about your yaml file is wrong. Your boss and your coworkers are forcing you to use this and ten other antitools despite you already knowing how to adequately and quickly solve the problem with the tools you have. They advocate for the tools despite having never used them because the tools have a fancy (disgusting) react website. I have extreme new tool jadedness. Usually I hate when poeple show me new software tech, because they will demand I use it and I have to pay the price. I will never become an expert of these tools. They will be replaced in six months. Only 3-5 of our 50 microservices will use each one. Many of them will be redundant.
Joined a new startup a few months ago. The ceo had would take me asside five times a week and tell me we had to use this new tool. Kubernetes, helm, and 100 other tools appeared. At first I enjoyed the experimentation but it never ended. Work never got done.
At some point I told him "This is just a basic crud app. what the fuck are we doing. Can we stop playing around and get this done?" He didnt listen. I quit. Fuck it.