[wickedOne]

you say you started doing programming as a hobby which means it used to be fun, right?

you might want to isolate the aspects of what made it fun back in the days when it was a hobby and what makes it dreadful at the moment and find yourself something which include the first, but lacks the later.

personally i think the attractive side of being a developer is creating something. reading you're not interested in business side of tech (analyst, salesman, management) you might want to explore other crafts which maintain the creative part.

that could be anything really. i myself started out as a graphic designer before i got involved in programming which might be something you want to explore...

[throwaway88p]

Honestly, I've always enjoyed chasing the "rabbit hole" that came with solving problems. I'm generally poor at putting my thoughts into concrete descriptions, but I'll attempt. It used to be something like this:

I have some sort of problem, ideally one that intrigues me, because it's not obvious. I would dive into it, and it would lead down to a rabbit whole of other issues and subjects I would research and would come out with a solution, having been engaged the whole time.

Nowadays, problems I encounter are either incredibly shallow, being caused because of some carelessness by myself or someone else and often solved with a 5 minute search, or the complete opposite, too complex for me to even get started with, as people much smarter than me.