Why I Don't Like Programming (Real Reasons)
Hello and welcome back to the channel. In this video you want to share with you my 5 things that I don't like about being a programmer. Also as I'm being a developer more than 10 years I found ways to fix this problems at least partially and I hope this info will help you also.
Zombie
My first point is about feeling like a zombie after work. I see this problem in a lot of programmers. So we just sit coding some feature especially when it is interesting non stop until the evening with just a small pause for lunch and when we go out of the office we are completely mentally exhausted. We didn't do any physical activity at all but we are so tired that we barely want to move.
If you feel something like that then probably you have mental fatigue. As we are thinking and focusing a lot for the whole day our brain gets a mental fatigue in the evening. This is why lot's of programmers can just watch youtube or read the feed in the evening.
How can prevent this? Make short pauses at work when possible, look at the window, go outside to breath fresh air for 10 minutes, try to add some movements to improve the blood flow into the body. Now this may sound stupid but try to be less focused on the task you are doing. In the evening try to force youself to do a workout it will turn your brain off and help to switch.
Sitting most of the time
My second point is about sitting the whole day. Most of programmers are sitting the whole day in the office than continue sitting at computer at home playing games or watching videos. Programming is really the job where you sit a lot and you don't move at all. This is really bad for your physical health and get only worse with the time.
First solution here is to buy a standing desk. So a desk where you can change the position between sitting and standing. The main problem that they are costly and if you work in office probably nobody will buy it for you. It helps a lot in switching positions while continuing to work and I felt much better after buying one for myself and switching position between standing and sitting every 30-60 minutes.
Second advice is to try and walk as much per day as possible. While working in the office in total you probably walk at least 1-2 kilometers but in remote it's zero. So here you need to force yourself to make a walk at least in lunch time or after work. Normally it's recommended to walk at least 10 000 steps per day so try to get to this number.
Also including workouts at least 3 times per week will significantly improve your overall health. Even in remote with closed gyms we can do workout at home with any youtube video that you like for free.
Debugging code for week
My next point is fully related to programming. Even if you are a skilled programmer you can spent hours, days and even weeks while trying to debug a problem. And actually the more skilled you get the longer it will take because the problems will be more nuanced.
The point is that you can't change this, it just happens and if there is nobody who had such problems or can help you can stuck in problem really long.
My longest problems to debug took near 2 weeks on every day debugging each. 1 was the memory leak in internet explorer and the second was with debugging configuration of SSL certificates. Actually both of them were fixed in less that 5 lines of code. You can image how frustrated I was in 2 weeks. So next time when you debug something really long just think that for me it took 2 weeks for a problem and maybe it helps.
Work in company problems
My next point is about small companies problems. In every company to have pros and cons which can really irritate you. It can be overtimes, boring job, constant changes that you need to do, lots of meeting or interruptions of your work. And over last 10 years I saw different problems in different companies. And obviously there is no best company in the world without anything that irritate you. You will have it everywhere and I can be different things.
But what helped me to ignore most of this problems is changing the attitude. So don't try to fix this problems or improve them. It's not your company. Just keep thinking that you exchange your time for money doing job for 8 hours a day. You normally even get new skills and knowledge while doing it which increases your value. So all this stuff that irritates you don't really matter if you change your thinking from deep involvement to "I just do my best for money" attitude. It doesn't mean that you do bad job. You just know that at 6 o'clock you are free and you can go and do whatever else you want. Then it doesn't matter that much if it's boring, you have meeting or you need to change something for the third time. The important thing here is that you don't have overtimes because it become really difficult to keep work/life balance.
This is why it's actually super important to stop thinking about work about you end your working hours. And most of developers continue thinking about problems or looking for the solutions even at home. It's not healthy and the sooner you start to separate work and home the better .
Out of date knowledge
My last point is about constant changing, new trends, frameworks and languages that we get every day in programming. If you compare how people wrote Javascript 10 years ago and now for example it's like night and day. The guy who didn't learn something new during last 10 years is just out of market because all technologies and changing so drastically. And it is of course fun and nice from one side but irritates from other. If you are 20 or 25 maybe you want to learn new things again and again but with age you see that all new stuff is either reinvented wheel or just another approach to the same problems. And very often is not the best approach. But to be valuable on the market you must learn and use all this new technologies and be on the cutting edge.
This also related to tooling. We get new programs and services every day. The are evolving so fast but continue to be slow, not reliable and eating lots of memory. Very often I see that if I take some program from 2000 it will work really stable and will consume almost nothing in comparison to new cool programs which probably are written with electron to make development fast and are super slow and laggy.
So just to sum it up here are my 5 things that I don't like about programming and solutions to them.
- Feeling like a zombie after work
- Debugging for weeks
- Sitting at the desk for most time
- Work at company problems (changes, boring, long answers, overtimes, interruptions, meetings)
- Must have knowledge up to date / Trends / Tooling
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