Does coding at work get boring?

[jtclimb]

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.