[lordnacho]

The thing that makes you happy when coding is purpose.

Even automating your house so that heating comes on before you arrive has a purpose. Or writing a script to clean up your photos. Or any number of little coding tasks. You do them and you find them enjoyable because they have purpose.

Sometimes with work, you lose that. Often it's because coding isn't seen as anything but a chore that needs to be done towards the business goal. A necessary annoyance, where the real purpose is something that doesn't require coding. And that really kills the enjoyment for a lot of devs.

I had a period where I felt like you. I was working in a dying business, other people weren't supporting it, and it just felt like a death spiral. The only thing to be done was to change track and do something else.

[therein]

I couldn't have expressed it any better. This is it for me, it kills it for me when "coding isn't seen as anything but a chore that needs to be done towards the business goal. A necessary annoyance, where the real purpose is something that doesn't require coding. And that really kills the enjoyment for a lot of devs".

I began feeling that way at my previous job and left about 2 months ago. Now I am in my new job at a startup going through hypergrowth and I feel like development and solutioning is so intertwined and we go back to the drawing board so often and the dynamics of so fluid that I get to feel a more obvious sense of purpose.