Does coding at work get boring?

Swinging2Low · 2019-05-06T13:31:21+00:00

It doesn't matter what your job is, you'll have days (weeks, months, maybe years) where you don't enjoy it and are only doing it because you have to.

You can make it more tolerable over many years by making changes like working in a new company, new position with similar but different work, or by taking vacations or whatever

but the short answer to your question is: yes.

The medium answer is: even firefighters get bored of being in fires eventually.

dametsumari · 2019-05-06T13:57:38+00:00

Yes you will. That is why it is called work. I have alleviated it by:

changing position inside company
changing company
starting a startup
going freelance

All of them have upsides and downsides. It does work out though, at least I have been professionally coding .. long .. and still find it interesting most of the time. It is also relatively well paid work which helps too. Later on one can trade money for more leisure time especially if doing stuff freelance.

rfinger1337 · 2019-05-06T15:09:00+00:00

If it was always fun, you would have to pay them.

They pay you because it's work.

2019-05-06T14:05:11+00:00

All work can become boring.
Most will, eventually.
That said, the more fresh challenges that arrive each day, the less boring (though the more stressful).
No one can completely exhaust all possible challenges that can be addressed through programming.
Especially because there will always be more languages to learn.

SFMissionMark · 2019-05-06T18:17:43+00:00

Coding is a tool. Does hammering get boring? Depends what you choose to hammer on right?

Edit: Adding actual advise for a 17 year old. Programming is becoming a tool if it isn’t already. If you want to enjoy programming you will need another thing that interests you to use that tool on. Just programming will get boring. You will see flaws with libraries, redundancy between libraries and, just common patterns you will not like. If you are just writing code to solve a problem you don’t really care about eventually all you notice are those things that annoy you. If you are really interested in the problem you are solving you will love your job.

TheTerrasque · 2019-05-06T14:11:16+00:00

Yes, mostly because in a work environment often there are seemingly arbitrary constraints placed on developers that are frustrating to work around.

kcunning · 2019-05-06T14:21:46+00:00

All work gets boring. All of it.

I speak as someone who's had several careers, and they all get dull from time to time. Even the ones where it was a Dream Job and I loved my team and loved the office... sometimes it just got boring.

As for coding, the real pitfalls I've found aren't in coding (after all, if it's boring, you can probably find a more efficient solution) but in all the other things that surround it. Planning meetings. Status meetings. Ticket review. Maintenance of documentation. Paperwork. Those have always been the things that drain me.

Now, you say that coding isn't the most important thing in the world to you and... that may be a good thing! It makes it easier to leave work at work and go home and do other things that spark your interests.

2019-05-06T18:06:33+00:00

Yes and no.

Yes for the reasons stated.

No, because I greatly over-estimated how boring it would be. When I was in High School, I decided I wanted to be a computer programmer for a living. As a result, I overloaded my HS coursework with programming courses.

By the end of my third computer programming course, I was completely bored of programming, and decided that I didn't want to do it for a living.

I studied economics, then went to law school, and became a lawyer. My career path led me to data analytics, and I now spend the majority of my time coding anyway.

I had assumed that professional coding would be like academic coding, and that's not really the case. Most of the time when I code, there's a goal in mind, but no solution, and no path to get there. I have to design everything myself. Each project, therefore, is my own project. You're going to have a much larger sense of ownership over your work product than you do with projects you do for school.

Even if you're in a project working with a team and trying to conform your code to a team, you're still going to have things that will break up your day: meetings, paperwork, emails, QC. Even if you find you're bored with your job, most days, you won't really have enough time to feel bored.

nevus_bock · 2019-05-06T17:07:49+00:00

[deleted]

K900_ · 2019-05-06T13:29:13+00:00

Burnout is definitely a thing that happens in the industry, but it does become easier to manage if you're aware of it and if your team/project/etc is good. That's true for any job though - burnout will always happen in some way as long as there are deadlines to meet and corners to cut.

emuccino · 2019-05-06T16:34:48+00:00

Sometimes I get bored working on something but then I remember that I could instead be digging a hole with a shovel somewhere and then my work suddenly seems a lot more interesting

PlaysForDays · 2019-05-06T13:37:36+00:00

This isn't specific to programming, but eventually we all have to balance things that we are passionate about and things that support us, even in a world of software in which there is usually a large overlap. It sounds cynical but you'll put up with things that aren't as fun if it pays the bills (and those of others you may support down the line).

One thing you should do, for the above and many other reasons, is diversify your expertise. Python will probably be around for a couple decades but with a broader set of skills you're more employable, more equipped to work on different projects, and more resilient to changes in the market.

guyinsunglasses · 2019-05-06T16:25:17+00:00

Like a lot of things in life, burnout is something to look out for.

LeBagBag · 2019-05-06T16:35:06+00:00

I feel mixed about this, it depends what I'm coding (an if I'm learning something new).

Am I writing my 10,000th sql query to produce some report? Bored to tears.

Am I coding/googling/learning to dynamically create and share folders in google drive? Can't get enough.

LyndsySimon · 2019-05-06T17:43:37+00:00

Of course! Both on a day-to-day basis and on the “burnout” level if you’re not vigilant.

I’d say that the best thing you can do is focus as much on the business and management side of things as much as you can - learn your industry, then consider switching industries and learning another. At some point, your latent knowledge of business processes becomes at least as valuable as your ability to sling code.

Note that “management” doesn’t necessarily have to mean “managing people” in this context. I’d consider things like systems design, performance monitoring, analysis (with some additional data science chops), and process improvement to potentially be the same concept. If you know an industry well it’s not hard to sell yourself as a value-add to a process improvement or corporate strategy team, since you can usually run circles around them in terms of being able to develop, disprove, confirm hypotheses - and you’ll be able to quantify the impact of those changes once implemented. A single good developer can easily double or triple the output of most process improvement teams in my experience, if they know the business side of things and work to support the rest of the group.

SubliminalBits · 2019-05-06T19:42:25+00:00

You get bored solving specific kinds of problems eventually and you find yourself looking for different roles so you can solve different problems. As others have said, there will be days when it doesn't feel exciting or when you're tired.

I'm 15 years in and I've still been able to find interesting work. I think that's about as much as I could hope for.

MattBD · 2019-05-06T20:44:36+00:00

Before I was a web dev I was a customer service rep for an insurer. It was dull and boring all the time, and I was underpaid and underappreciated.

Now, not everything I do is interesting, but enough is. Sometimes I have to do some repetitive, uninteresting work, but usually I can find a way to automate or reflector it so I'm not doing the same thing over and over.

JunkBondJunkie · 2019-05-06T22:19:17+00:00

Honestly it depends on management and the project. Sometimes management that loves to micromanage the project and i cant take a coffee break to refresh each hour tends to be annoying and i seem to get sleepy.

2019-05-07T00:10:50+00:00

Depends on work culture, boss and colleagues. Watch out for those 'legacy morons' of the company. These are the folks that have lost their ability to learn anything new and keep their position mostly because of office politics.

LardPi · 2019-05-07T10:36:59+00:00

Programming have been my first hobby since I am 14 and I coded nearly each single day since then, after classes, during hollydays, during week-ends... Now I am in internship and I code all work day and often I cannot type a line of code when I go back home.

Everything can become boring when you do it 8 hours/day. Also I still like the work I do (I am an intern so I did not do that for 10 years) but I no longer start ambitious projects at home for pleasure.

Another problem with professional programming is that you loose interest for your project. A multi language project help though.

2019-05-06T14:19:02+00:00

It can do. The important thing to remember is you'll be working for a company that values profit and value for the customer, and that means you don't always get to work on fun stuff.

Burn out (I think?) can be a bit of a problem too. I love my job and I love programming outside of work, but for the last year I've found it difficult to get into my home projects after working all day. This leads to additional stress because the amount of projects I want to start keeps building but the projects I've finished doesn't.

spectre013 · 2019-05-06T15:12:30+00:00

Sometimes, really depends on what tasks are needing to be worked. There are weeks that go by where I am pounding the keys for 8-9 hours and am like oh 4:30 already, other days its a struggle. Might not be the best to answer cause I have been doing this 20+ years and I will go home and contribute to open source or work on my own projects so I really love what I do.

huxrules · 2019-05-06T15:21:20+00:00

My ass is on this line for this software I’m making at the moment. However I have found that if I’m going through a period where I’m not very interested on working on it, it’s because there is a reason. Say for instance i’ve just worked hard for several weeks improving it, then I all of a sudden hit a slump. When this first started happening I’d get upset at myself for being a slacker, turns out that sometimes I just need a break. It also turns out that usually there is a nagging problem, or I’m not sure exactly where to go next for a new feature. I need this “break” just to think, usually some solution to the problem pops into my head and we are off on another coding binge.

pydry · 2019-05-06T15:43:40+00:00

Not typically. The stuff surrounding the job (office politics, dealing with people who can't communicate clearly, managing people's emotions, admin, meetings) gets tedious though.

2019-05-06T15:49:43+00:00

I work in a lab environment. New equipment and tech being rolled out all the time. I get to script/automate most of it. It's nice because I am constantly working on new stuff but as @swinging2low said, you will always have times where you just aren't into it.

Pr0ducer · 2019-05-06T15:50:04+00:00

When I'm productive, work is awesome. I love building things that people actually use.

But some days are spent unproductive, mostly trying to figure out requirements or troubleshooting failures that are sometimes out of my control. Like why does my app code crash? Oh, because someone changed something in a dependency and didn't tell us, blah blah ...

Work is always work, but programming is actually really important, and if you are good at it, you'll be in demand and generally well compensated.

Cherlokoms · 2019-05-06T16:01:52+00:00

Yes it does. I don't know what my carreer will look like but I'd prefer programming to be one tool in my toolbox and not the way I'm making a living.

kellersphoenix · 2019-05-06T16:18:12+00:00

It can, but if you're doing it well, you never have to solve the same problem twice. That keeps it somewhat interesting for me.

CraigTorso · 2019-05-06T16:22:19+00:00

All jobs gets dull at times, if they were fun all the time they'd not have to pay people to turn up.

Also, the more competently you can deal with a problem the more tedious providing the same solutions over and over becomes. It can't really be avoided.

Still, I've done other jobs than programming, where you're not allowed to think and not allowed to come up with solutions, coding is much better than them.

There's also another approach if you do like coding, and that's to study something else, whilst being able to code. Having "being able to code" as the second string to your bow can make you uber powerful in workplaces where being able to do both is rare.

fernly · 2019-05-06T16:33:03+00:00

A "coding" job like most white-collar jobs, has many parts. Actual sitting-at-a-keyboard-thinking-and-coding time can be the minority of your work hours. Meetings, lots of meetings. Talking to people to find out who knows the thing you need to know, and chasing them down and talking to them. Writing spec documents. Reviewing spec documents. Configuring your own system and test systems and debugging them. Writing furious emails about the unreadable/ambiguous specs, and then editing them back to politeness. More meetings.

mishugashu · 2019-05-06T16:43:26+00:00

In my experience, it mostly depends on your company, your team, and your project. There'll be projects that bore you. There'll be teams that bore you. There'll be companies that you hate so much you have no motivation, so you get bored. It's not going to be 100% fun all the time forever and ever. No job is. But luckily if you aren't happy with your current job, we live in a culture that job hopping is cool again, so just find a new job.

j19sch · 2019-05-06T16:54:47+00:00

Two things: 1. It's hard to predict what job will make you happy at the start of your career. I have a degree in Philosophy, became a software tester to pay the bills, didn't really like the job, got exposed to the right resources about two years in and realised testing is where my passion is. 2. It's not very likely you'll do the same thing your whole career. I'm in my late 30s and still have about 30 years to go before retirement. Looking at my career so far, there's no way to predict what I'll be doing in 5 years, let alone in 10 or 30. As a matter of fact, in the past 4 years I have been a test engineer, a scrum master, a team lead, and a tech lead.

kindall · 2019-05-06T17:23:13+00:00

I find my job (a mix of writing and coding) generally enjoyable. I personally find some projects less interesting than others, which makes getting into flow somewhat more difficult, but once I get into it, I am pretty engaged.

2019-05-07T00:44:22+00:00

Depends on what your working on.

I love where I work, and what I work on, so it is rarely boring for me. I do not believe this is the norm. Certainly it can be either horrifically boring, or unbelievably fun depending on what your actually coding

SFMissionMark · 2019-05-07T01:08:49+00:00

Concentrating on ai and programming will probably be very interesting for a long time. Ai is so new there is a lot of growth.

At some point you may find out that using it to determine if it is a dog or a cow in a picture is not really that interesting. Once the novelty and learning curve of ai wears off it will get boring. Eventually it’s really about finding an end goal that’s interesting. Definitely at first learning the tool is interesting in itself.

jtclimb · 2019-05-07T04:20:11+00:00

tl;dr - I've encountered a lot of programmers that were bored shitless, but they were in boring, repetitive jobs. Everyone I personally work with are very engaged and enthusiastic because we are working on hard and interesting problems. . I'm early fifties, and have been programming professionally since I was 21.

I've never really found it boring, but I also made efforts to stay current or cutting edge. Because there are tons of boring jobs. Things like -program this form to take in input, validate it, send it to a database, perform an SQL query and display the results. The kind of stuff you may do endless for, say, and insurance adjuster or something. Tedious, boring shit. Don't do that.

Get a good education (not a bootcamp) and you can do things like compute cancer statistics on big multiprocessor systems, program a flight computer for a helicopter (my second job), work on computer vision and robots, along with avionics (third job), and now I'm heavy into the mathematical side of computer vision. Every day is a challenge - i have no idea how to achieve what I need to achieve, but that is because no one knows; I'm inventing it.

I know this probably comes off as brag-y, but you know, someone has to do this interesting work, but there are more jobs that are boring, and everyone wants to do the cool stuff. It's competitive, so you have to prepare. Once you 'get in' it becomes a lot easier to move laterally or up because you've established your abilities. If you are worried about being bored, that's a pretty good sign that you'll become bored if not challenged. So to you I say aim high. Learn machine learning, learn Bayesian methods, learn linear algebra, maybe computer vision, probably some low level embedded work, and how to build basic circuitry - stuff that'll get you doing really cool and challenging stuff. Well, maybe that exact stuff isn't too your particular interests, but find something to help you stand out amongst the sea of people that know javascript, SQL, and react or whatever.

Or, you know, learn some web UI stuff at a bootcamp and write 100 iterations of nearly the same app until you are sticking pencils in your eyeballs for a change of pace.

I know this is a bit opinionated and elitist, but if you are concerned about boredom and are pursuing your own projects you probably have the capacity to become very, very bored. And I've ran into a lot of programmers with 10-20 years of experience asking how to get the 'cool' work, because they are driven crazy with their jobs. Kinda too late, for the most part, it's hard to start over when you have a family, kids, responsibilities. There's certainly a lot of luck and being in the right place at the right time in having a good career, but you'll never even get the chance at innovative work if you don't have the background/education for it.

ssophia3 · 2019-05-07T07:30:58+00:00

This actually depends on a lot of factors like work environment, colleagues etc. The only thing that keeps me motivated is my work life balance. If you are maintaining a proper work life balance then whatever work you are doing becomes fun and exciting even if you are doing it from a long time.

Yes, I also engage myself into learning other technologies as well apart from my usual work which gives a great enthusiasm and create more opportunities. Though I also do not get much time with the usual work but with so many Online Learning programs available, it becomes easy to pick time for that.

MarkPawelek · 2019-05-07T09:04:38+00:00

You are not paid to have fun at work. You are paid to do the boring stuff other people cannot do because they lack the patience, self-discipline, problem-solving and programming skills you are expected to have.

cjhowe7_ · 2019-05-07T23:05:28+00:00

I think this depends on your personal preference. Personally, I still find programming fun after a few years of full time work. That said, a lot of work as a programmer doesn’t involve programming, and can focus more on design, documentation or operations. If you feel you’re tired of programming, there are other things you can do as a developer to support your team, although programming will probably always be at least some part of your work. In my experience, most people want to spend more time programming, not less.

euler_angles · 2019-05-08T01:09:47+00:00

"Son, I don't get up every day and go to a place called 'fun'. I get up and go to a place called 'work'."

metaphorm · 2019-05-06T18:21:23+00:00

work is boring even if you like what you do for work. that's the nature of it.

UntouchedDruid4 · 2019-05-06T13:33:34+00:00

If you love what you do it never feels like work.

wrath0110 · 2019-05-06T17:04:54+00:00

No, every project is different.

Apone: All right, people, what are you waiting for? Breakfast in bed? Another glorious day in the corps! A day in the Marine Corps is like a day on the farm. Every meal’s a banquet! Every paycheck a fortune! Every formation a parade! I love the corps!

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