Coding is a bit boring. Who agrees?

This is the problem with today's "passion-first" attitude towards work.

I feel like programming is boring 90%, pretty exciting 9%, and super-exciting 1% of the time.

Still hands-down beats out any other realistic career choice I could think of.

How do you feel about programming? Do you hate it and if nhow do you make it fun? I guess maybe I've been working for clients too much and maybe I should work on a project for myself.

Most days I'm indifferent, many days I hate it, some days are great. I don't do anything to make it fun -- it's my job. But I'm also compensated considerably better than $5-15/project (considerably more per hour in fact).

In my opinion there is nothing better than the feeling you get when you finally solve your problem.

This image sums it up

If they only want to pay you 5-15 bucks then don't put in a big effort, give them the absolute minimum. Tell them if they pay you what you are worth then you will give them the best product in the world, any less and they receive garbage.

DO NOT UNDERSELL YOURSELF you will regret it later on

It could very well be though, that you aren't at a level of being 'worth' more than $5-15/project.. if that's the case, you're probably better off not being paid to program, spend time doing it on your own and actually learn wtf you're doing.

hm.. i really like programming and with laravel, i love it.. things/functions are so elegant/easy & laravel makes so much stuff easy to do that it makes working fun & i cant wait to go to work the next day..

I do have those moments where I Think laravel messed up but thats usually my problem and i am just blaming thinking its laravel.. or sometimes i get stuck in a problem/bug i cant solve.. but when its solved its happy days..

If the only incentive you care about to program is money, then make an honest assessment of your skills and measure how much you are worth.

If you run into problems quickly and it seems like you are never getting better then maybe you are a newbie that has bitten off more than you can chew. Start from the beginning with patience. There is a video of Jeffrey Way in which he references a programmer's feeling of being constantly overwhelmed. That is all of us.

Also don't forget that if you master programming you do not necessarily need to work for someone else. You can start your own company/service and that is incredibly rewarding.

The beginning is ALWAYS tough. You just have to bite down on your mouthpiece and embrace the quite solitude that programming demands. And then you become a master.

$5 for a whole website is insane. Working that hard for that little would make anybody hate programming. When you're a newbie, I say screw making money from it. Make something that you want to make. You'll learn a lot and find the whole thing a lot more rewarding. When you start feeling more comfortable with coding, then you can start look for a paying job. Hopefully by that point your skill set will be worth a lot more than $5.

Hopefully by that point your skill set will be worth a lot more than $5.

And even if it's not -- for the love of god, and the sake of all the rest of us, stop doing projects for so little, it just sets precedent that development is cheap. Anything worth doing is worth doing well, and if you're going to hire someone to do it, the expectation should be that it's going to cost a realistic amount.

At trucking I got paid a set monthly salary, it was more than 15 per hour. But side projects I like by job not by hour. But with the understanding that if they want more added it will be more.

A little follow-up I think all you good programmers should pick a non-profit and do one project free but a good non profit where the director is a volunteer not a director who makes freaking $100,000 annually. I do one for a Humane Society.

Yet another follow-up no coding is not boring it's very fun and rewarding when a challenge is met.

I don't know why, but this reminded me of the guy complaining about the cost of condoms, and being told if they are too expensive then you are doing it wrong!

A good programmer enjoys problem solving in the first instance. They enjoy the 'art' of crafting something functional that solves a problem. Almost as a bonus, they get rewarded well (mostly). They improve their skills so that they can produce elegant solutions more often.

Irrespective of the hourly rate, i don't think I could do any project in 3 hours so you need to be more realistic about costs and give yourself time to plan, do and perfect the work so you can come away with satisfaction and financial reward.

I would have given up if I was trying to execute a skilled job for just 5 bucks too.

I think coding/programming is great fun, what I don't like is all the libraries, versions, betas, packages, etc. it takes to create a simple web site or application. Seems like there is always one piece that isn't finished yet and you are kept waiting for the released version to get a job done. There are so many technologies , frameworks, and platforms that you need to know. When I started with PHP 4 life seemed so simple. :P

@godbrain well, you don't have to use those packages.. you can still write everything yourself. :)

Oh My. The Googleplex has either divided or renamed itself. Damm those who dare to improve their tools; rocks work fine!

And again the wise one has spoken. --immck Words to live by.

Sure, it's boring compared to mountain biking or climbing or canoeing but coding is a job and you get paid for it, so it doesn't need to be fun.

I have had several different careers and always come back to coding.

It's interesting because you learn new things. It's frustrating when you get stuck, but satisfying when you fix something. @WebKenth It's easier than a lot of jobs, it's not physically or emotionally draining (usually). Nobody dies when we get it wrong (usually).

I feel like I have "career security", coders will always be needed and once you can code, you can pick up any language with some effort.

I don't think you should be working for such little reward. Get a coding job, the best way to learn is in at the deep end, when you feel it's all too hard and you can't do it.

Good luck.

Mick

So none of you have ever felt a little overwhelmed by the number of options in development? Really? Writing to multiple browsers over the years with very little standards maybe? I was making a joke about PHP 4. My main point is there is constant learning and challenges to this, which can both be a fun learning experience and a nightmare. I just taught myself Angular 2 and it's quite a change doing an SPA from what I have done in the past. It was both exciting to learn and a challenge to get my mind wrapped around it. I am currently using, Laravel 5.3, Spark 3, and Vue 2 for another project and have also created sites with MVC 5 and documentDB running on Azure. With every one of these projects I've run into problems that had nothing to do with the coding itself but the tools around it. Coding is fun but there is much more to it than that.

So no, I'm not using rocks ;)

@godbrain It's part of the job. Overwhelming, sure.. trying to constantly stay on top of all the different options is challenging, but there's no need to keep up with everything either. I too just finished an Angular2 project. Started the project about mid-way through the "release candidate" (yeah right) cycle.. if I had a choice whether to do it again I wouldn't. It left a bad taste in my mouth. Despite that, I see the potential, and starting a project with angular2 now would probably be less painful, though the official documentation is still crap. :)

What learning curve, most technologies that surround laravel is completely optional, vue, forge, etc. Laravel itself, meaning MVC in laravel isn't that big of a learning curve. I don't heavily use javascript, just for maybe a popup calendar, and perhaps a lookup table. Bootstrap is optional, I write my own css and custom media queries for mobile. Just focus on laravel mvc, don't wory about the technologies you don't need and it's all fine. And unless you want to play with heavy relations, ORM is optional, the querybuilder can do 98% of most all needs. You can even use regular queries if desired, laravel has getPdo. Taylor made the framework very flexible.

@canadianlover

If you want to become good at anything WORK!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTHbFb1fNy4

Read: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles

I suggest you do not contract for work for $5 - that demeans both you and other programmers. I suggest you think of a SMALL project idea, then implement it, but (important) keep a record of the time you take to flesh out your idea (before any coding), layout some simple web page, how should it look, how does the user interact with it? etc. THEN try to write the code (keep it very simple as possible) to make it work. Then look at how many hours it took you.

When working for a client, you need to add in the time it will take to understand their ideas and communicate with them, time to write a small plan that documents what you will provide and an overview of the functionality. Agree that with them, Build in an allowance for time to re-work it when they want to change typeface/colour scheme etc (yes, even on a simple one page web app!). NOW you will have an idea of what you can achieve and how long it takes, and can set a realistic cost for the client.