You will experience periods of burnout in your programming career. Things will come at you that will overwhelm your ability to cope with them. You will find yourself stuck in loops wondering if this is really what you should be doing. Understanding what you're feeling and acknowledging your feelings as valid is the first step to changing the course from one of burnout and stress. Programming shouldn't be drudgery (no work should be drudgery). There should be something in your programming day that keeps you motivated, and helps you grow your skills. Adding bits of learning, joy, and wonder (along with periods of downtime) will help sustain you through the emotional turbulence that awaits. And recognizing when you're burning out and renegotiating your agreements with yourself and others can help reinvigorate your desires to keep programming.
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## Giving up
-Programmers don't like to think about giving up. We work on machines that have so many possibilities that we feel we should be able to make things work. But sometimes we can't see those possibilities. Sometimes we look at the list of things we should be learning and wonder if it's all worth it. We look at lists of job prospects and see nothing but meaningless work. Students ask us what it's like to be a programmer and we wonder if it's OK to crush their dreams this early in their careers. The joy that sustained us into learning the craft disappears and we're left wondering if we will ever cultivate that feeling again.
+Programmers don't like to think about giving up. We work on machines that have so many possibilities that we feel we should be able to make anything work on them. But sometimes we don't want to see those possibilities. Sometimes we look at the list of things we should be learning and wonder if it's all worth the effort. We look at lists of job prospects for our set of skills and see that the only fit for those skills is nothing but work that we find meaningless. People who are learning to program ask us what it's like to be a programmer and we wonder if it's OK to crush their dreams this early in their careers. The joy that sustained us into learning the craft disappears and we're left wondering if we will ever cultivate that feeling again.
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-Programming isn't for everyone. There are times when I've wondered if I should be working as a programmer. I feel as though I can't learn everything that I need to know, and wonder if what I'm learning will not matter because in 10 seconds everything out there will have completely changed. I struggle looking at job positions that seem like they won't matter in 3 years, let alone 100. I feel like the computing future I was promised never happened and we're stuck in a world where computers are little more than levers for companies to pry open the wallets of their customers.
+Programming isn't for everyone. There are times when I've wondered if I should be working as a programmer. I feel as though I can't learn everything that I need to know, and wonder if what I'm learning will still be relevant because by the time I finish everything I'm hoping to learn will have completely changed by then. I struggle looking at job positions that offer work that I don't think will matter six months from now, let alone 10 to 100 years. I feel like the computing future I was promised was corrupted and we're stuck in a world where computers are little more than levers for companies to pry open the wallets of their customers.
-It's easy to become fatalistic about the practice of programming but I've realized that there's more to computing and programming than what I see in the job market.
+It's easy to become fatalistic about the practice of programming but I've realized that there's more to computing and programming than what the job market has to offer.
Part of the joy of programming is the curiosity. If we can continually tap into that curiosity then we have so many avenues to explore. From game programming to some of the more esoteric languages there are always topics and ideas to discover. What the job market uses is but a fraction of what is out there. There's also a whole host of emulators and retro-computers available with good documentation. One of the things that I'm curious about is how older computers work. But there are also newer, lower-powered machines out there in the embedded space that are fascinating to look at and understand.
projects / themediocreprogrammer.git / blobdiff