[arexxbifs]

20+ years on I've had some good, some bad and some occasionally wonderful. It's not a bad profession, as professions go: things are generally very cushy and you can, from time to time, experience the same elation as when exploring on your own (though, for me, it's getting increasingly rare).

It's a big difference between sating your own curiosity in a hackeresque way, learning about what interests you, programming whatever the heck you like, and working professionally with software development.

If there's a programming job with no specs, no customer demands, no deadlines, no legacy maintenance, no market pressure, no platform preferences or language requirements, please let me know, would you? :)

[dmos62]

Sort of tangential, but I find that when I escape one set of annoyances, another pops up. I don't mean that worse problems are replaced by better problems, but rather that I seem to create them myself. The pain point isn't really in what's required or what's happening, but how I react to things.

[qorrect]

Programming would be awesome without having to mess with customers.

[sk0g]

Unfortunately, we get paid to translate business requirements to a language a computer can understand. Is that programming? Maybe, but a limited, rigid subset, that I at least don't find particularly stimulating.