I've been doing this full time for about fifteen years, which is a fairly long time (though admittedly not nearly as much as some others here).

I haven't really stopped loving writing and designing software. I still have fun writing code and coming up with clever optimization tricks. The thing that has become draining is the actual act of "having a job".

Obviously I'm grateful to have an income, and I like my coworkers, but the problem with most jobs is that the part I enjoy like ends up being a relatively small part of my day. When I worked for a BigCo there would be weeks at a time where at least half of my day is eaten by meetings and/or emails, and when you do get to work on something technical it's usually not something that's challenging or interesting. A lot of the work ends up being a bugfix or an incremental feature that really doesn't require a lot of thought.

Even startups aren't immune to this. With startups you have the advantage of not being nearly as siloed, but that comes with the double-edged sword of being stuck working on parts of the company or stack that you don't really care about. I deal with fewer meetings but I spend much more time fighting with Kubernetes YAML configurations which I find unbelievably draining, which I might have been able to avoid if I stayed at BigCo.

From 2016-2018, I worked at a MediumCo, where I was able to primarily focus on designing and writing distributed software. I was able to spend a good chunk of time figuring out how to optimize concurrent software, there weren't that many meetings, and I didn't get sick of it at all. I quit that job because I had a romanticized idea of what life at BigCo would be like; if I had the ability to see the future I would have stayed at MediumCo because I didn't like working at BigCo [1].

Anyway, my point is that given my experience, if you can actually work on the things you love, and not just a bunch of ancillary bullshit, I think it's possible you can continue to enjoy it forever. The problem is that most jobs simply aren't like that.

[1] Usual disclaimer; you might be able to dig through my history and figure out who BigCo and MediumCo are in this, and that's obviously fine, but I politely ask that you don't post the proper nouns here.

I've been coding for 30 years. We recently built a silent auction app for the university I work for, and it was as rewarding for me as the first thing I ever programmed. Sometimes the job is a chore. But for me, the challenge of building something new never gets old. Teaching junior devs is also consistently rewarding.

I enjoy writing and designing software systems, and have since my first apple ii use in 2nd grade writing logo programs (the turtle drawing programming language)

I write software in my spare time, for fun, as it scratches a particular itch in my brain, but I also enjoy a lot of other hobbies as well: woodworking, car repair, boating, beekeeping...

Having a 9 to 5 desk job in any field is it's own type of soul crushing, even moreso as of late for myself personally. However, if I need to perform the song and dance to support my family, I'll at least do it to the tune of something I enjoy. With software engineering I can at least "get lost in" the work, so the drudgery can be temporarily forgotten until I can get home to my family and side projects.

It's a bit fractal and tautological...

On the one hand, I think a lot of the ruinous parts are the extra things it forces beyond the parts you actually love. So the problem there is you are actually doing a bunch of things you don't love, so do "work" some portion of your day.

The other is that many of us do love a bit of oppositional defiance. Doing what is demanded of us by others is definitely not doing what we love in that respect!

IMO, there are more steps. Do what you love for work, someone will exploit you for it, and break your heart.

One of my kids has taken this advice, does art (really good art) for themselves and is pursuing a STEM career instead. The other is pursuing a game dev career, despite every current and former dev in his life warning him off for the last fifteen years. To quote Kissing Jessica Stein, “OY! This child will suffer.”

Agreed - once you have to do something for a living in order to survive (and probably under the orders of clueless management and company executives) it becomes "work" that is no longer fun.

Same way that being forced to read for school often kills the desire to read for fun.

It certainly killed a lot of my tinkering outside of work, but that's more a matter of when I'm already doing the thing for most of the day, even though I like it I don't always want to continue doing it for the rest of the day too when I get home.

Yes and no.

I'm really glad that I left the rodent rally, but I did not want to leave tech. I just wanted to be in a place, where my work doesn't get fed into a wood-chipper, by terrible managers.

Once they were taken out of the equation, happiness ensued.

I deliberately turn down jobs that pay. Once someone pays me for my work, I'm duty-bound to give them what they pay for; even if that sucks, and I don't like doing bad work.

Exactly.

I am "privileged," but pretty much every other vocation has been in a place where people are getting squeezed by others or tools. Nothing new here, folks.

It's just that now, the bell tolls for tech workers, and they are suddenly getting to understand what other fields have been dealing with, for decades -centuries, in some cases.

Thanks. I needed to be put in my place.