3 ms·

There’s an old aphorism: “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” I worked in tech, because I love tech. No other reason, really. I accept

There’s an old aphorism: “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” I worked in tech, because I love tech. No other reason, really. I accepted a job, making maybe half of what I could make, elsewhere, because of the personal satisfaction I got from it, and the relationships I made, there. When I retired, I have continued to develop software, and am currently “leaning into” AI-assisted development. During that time, I’ve also had plenty of time to be human.

vrganj 7mo ago
I have found that aphorism does not ring true for me. “Do what you love for work, and you'll stop loving it" seems more true to me. It always eventually turns into a chore once it is a thing you need to do.
- hinkley 7mo ago
  IMO, there are more steps. Do what you love for work, someone will exploit you for it, and break your heart. One of my kids has taken this advice, does art (really good art) for themselves and is pursuing a STEM career instead. The other is pursuing a game dev career, despite every current and former dev in his life warning him off for the last fifteen years. To quote Kissing Jessica Stein, “OY! This child will suffer.”
  - ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
    Back in the day, I was a fairly good artist[0]. I was good enough to get work, and pursue a career, although I don’t know how successful I would have been. Fortunately, I also really enjoyed tech, and figured that even a mediocre programmer would do better than a top-shelf fantasy artist. Back then (hard to believe, these days), competition was a lot less prevalent, in tech, and was brutal, in art. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40917886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40917886
- saltcured 7mo ago
  It's a bit fractal and tautological... On the one hand, I think a lot of the ruinous parts are the extra things it forces beyond the parts you actually love. So the problem there is you are actually doing a bunch of things you don't love, so do "work" some portion of your day. The other is that many of us do love a bit of oppositional defiance. Doing what is demanded of us by others is definitely not doing what we love in that respect!
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- ip26 7mo ago
  It certainly killed a lot of my tinkering outside of work, but that's more a matter of when I'm already doing the thing for most of the day, even though I like it I don't always want to continue doing it for the rest of the day too when I get home.
- drzaiusx11 7mo ago
  I enjoy writing and designing software systems, and have since my first apple ii use in 2nd grade writing logo programs (the turtle drawing programming language) I write software in my spare time, for fun, as it scratches a particular itch in my brain, but I also enjoy a lot of other hobbies as well: woodworking, car repair, boating, beekeeping... Having a 9 to 5 desk job in any field is it's own type of soul crushing, even moreso as of late for myself personally. However, if I need to perform the song and dance to support my family, I'll at least do it to the tune of something I enjoy. With software engineering I can at least "get lost in" the work, so the drudgery can be temporarily forgotten until I can get home to my family and side projects.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
  Yes and no. I'm really glad that I left the rodent rally, but I did not want to leave tech. I just wanted to be in a place, where my work doesn't get fed into a wood-chipper, by terrible managers. Once they were taken out of the equation, happiness ensued. I deliberately turn down jobs that pay. Once someone pays me for my work, I'm duty-bound to give them what they pay for; even if that sucks, and I don't like doing bad work.
- musicale 7mo ago
  Agreed - once you have to do something for a living in order to survive (and probably under the orders of clueless management and company executives) it becomes "work" that is no longer fun. Same way that being forced to read for school often kills the desire to read for fun.
- suzzer99 7mo ago
  I've been coding for 30 years. We recently built a silent auction app for the university I work for, and it was as rewarding for me as the first thing I ever programmed. Sometimes the job is a chore. But for me, the challenge of building something new never gets old. Teaching junior devs is also consistently rewarding.
- tombert 7mo ago
  I've been doing this full time for about fifteen years, which is a fairly long time (though admittedly not nearly as much as some others here). I haven't really stopped loving writing and designing software. I still have fun writing code and coming up with clever optimization tricks. The thing that has become draining is the actual act of "having a job". Obviously I'm grateful to have an income, and I like my coworkers, but the problem with most jobs is that the part I enjoy like ends up being a relatively small part of my day. When I worked for a BigCo there would be weeks at a time where at least half of my day is eaten by meetings and/or emails, and when you do get to work on something technical it's usually not something that's challenging or interesting. A lot of the work ends up being a bugfix or an incremental feature that really doesn't require a lot of thought. Even startups aren't immune to this. With startups you have the advantage of not being nearly as siloed, but that comes with the double-edged sword of being stuck working on parts of the company or stack that you don't really care about. I deal with fewer meetings but I spend much more time fighting with Kubernetes YAML configurations which I find unbelievably draining, which I might have been able to avoid if I stayed at BigCo. From 2016-2018, I worked at a MediumCo, where I was able to primarily focus on designing and writing distributed software. I was able to spend a good chunk of time figuring out how to optimize concurrent software, there weren't that many meetings, and I didn't get sick of it at all. I quit that job because I had a romanticized idea of what life at BigCo would be like; if I had the ability to see the future I would have stayed at MediumCo because I didn't like working at BigCo [1]. Anyway, my point is that given my experience, if you can actually work on the things you love, and not just a bunch of ancillary bullshit, I think it's possible you can continue to enjoy it forever. The problem is that most jobs simply aren't like that. [1] Usual disclaimer; you might be able to dig through my history and figure out who BigCo and MediumCo are in this, and that's obviously fine, but I politely ask that you don't post the proper nouns here.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
Bender 7mo ago
This was the same for me. The only things I did not like about tech were not really related to tech but rather bad leadership or the wrong kinds of leadership. Early in my career I worked for one of the worst and literally most criminal managed hosting organizations and it was the best boon for my career making me fearless. I learned how to remove all emotion from my experiences and off-board bad leaders. Everything else for me was being in the right place around the right people at the right time and teaching those around me everything I knew in hopes they would take over those tasks. My biggest satisfaction and what I took the most pride in was helping others with their careers and helping them off-board bad and abusive management.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
  Exactly. I am "privileged," but pretty much every other vocation has been in a place where people are getting squeezed by others or tools. Nothing new here, folks. It's just that now, the bell tolls for tech workers, and they are suddenly getting to understand what other fields have been dealing with, for decades -centuries, in some cases.
weatherlite 7mo ago
"Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life." It's possible sex workers took this advice too literally...
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
QuantumFunnel 7mo ago
That's a very privileged thing to say about a career where the tools to replace developers did not exist
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
  Thanks. I needed to be put in my place.
  - cindyllm 7mo ago
    [dead]
benhurmarcel 7mo ago
I don't know if it's so universal. My opinion is rather that most jobs will make your passion become dull. I knew some airline pilots who loved flying, but didn't feel so much like it after decades. I got into aerospace engineering because I liked all aspects of it. A couple decades of end-to-end meetings and "TPS reports" later, I'm not as passionate anymore. Some time ago I was excited about solving a practical issue by coding some new tool myself, a year of exchanges with management and IT has made me look forward to move on. By all measures my company is pretty good in my industry, but the corporate life just has a way of sucking away passion.
sdevonoes 7mo ago
I love tech. Reading tech books is something I do on a daily basis. I work on personal side projects, learn new ways of solving things, languages, frameworks, libraries, etc. But I have to say that as I grow older, I like less and less the tech my boss makes me work on. And that applies to perhaps the majority of potential bosses out there.

vrganj 7mo ago

I have found that aphorism does not ring true for me. “Do what you love for work, and you'll stop loving it" seems more true to me. It always eventually turns into a chore once it is a thing you need to do.

hinkley 7mo ago
IMO, there are more steps. Do what you love for work, someone will exploit you for it, and break your heart. One of my kids has taken this advice, does art (really good art) for themselves and is pursuing a STEM career instead. The other is pursuing a game dev career, despite every current and former dev in his life warning him off for the last fifteen years. To quote Kissing Jessica Stein, “OY! This child will suffer.”
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
  Back in the day, I was a fairly good artist[0]. I was good enough to get work, and pursue a career, although I don’t know how successful I would have been. Fortunately, I also really enjoyed tech, and figured that even a mediocre programmer would do better than a top-shelf fantasy artist. Back then (hard to believe, these days), competition was a lot less prevalent, in tech, and was brutal, in art. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40917886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40917886
saltcured 7mo ago
It's a bit fractal and tautological... On the one hand, I think a lot of the ruinous parts are the extra things it forces beyond the parts you actually love. So the problem there is you are actually doing a bunch of things you don't love, so do "work" some portion of your day. The other is that many of us do love a bit of oppositional defiance. Doing what is demanded of us by others is definitely not doing what we love in that respect!
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
ip26 7mo ago
It certainly killed a lot of my tinkering outside of work, but that's more a matter of when I'm already doing the thing for most of the day, even though I like it I don't always want to continue doing it for the rest of the day too when I get home.
drzaiusx11 7mo ago
I enjoy writing and designing software systems, and have since my first apple ii use in 2nd grade writing logo programs (the turtle drawing programming language) I write software in my spare time, for fun, as it scratches a particular itch in my brain, but I also enjoy a lot of other hobbies as well: woodworking, car repair, boating, beekeeping... Having a 9 to 5 desk job in any field is it's own type of soul crushing, even moreso as of late for myself personally. However, if I need to perform the song and dance to support my family, I'll at least do it to the tune of something I enjoy. With software engineering I can at least "get lost in" the work, so the drudgery can be temporarily forgotten until I can get home to my family and side projects.
ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
Yes and no. I'm really glad that I left the rodent rally, but I did not want to leave tech. I just wanted to be in a place, where my work doesn't get fed into a wood-chipper, by terrible managers. Once they were taken out of the equation, happiness ensued. I deliberately turn down jobs that pay. Once someone pays me for my work, I'm duty-bound to give them what they pay for; even if that sucks, and I don't like doing bad work.
musicale 7mo ago
Agreed - once you have to do something for a living in order to survive (and probably under the orders of clueless management and company executives) it becomes "work" that is no longer fun. Same way that being forced to read for school often kills the desire to read for fun.
suzzer99 7mo ago
I've been coding for 30 years. We recently built a silent auction app for the university I work for, and it was as rewarding for me as the first thing I ever programmed. Sometimes the job is a chore. But for me, the challenge of building something new never gets old. Teaching junior devs is also consistently rewarding.
tombert 7mo ago
I've been doing this full time for about fifteen years, which is a fairly long time (though admittedly not nearly as much as some others here). I haven't really stopped loving writing and designing software. I still have fun writing code and coming up with clever optimization tricks. The thing that has become draining is the actual act of "having a job". Obviously I'm grateful to have an income, and I like my coworkers, but the problem with most jobs is that the part I enjoy like ends up being a relatively small part of my day. When I worked for a BigCo there would be weeks at a time where at least half of my day is eaten by meetings and/or emails, and when you do get to work on something technical it's usually not something that's challenging or interesting. A lot of the work ends up being a bugfix or an incremental feature that really doesn't require a lot of thought. Even startups aren't immune to this. With startups you have the advantage of not being nearly as siloed, but that comes with the double-edged sword of being stuck working on parts of the company or stack that you don't really care about. I deal with fewer meetings but I spend much more time fighting with Kubernetes YAML configurations which I find unbelievably draining, which I might have been able to avoid if I stayed at BigCo. From 2016-2018, I worked at a MediumCo, where I was able to primarily focus on designing and writing distributed software. I was able to spend a good chunk of time figuring out how to optimize concurrent software, there weren't that many meetings, and I didn't get sick of it at all. I quit that job because I had a romanticized idea of what life at BigCo would be like; if I had the ability to see the future I would have stayed at MediumCo because I didn't like working at BigCo [1]. Anyway, my point is that given my experience, if you can actually work on the things you love, and not just a bunch of ancillary bullshit, I think it's possible you can continue to enjoy it forever. The problem is that most jobs simply aren't like that. [1] Usual disclaimer; you might be able to dig through my history and figure out who BigCo and MediumCo are in this, and that's obviously fine, but I politely ask that you don't post the proper nouns here.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

Bender 7mo ago

This was the same for me. The only things I did not like about tech were not really related to tech but rather bad leadership or the wrong kinds of leadership. Early in my career I worked for one of the worst and literally most criminal managed hosting organizations and it was the best boon for my career making me fearless. I learned how to remove all emotion from my experiences and off-board bad leaders. Everything else for me was being in the right place around the right people at the right time and teaching those around me everything I knew in hopes they would take over those tasks. My biggest satisfaction and what I took the most pride in was helping others with their careers and helping them off-board bad and abusive management.

ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
Exactly. I am "privileged," but pretty much every other vocation has been in a place where people are getting squeezed by others or tools. Nothing new here, folks. It's just that now, the bell tolls for tech workers, and they are suddenly getting to understand what other fields have been dealing with, for decades -centuries, in some cases.

weatherlite 7mo ago

"Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life." It's possible sex workers took this advice too literally...

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

QuantumFunnel 7mo ago

That's a very privileged thing to say about a career where the tools to replace developers did not exist

ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
Thanks. I needed to be put in my place.
- cindyllm 7mo ago
  [dead]

benhurmarcel 7mo ago

I don't know if it's so universal. My opinion is rather that most jobs will make your passion become dull. I knew some airline pilots who loved flying, but didn't feel so much like it after decades. I got into aerospace engineering because I liked all aspects of it. A couple decades of end-to-end meetings and "TPS reports" later, I'm not as passionate anymore. Some time ago I was excited about solving a practical issue by coding some new tool myself, a year of exchanges with management and IT has made me look forward to move on. By all measures my company is pretty good in my industry, but the corporate life just has a way of sucking away passion.

sdevonoes 7mo ago

I love tech. Reading tech books is something I do on a daily basis. I work on personal side projects, learn new ways of solving things, languages, frameworks, libraries, etc. But I have to say that as I grow older, I like less and less the tech my boss makes me work on. And that applies to perhaps the majority of potential bosses out there.