> career (if I'm focused I'm neglecting my responsibilities).

I'm confused—can you expand on this? What's "the work" that you've "grown to hate?" Is it "coding," or is it your "responsibilities?"

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andoando 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

If its any typical corporate job, as they said I imagine the coding is rather boring.

We need a new feature. Ok add this controller, add some if statements for this business logic, make some api calls, add this to the db, write some models. Ok done, same thing over and over again.

Id certainly love to be able to do the architecting part and have someone do the work

	▲	pjmlp 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		As enterprise consultant, the "have someone do the work" is kind of complicated when the someone is not from the same office, if given the choice I would rather do that boring stuff myself.
	▲	MattGaiser 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I’ve found GitHub Copilot Agent quite good for this kind of coding. You write up the architecture you want and I paste it into an issue and it fills in the rest.

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radicalbyte 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Coding as the fun stuff need you to be able to focus and due to responsibilities (which include a whole lot of system architecture, people management I do enjoy and can do well).

Basically you get to a point in your life and career where you have to decide whether you want to be the absolute best engineer, or whether you want to be building the best environment for building and retaining the best engineers. I kicked the can down the line but it was eventually having three kids which made me realise that the latter was my path. That and it was becoming increasingly harder to actually do #1 when you seem to be surrounded by incompetents taking the second path who, as they often never became competent engineers but seem to have a large influence on decisions as a group.

It's not that I like writing code exactly it's that the domain of the code I can write to a professional level doesn't overlap with the code I find interesting to write. Or in the case of web frameworks, worth spending two days understanding the new dialect of whatever the latest fad framework is so that I know what I'm doing and not copy/pasting or otherwise working from example.

What might make it hard to understand is that the vast majority of people who call themselves engineers don't do so to the level I consider professional; especially in the app / web development / start-up world.

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nunez 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The way I read it (and I agree with, so biased) is that OP hates that the focus of writing code is generally-perceived as a negative, hence the proliferation of code assistants, AND hates that focus is harder to obtain because of life stuff.

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radicalbyte 3 days ago | parent [-]

That's it, it's life phase makes focus impossible, and coding is a massive drug when you're in the zone. And I was very very good a few years ago when in the zone working on highly concurrent (and distributed) systems. I felt like superman compared to everyone else I worked with as I could build things no-one else could.

There are plenty of people on this site who must be able to relate to that (and who are much better than I am - I was a Championship player playing for a League Two club and there are Galactico's active here).

That's long gone and now I'm turning into Eddy Howe (a football manager) not Steve Bull (who was an excellent striker who played for Wolves his entire career in the lower leagues but really should have moved to a good club because he was too good for them).

I wonder sometimes if that's the hump that top class sports stars have to go through when they retire from playing, it took me a few years to understand and accept.

	▲	johnisgood 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> coding is a massive drug It truly is. One could say it could be an addiction. Something is an addiction only if it makes your life dysfunctional, and boy I have been coding for 3 days straight (!) without eating way too many times. I am completely in the zone and I neglect myself and everything around me. Yes, I know, it is bad and unhealthy, but it still happens often. I wonder if I am alone in this, I would hope not. :D
	▲	nunez 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I can definitely relate. I've taken week-long solo vacations (with my wife's approval!) just so that I can code without distractions. I don't have kids, but given that I can easily work 6-8 hours straight on completing a feature, I have to curtail it to maintain a high-quality relationship. (I also weightlift, which can take up a lot of time.) It's very difficult for me to get into the zone in three-hour spurts, and coding at night at the cost of my sleep is something I've retired. Shoot, a three-hour work session might be me trying to fix _a single bug._ Regarding "the hump," the show _Ted Lasso_ actually does a great job of describing this. A star player retires as they realize that they are no longer as spry as younger talent. Part of this show is about how they choose to deal with it.

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bongodongobob 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Most non startup corporate programming jobs are just adding/removing features, add a checkbox here, squash this business logic bug, add a new dept code here, etc. You never build anything new, it's just piddly maintenance stuff.