Does it get boring after a while?
Any job can get boring.
Most people find their jobs boring. Not everyone can be astronaughts or lion tamers.
I programmed before school age. I feel very lucky to now get paid for it. There is still the thrill when you hit ‘go’ and the machine does stuff.
Saying that, there are boring parts to the job, but meh, that’s life.
Every job can be boring. All depends on how you approach it.
I’m not experienced enough to talk about this but I think given the possible work environments for non-game developers, it’d be boring after a while to do web or backend or such things.
I’ve recently started working part-time in a company developing mobile & Facebook games, it’s been fun so far.
THERE ARE EVEN GIRLS ;D
nerdy chicks. that’s the best part.
Even astronauts have described their job as “a week of thrills, 51 other weeks of paperwork”.
Even if you enjoy the work (your actual projects), you might still dislike the job.
Depends on what you’re programming.
Like people have said, any job can get boring and programming is no exception (well maybe it’s a JobNotCurrentlyRewardingException). The question is what you can do about it during those lulls in enthusiasm. Some ideas.
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Learn more. There is more to programming than Java style OOP. Check out different paradigms like functional programming, the actor model, LISP’s code as data approach, etc. See what their strengths and weaknesses are. See if you can adapt some of what they do in your current work.
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Automate. Is there some tedious piece of your work you could automate? Sometimes building the software to automate a process can be a great learning experience, put you in a different frame of mind, and (if it works) give you a significant productivity boost.
3.Talk to your co-workers. Many people who code by day also code on their own pet projects and are more than happy to talk about it at length. You may learn something or their enthusiasm may rub off on you.
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Have a personal project. Working on something you enjoy can remind you why you liked programming in the first place. It can also give you the opportunity to delve into topics that your day job just doesn’t require.
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Put your personal project aside and do something else If you are programming at work and then getting home and hacking away at night, it’s only a matter of time before programming in general is going to get stale. Get into an activity that uses your body and different parts of your brain. Go for hikes or play a sport or try your hand at painting, gardening, woodworking, something other than being in front of a monitor (either laptop or tv).
It depends on a lot of parameters including your own personality. I work in order to pay my bills, I hate corporations but I have tons of things to pay. I prefer self management, I hate bosses, managers, people who know nothing about technical stuff and who want to give you lessons on how to get the job done. I try to find a not too much unpleasant job. I used JOGL for a long time in my previous one, it was really cool. Most of the time, I work on plain 2D GUIs in SWT/AWT/Swing, the most boring thing for me consists in fixing the bugs of other people most of my time. Code maintenance is important, it’s nice to do it a bit, it’s like putting your head into your own shit, it reminds you that if you write crappy code, you will have to fix it but when you spend most of your time in fixing bugs of other developers, they go on making crappy code, you have to fix more and more bugs, it’s not very rewarding and they don’t realize that their code is not of good quality, they don’t mind, they make new features, they feel better and you feel worse everyday.
I prefer working with women :-*
I agree with actual except about the very last point. The lack of sleep might drive you sad but programming doesn’t get boring for me. I have just spent several days in porting LibGDX to JOGL 2.0 and it was really nice ;D Xerxes can now use it with his Raspberry Pi. Of course, I like some other activities including sex :persecutioncomplex: I’m tired, I’m going to fall asleep. Some people can’t focus on the same “tasks” for years whereas I can 
As a SSE with 25+ years under my belt, yes It does get very boring. So boring that I’ve seen quite a few good software engineers get very disillusioned and switch careers after 3-5 years. What I tell the younger ones these days is that they should try to offset the boring day-to-day business software with a few of their own projects at home to help keep the passion/interest up. It can be anything, it just needs to be fun/interesting for them to tinker around with. This sort of thing is a common trait for those of us who have been in software for a long time.
It can be boring but the trick is to change jobs every 3 years.
Boring is only one problem with it though. It can severely lack in job satisfaction. Generally speaking, as a programmer, you will only ever hear people complaining to you, and about how crap your programs are. It is not nice. You will almost never be praised for making something that works. I almost regret my career as a software engineer of 20 odd years when I look back and think about just how little acknowledgement or reward there is in it.
Cas
I think a “technical artist” would be a more rewarding job. People see the result of your code and say “Wow, that looks cool.”
[quote]Generally speaking, as a programmer, you will only ever hear people complaining to you, and about how crap your programs are. It is not nice. You will almost never be praised for making something that works.
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Let me quote this princec :point:
Yes, if you get a job writing an “enterprise” application…
^ I would you medal if this was normal thread.
depends on if you work for microsoft or not ):<
To further re-iterate princec comment, the same thing applies to many other areas.
My last 2 jobs I’ve had, one as a facilities engineer(mechanical engineer) and the other as a Utilities Controls Engineer.
Both our department and individually no one ever got praised for doing anything good or correct. You only hear if something went wrong. You will need to learn to take in the fact, that if no one says anything that bad, as a pretty good sign.
Also, if you start giving others compliments and making the workplace fun for others, it also promotes others to do the same to you.
As a facilities engineer, I would do mechanical work for renovations of various scale, no one ever says, oh hey that mechanical engineer did a good job. Not even the architects always get praised. However the interior designers, often would get praised for picking a good wall paint color.
As any technical field, from engineering, computer science, to whatever else. Hopefully you are pursuing these jobs and hobbies because you genuinely are interested and enjoy solving problems and challenges. Always try and focus on self fulfillment about overcoming obstacles that are infront of you.
I occasionally do volunteer work, and the people who work super hard, and the people who just kinda mosey around and talk with people all usually get an abundant of appraise and ‘good jobs’ and ‘thanks’. Though its all okay, cause everyone has fun.
If you need others to say good job to you all the time, then I’d advise looking into other fields, that have much more social and immediate interaction, or alternatively and possibly doing volunteering work(a lot of volunteers often get praised a lot more then they usually deserve).
edit: is there any reason this topic is in shameful chitchat and not under misc topics? I feel like its not a completely waste of conversation/comments?
I think because of its incredibly tenuous link to either “java and gaming”.
Cas
I moved it to Chitchat because I felt nothing good could come from this thread.
I moved it back to Misc because I was wrong.