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I thought that this was me ("The industry in which I have based my entire career just doesn't excite me anymore."), but then I realized I actually am mostly jus

I thought that this was me ("The industry in which I have based my entire career just doesn't excite me anymore."), but then I realized I actually am mostly just interested in programming the way some people are interested in any other skill or machine. Some people learn guitar because they need to make music and play out. Others just love playing the guitar, even and especially when nobody is watching, for its own pleasure. To me, there is no greater toy than a programming language. ChatGPT is neat, but it isn't a programming language. Same for blockchain or agile or whatever other trend is happening in the industry. Some of the trends literally are new programming languages! Golang is really fun! So is TypeScript! Some trends or technologies make programming even more fun (in my opinion anyway) and I embrace those feverishly: distributed version control, CI/CD, pair programming (sometimes it's even more fun with a friend!), configurable linters like Perl::Critic, Intellisense, JUnit-style testing frameworks. All this stuff helps me feel more in control of the computer (or distributed cluster of computers), which I've discovered is the main thing that gets me off about programming. I'm even still hopeful that LLMs will have some role to play in my having more fun with programming. I've tried CoPilot and so far it hasn't grabbed me, but maybe this will change. In any case, there are clearly other people having fun with it so I guess that's good. Maybe somebody can find joy by debugging GPT-4 prompts the same way I enjoy pouring over stack traces.

gspencley 4y ago
This is completely valid and I wish that were me. I'm a "maker." Although I try to bring a level of "craftsmanship" to my code, and I care a great deal about code quality, refactoring and solving problems at the code level - and I definitely enjoy the process - it is still a means to an end. It is the configuration of raw materials that contribute to the final form of something useful and tangible. The most tragic part is realizing that it is very unlikely that I will ever care about what it is that I am producing in tech. I was self employed for 15 years and that was extremely rewarding because the business and the product was my vision, my creation etc. Now that I am back in the job market I find that what was a career for 20 years has become "just" a job. I am making something, and that matters, but I'm not making something I would personally use as an end-user. And that is not a slight against the things I am making. They are useful to someone. Just not to me. I have spent the last few years thinking about what it would look like to make something I myself use and that's when I realized that, relatively speaking, I hardly use any tech as an end-user in my personal life at all.
- sph 4y ago
  I could have written this myself. I'm currently going the scary "bootstrapped founder" route because at least the tool I'm paid to work on is something I care about and I can put a lot of my craftsmanship on. But in general my long term goal is to go write mini Lisp interpreters in a cabin in the woods, and move away from the direction Big Tech is going. I love computers, software, but I would not say I love technology anymore, nor I think that the Internet is a net benefit for humanity anymore. It's been quite hard to accept that my view of the tech world has turned upside down in no more than a couple years.
  - ElevenLathe 4y ago
    "[writing] mini Lisp interpreters in a cabin in the woods" sounds wonderful!
    - gspencley 4y ago
      Indeed! Though when my wife and I have talked about "going off grid" and living remote, she wanted to understand my limits and asked about electricity. I pointed out that electricity led to the discovery of logic gates, which led to integrated programmable circuits, which led to the Von Neumann Architecture, which led to Ethernet, which led to the Internet which led to Twitter. It's a slippery slope!

gspencley 4y ago

This is completely valid and I wish that were me. I'm a "maker." Although I try to bring a level of "craftsmanship" to my code, and I care a great deal about code quality, refactoring and solving problems at the code level - and I definitely enjoy the process - it is still a means to an end. It is the configuration of raw materials that contribute to the final form of something useful and tangible. The most tragic part is realizing that it is very unlikely that I will ever care about what it is that I am producing in tech. I was self employed for 15 years and that was extremely rewarding because the business and the product was my vision, my creation etc. Now that I am back in the job market I find that what was a career for 20 years has become "just" a job. I am making something, and that matters, but I'm not making something I would personally use as an end-user. And that is not a slight against the things I am making. They are useful to someone. Just not to me. I have spent the last few years thinking about what it would look like to make something I myself use and that's when I realized that, relatively speaking, I hardly use any tech as an end-user in my personal life at all.

sph 4y ago
I could have written this myself. I'm currently going the scary "bootstrapped founder" route because at least the tool I'm paid to work on is something I care about and I can put a lot of my craftsmanship on. But in general my long term goal is to go write mini Lisp interpreters in a cabin in the woods, and move away from the direction Big Tech is going. I love computers, software, but I would not say I love technology anymore, nor I think that the Internet is a net benefit for humanity anymore. It's been quite hard to accept that my view of the tech world has turned upside down in no more than a couple years.
- ElevenLathe 4y ago
  "[writing] mini Lisp interpreters in a cabin in the woods" sounds wonderful!
  - gspencley 4y ago
    Indeed! Though when my wife and I have talked about "going off grid" and living remote, she wanted to understand my limits and asked about electricity. I pointed out that electricity led to the discovery of logic gates, which led to integrated programmable circuits, which led to the Von Neumann Architecture, which led to Ethernet, which led to the Internet which led to Twitter. It's a slippery slope!