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I only find it to be painful when done for the corporate world... when I go home, even after 7 hours at the office, I find it therapeutic to push to main, not have a CI, not write tests, test in production, commit with one-liners like I'm asking someone if they want a beer, and overall just code any random idea that crosses my mind... even more so now with AI, because now I can get my ideas out there faster, and believe me, this is serious crapware, but who cares? I don't...
Ran a personal project like this for years, no CI, sqlite file just sitting on a $5 VPS. Worked great until the one time I pushed a migration that silently corrupted timestamps and I didn't notice for three weeks. Production-testing is fine until the bug is quiet.
Unlucky isn't it, that's just what building fast looks like before you have paying customers who'll notice. Startups that write full test suites pre-PMF usually die polishing code nobody wanted. Rigor's a cost you pay once someone's depending on you.
Programming doesn't cause me pain or feel like work. I build projects in my free time because I enjoy solving problems.
One thing I love about programming is that it forces me to understand ideas at a much deeper level than simply reading about them. Writing code requires both step by step reasoning and high-level abstraction. That combination often leads to better solutions and a clearer understanding of the problem.
I often ask myself, "Would I still do this if I weren't getting paid?" The answer is usually yes. That's why many of my projects are completely free, with no ads or subscriptions.
Aside from the human side of it which is often nothing to do with programming itself, I'd say anything that is captivating is only so because its agonizing. If you have a problem to solve and instantly know the solution, there was no problem, just manual labour left not done (using that in the most technical sense). Solving problems is captivating, but it has to be hard or there'd be no problem at all.
Yea solving hard problems can be quite enjoyable, but can easily become a burden on your mind/body over time. When you're clearly making progress, then everything feels wonderful even if it's challenging. But when you're stuck, when your code/model isn't working as designed, if there is a clear gap between your current state of understanding and the amount required to solve the problem effectively, then you can fall quickly into despair. It's made worse when you see others doing similar work to what you do, but being far more successful at it. And made even worse, when you tie parts of your identity to the problem you're trying to solve, and the code you write. But that's the nature of what you're trying to do, so it isn't all bad.
There's a decent literature on this in flow research (Csikszentmihalyi) — the despair spike you're describing tracks pretty closely with what he called the anxiety channel, where challenge outpaces skill. Debugging is nasty because the skill-challenge gap is often invisible until you're already stuck in it.
I think what is agonizing is either the process imposed by the company or the architecture you are working with. Both can lead to immense frustration. When you have good architecture and a good development process, things become much less frustrating. I wanted to add one more thing: if you work on any idea you don't like, it doesn't matter the language, the platform, the architecture or the process. In the end you will feel the pain and frustration.
For me the agonizing part are all the arbitrary things you have to memorize or lookup, that do not follow from the flow of the code or the principles on which the system is built. Struggling to find the right keywords to find which particular frob needs to be foozled for the program to start working, which may or may not be documented anywhere or written up by someone who already somehow stumbled across the answer.
> Your goals are set by others; information and resources are provided by others. The programmer rarely controls his working conditions, sometimes not even his objectives. In management terms, "one's authority is not commensurate with his responsibility."
Companies by emphasizing only on "extrinsic motivation" without understanding what drives a person, effectively kill "intrinsic motivation" and hence transform what was once enjoyable into a detestable chore.
Nah, I have another one: Being confronted with my own stupidity and my own limits in mental capacity. The shocking thing is that this never goes away, even after decades of practice.
I mostly find programming fun, I’ve been doing it most of my life, but I will admit that engineering can be pretty agonizing. I enjoy the stuff, I enjoy the algorithmic stuff, and I enjoy implementing the math and algorithms, but that’s only about half of any programming job I have had.
I derive zero enjoyment from Kubernetes configs, or Terraform, or fucking around with log settings, or screwing around with all the knobs for Kafka. That stuff is agonizing.
"Agonizing" is doing a lot of work here, but I'd guess most people who say that mean debugging, not writing code. Writing is the fun part. Debugging is where the room-temperature-IQ feeling kicks in. Different skill, different emotional register entirely.
I know my code, I don't know your code. I don't know what you were thinking, why it's in the shape it's in. What assumptions you made that you might not have documented or who's documentation I have not found. Also, if you're the person who has to review it I have no idea what you'll accept which means I have to gamble wasting my time to make a PR on the off chance that you might not approve.
With my own code, all that goes away.
The other big one is yak shaving. Being forced to do things B, C, D, E, F before I can do the thing I wanted to do. I've lost projects to this where like say, some library has a bug, there's a fix in the new version, but the new version depends on newer things, and pulling those things in is not compatible with the project. I spent 30 to 60 - 120 minutes trying to get it to all work so I can get work, getting more and more pissed off, because this isn't what I planned to spend my time doing. And, I often fail and give up. Progress stopped on at least one personal project for ~4 years where once every 6 months or so I'd try to update dependencies and fail and never actually made any progress on the app.
Fortunately, this year, AI was able deal with it. It fixed the deps, removed most of them, and implemented most of the features on my TODO list from years ago.
Through words and patterns you can change the operation of the machine, and thus alter the physical world. Your programs are wizardry! The part that sucks is trying to make magic happen within an organization run by boring accounting people. The only room for magic is begrudging.
The same reason gambling is. No, I'm serious. Theres a psychological phenomenon where things which are reliably positive are less enjoyable (or addictive) than something that is disappointing sometimes and positive other times. Writing software is like that in that things don't work, then they don't work, then they still don't work, then suddenly they do.
What you are describing is more about the frustration tolerance: In SW, you need to have a very high one, while in Gambling the addiction keeps you at the table -this is also some type of frustration tolerance, bot not the one as in a context of learning-new-stuff.
One of the problems - people are promoted more due to social relations so in a such environment technology becomes second class citizen. It incentivizes other qualities than being good at what you are doing.
blah blah blah "The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures." blah blah blah
-- The Mythical Man-Month, Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
often quoted in cringe-inducing hand-wringing blog posts
It’s not agonizing or difficult at all, you just need like 20 years of obsession lmao
But seriously it’s easy after that. The hard part becomes:
- what do people want
- how should it look and feel
- how does it generate revenue
There’s a concept and execution phase to each of these that are difficult in their own way.
But yeah I have not stressed out about which for loop to use or if it should be monolithic or services etc in a long time. We have so many language options and you can even have a bot write it for you to the latest style and standard
Weinberg wrote this exact essay in 1971, The Psychology of Computer Programming. Nothing's changed except the stack traces are longer. The agony was always the gap between the model in your head and the one the machine actually runs. AI just moved where that gap shows up.
