After more than five years without programming daily, I returned to it and surprisingly enjoyed it. I say that because I thought I would never go back to programming again.
The context
Long story short, I spent 12 years programming daily as a full-time job, then moved to management and ultimately started my own recruiting company. It was almost seven years away from coding daily, but only five without touching code.
During the coding “break,” I thought go-back programming wouldn’t happen; I had lost interest in it.
I made some attempts as a freelancer in tandem, but the spark isn’t there anymore.
I told myself things like, programming is not fun as it was in the past, and I don’t want to learn a new technology/framework every week.
The interesting fact is that I was blaming the wrong reason, I thought the reason was the “coding” activity itself, but it wasn’t.
Taking action
Even with these thoughts surrounding my mind, I decided to join a team as a developer again a year ago. It was a bet; it could work just like it could go wrong, but there was only one way to find out, so why not go forward?
I started looking for positions, selected the most fitting my plans, and went ahead.
Discovering the real cause
After thinking about this, I realized that everything surrounding the “coding” activity was my real problem. Not the coding itself. I still love to code and solve problems with code, but I wouldn’t say I like the bureaucracy we created surrounding the coding activity.
I was tired of the routine we created as “agile” development teams.
As I progressed in my career and worked for more prominent companies and significant projects, I realized that delivering progress and results in a report to stakeholders was more critical than providing actual code and features that generated real value for customers and users of the products we’re building.
And that was killing my passion for coding. That was why I lost my interest in coding, not the coding itself.
I realized it after working for months for a small company, focused on delivering real features as fast as possible and not caring about reports or fancy tracking systems.
Notice that I didn’t say any tracking and no reports, I said no fancy systems to do it and not prioritize it over shipping features.
Reviving the Spark
A small team of senior developers doing the work engaged with code quality and shipping feature after feature; like I wasn’t seeing for a long time, this is the real deal.
That fired the spark of coding inside me again, and I can see now that I never lost my interest in coding, and I don’t believe it will ever happen. But I also better understand how toxic and anti-productive an environment can be, so I consider myself more prepared to defend myself and my team when and if it happens again.
It’s been a year working with this team, and I had time to mature these tough without risking being precipitated.
I don’t know what kind of job I will do in the future, mainly because I am also interested in other activities, but I can ensure I love programming, and I’m enjoying it a lot nowadays.
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