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.
That’s going to age as well as weapons of mass destruction in Iraq did. The reality is that only Israel was threatened by Iran and the US is caught up in it simply because we act as their vassal.
You know, I'm not going to say I'm enamored with the language, but I think the Stockholm Syndrome has kicked in because I really don't hate the language so much anymore.
I mean, I'm only ever using it for configurations, and I think I'd still prefer writing Nix than YAML. I probably wouldn't like writing a full "program" with Nix, but I don't think anyone does that?
Yeah, I've been using Unixey stuff for almost twenty years now (most of it Linux, and fell for the siren song of macOS for about four of them).
I liked Arch and Ubuntu and Mint and OpenSUSE well enough when I used them first, but once I actually tried NixOS it felt so obviously correct that it started to bother me that it's not the default for everything.
Being able to temporarily install things with nix-shell is game changing, and being able to trivially see what's actually installed on my computer by quickly looking at my configuration.nix is so nice. "Uninstalling" things boils down to "remove from configuration.nix and rebuild".
The automatic snapshots upon each build allows me to be a lot "braver" when playing with configurations than I was with Arch. I was always afraid to mess with video card or wifi drivers, because if I screwed something up and if I didn't know how to get back to where I was, I might be stuck reinstalling to get back to a happy state. This didn't happen that often but often enough to have made me a bit weary about futzing with boot parameters or kernel modules. Because of the automatic snapshots with NixOS, it's much easier (and more fun) to poke with the lower level stuff, because if I do break something in a way that I don't know how to fix, the worst case scenario is that I reboot and choose an older generation.
This is a bigger deal than it sounds. For example, with my current laptop, there was a weird quirk with my USB devices having to "wake up" after not being used for more than thirty seconds, meaning that I might start typing and the first three or four words wouldn't go through. After some digging, I found out that the solution is to add "usbcore.autosuspend=-1" to the kernel params. I did that and it worked.
If I had still been running Arch or Ubuntu, I probably would have just learned to put up with it, because I would have been afraid to edit kernel parameters because of the risk of breaking things in a way that I don't know how to fix.
I love NixOS. I have no desire to leave, or at least I have no desire to abandon the model. I've considered changing to GNU Guix System since I like Lisp more than I like the Nix language, but those FSF-approved distros can be a real headache for people who actually have to use their computers.
We can acknowledge that weed might be bad for people while also acknowledging that it probably shouldn't be illegal. There's no contradiction.
I think alcohol is bad for people but I don't think it should be illegal. I also think weed is probably bad for people but probably shouldn't be illegal.
I am not sure I'd say I'm "against" it since broadly speaking I don't think it should be illegal, but I am against it in the sense that I really think that absolutely no one should be smoking weed. It's kind of an unearned opinion; I don't know anything about medicine or health or anything like that, but I hated what it would seemingly do to my friends in high school.
I'd have friends that would be more or less down to earth, start smoking weed, then start finding and watching videos of Alan Watts and Carl Sagan and convince themselves that they knew everything in the world about physics and philosophy, and they became utterly insufferable in the process, and whenever anything negative about weed was ever said, they would provide me a lecture about how weed is a cure to pretty much everything and how no one has ever had a negative effect from it ever in history.
I think there's been a huge over correction; there was so much bullshit about the dangers of weed that people started acting like it's some miraculous cure-all and ignoring actual issues.
This was such a visceral turn-off for me that I to this day have never used weed, and the idea of using it still kind of makes me viscerally annoyed. It's entirely possible that my friends were insufferable teenagers purely because teenagers can be insufferable, and that's not even unlikely, but the way I remember it is the weed making them annoying it. Not saying it's rational, just that memory and human brains are weird.
> Plenty of people use cannabis to alleviate symptoms. I don't think they expect to be cured entirely.
Obviously can't speak for everyone, but I know people who do think literally that. They think that weed will actually cure their depression, and they'll allude to some studies about it that I'm pretty sure don't exist and that they just made up.
He bragged about trying to stop the investigation! That's why Robert Mueller was appointed the first time. He went on TV and talked about how he fired Comey for even starting the investigation into Russia.
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.
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