Forking this thread from the jdk 8 thread…
I’ve been programming 19 years. I might have a few useful words:
- In work, people should aim for a balance between what they enjoy and what the world wants.
- If you don’t like programming, try to get out of it. If you need the money or whatever, at least invest in some other piece of personal growth. Take a class, start a family…
- I hate much of programming. 90% of it is hard, boring, crap work dealing with legacy code bases on issues that I don’t care about, and most of the world doesn’t care about.
- Some new technologies are genuinely fun! Like JDK8 or Scala or Haskell or even a nice build tool like Gradle is really cool. Going from a lifetime of Microsoft Windows to Linux and realizing, wow, cmd.exe sucks and zsh is such a better product! Or going from a lifetime of Microsoft Word and Excel to going wow: Markdown or LaTeX are just better tools for authoring documents and Google Docs or R does everything that Excel did better by a hundred fold! Learning and using these tools is fun!
- Some programming is actually fun. Taking an old product and making it better, designing something and writing it, and seeing it come together is gratifying.
- I choose a career of programming with my heart set on video games. Now, I find other areas of the world much more interesting than video games. I still like the programmer talk around it though. And I would potentially write a video game if it were part of some other ambition. The game would just be a means to an end though.
- As an adult I developed a passion for learning academic subjects like higher math, signal processing, philosophy, and various engineering disciplines.
- Older people often have developed a useful specialty that holds a lot of value in this world. If you just do basic general programming stuff and get old, that’s an unhappy path, but that’s how every career track works. Tons of age 50+ programmers who are at the peak of their game and are extremely valuable and have really exciting and desirable careers. There are also a lot of people who wash out or just move on to something else, and that’s how almost all careers work.