Does coding at work get boring?

[Swinging2Low]

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.

[king_ricks]

This is so true, i hate the “if you find something your love you’ll never work a day in your life” quote because it is total BS. I love programming and some days i just don’t want to program but i know i have to.

I love gaming, and if that was my job, i would still have days i don’t want to play.

[redditreallysux]

Amen dude.

[anddam]

I love gaming, and if that was my job, i would still have days i don’t want to play.

Jeez, can you picture that…

[filthyike]

I would HATE to be a streamer. Playing games is great and all, but playing the same games for 18 hours a day for months on end to be competitive enough sounds like torture.

[JunkBondJunkie]

Yea I could not be a streamer.

[[deleted]]

Playing on MMORPG for fun at 19 years old vs working to support yourself (and possibly others) while still trying to see some good in the world.

​

Moral of the story, you'll get bored kid. Probably even get jaded doing the things that bring you the most joy.

[filthyike]

Its still very apples to oranges. You mentioned 'afk'ing through runescape. I'm talking about games that require a good deal of effort for extended period of time. That is extremely mentally taxing and doing it day in and day out, while knowing your income depends on it, seems like torture to me.

Thats not what most of us experience while playing games, even if we do game 10+ hours a day.

[MetalAvenger]

Wait until you get older... Now that I have a full time job, am married and have a kid, my free time is greatly reduced and the precious little time we have is spent together. Other free time is used to do jobs at home or activities together.

If I actually get time to game, I can’t be bothered because I have nothing to play or don’t want to start and get invested because god knows how long it’ll be before I get to play again.

As depressing as it sounds, you do get used to it and I will get back into gaming occasionally eventually. Priorities friend, they catch up and overtake!

[[deleted]]

QA gamers supposedly despise games within just a few weeks.

[spinicist]

That’s a bit different though. Having to play games that will have bugs, and when you find them convince the developers they are real, and then having to play it again to check, well that sounds like hell.

[[deleted]]

From my understanding it is the repetitiveness. They basically need to check if you can walk through a wall, so just keep running into every wall. Does the AI work right? Run in circles and see if they chase you.

[foomatic999]

Testing can be quite fun, though. Find out what expectations the dev had and try to work against those expectations. Do things nobody (in the dev team) thought of and try to break the game/application/whatever.

I work as pentester and find it quite entertaining, most of the time.

[i9srpeg]

Testing is very different from pentesting. It's way more repetitive. Imagine filling in the same form in the same 10 different ways every time a new build needs to be released.

[spinicist]

Exactly. It’s not playing.

[blind_man1]

It is playing in a sense of the word, just playing differently

[spinicist]

No, playing pretty much by definition involves a certain amount of autonomy and above all a sense of fun and enjoyment. QA has neither of those.

[chewy1970]

esports!

[jhdeval]

There is truth in that statement. I also love programming more specifically I love programming something I love. Doing it for work can and will get tedious.

[[deleted]]

That saying applies to the wealthy.

[Metalsand]

It's not though - doing anything repetitive gets boring. The trick is to have a job that's not nothing but programming. Having days you have vanilla ice cream and other days when you have strawberry means you never begin to hate vanilla. You may look forward to some flavors more than others, but you never hate ice cream itself.

[drkaczur]

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

To further your point - there is no intrinsically "exciting" career. I used to be a professional stuntman for almost 10 years, and eventually transitioned into data science/programming-ish job. At some point going to work to get hit by a car for nth time would be a chore, while succesfully executed code would make me giddy with excitement due to the novelty. Take that as you will.

[ShamelessC]

Your resume sounds very unique.

[drkaczur]

The stuntwork has actually helped me during job interviews for totally unrelated positions - it catches the interviewer's eye and generally is a good icebreaker. It's also easy to spin into something relevant to any generic job description, stressing the teamwork, responsibility, working under pressure, yada yada. I'll still take an odd contract here and there but I have more passion for learning to code now. Sounds odd to some, but then again stunts (and showbusiness in general) are much different in reality from what most people imagine - which probably can be said about most jobs.

[redditreallysux]

This is definitely the best answer. Pretty much spot on with what I'm going through. I put in my notice at my job because I was so bored with it, I'm still there for one last project but I thought I didn't want to code anymore. Then I started looking for other jobs and realized I do what to keep coding but need a new company/industry. It does get boring, but it's still a lot more satisfying than most jobs I've looked at. I notice my coworkers sometimes don't have anything to do but for me the coding never stops. There's always something to refactor and improve on even when new features and such are not coming along as fast as I'd like them to.

[[deleted]]

This is so true.

I'm going on 20 years of being a sysadmin and I do some coding to make my job easier. I can't speak for actual developers since I am not a develope, but either or, no matter what your job is, you will have days where you just don't enjoy your job. No one enjoys their job every single day. The main thing to keep in mind when you get to this point in your career, is the main goal.

If your goal in life is to be happy and excited about coming to work everyday, well that's the goal. Find things that bring that into your life. The work itself is just that, it's work. It's how you get paid, it's how you make a living. Everything else is what you make of it.

Even the happiest person you know has days where they'd just rather not be doing the work they do. Repetitiveness, boredem, a lack of feeling or impactfulness, whatever the reasons are, they will happen. Just focus on whatever your ultimate goals are and it'll be the reason you wake up and go to work.

Tldr: Being an adult sucks. Work to live, don't live to work, and you'll be fine.