[badpun]

Coding, esp. in modern environments (byzantine stacks, code reviews, agile) involves a lot of frustration and can be quite stressful. I think that's the reason it pays so well - it's just a demanding and unpleasant job that most people don't want to be doing unless they're paid very well. If you don't particularly care about money, maybe you could find something easier instead?

[whysine]

That's true. But my problem is - what else can I do? I have no other qualifications. I'm currently doing translations and it's extremely boring. It's just a part-time job and I could never see myself do this full-time. I tried other things, too, but nothing can compare to coding. Although I often got frustrated, there were also many times when finished a day of coding, went to bed and couldn't wait to start again the next morning. I never felt this way with any other job I did. Another comment mentioned customer support. I guess I will give that a try.

[badpun]

I guess there are different kinds of coding jobs. From my experience, very small teams or ideally freelance, when you're not dealing with the general corporate idiocy/security/agile/co-workers ideas on how to code/gigantic legacy codebase/office politics/etc and "only" have to fight technology, can be more peaceful. Also, technology stacks probably differ in terms of sanity, from completely bonkers (like the Hadoop/Big Data I'm currently in) to something fairly logical (like embedded maybe?).

[mattmanser]

It pays so well because there aren't enough developers.

That some developers have managed to screw themselves over by using Byzantine stacks, code reviews and agile is entirely their own fault.

Programming isn't a stressful job, but programmers sure love making their own working environments toxic.

[richardknop]

Most programming is about turning set of chaotic and very poorly defined business requirements into a code. Which usually means you end up with complex code to handle edge cases that were not defined prior to development. Constantly changing business requirements and unreasonably deadlines don't help. End result can be very stressful and not enjoyable. That's why I think there isn't enough developers. Lots of people just don't have nerves to do this job.

[badpun]

In my current company, both the super-shitty the stack (Hadoop) and agile was decided way above the heads of developers. We're just cogs hired to implement the vision of the higher ups, which is to build a "data lake" using "agile teams".

[expertentipp]

-1 refactor this