Who is the first programmer in the world?

A programmer who doesn't get to program - where to turn?

• I'm in my mid 20's, and have been working as a full time programmer / developer for the last ~6 years, with several years of part-time freelancing before this, and three straight years of freelancing in the middle of this short career. I work mostly with PHP and the Drupal framework. By and large, I focus on programming custom pieces of functionality; these, of course, vary greatly from project to project. I've got years of solid experience with OOP (have done some Java & C# years ago, too) including intensive experience with front-end development, and even some design work. I've lead small teams (2-4 people) of developers. And of course, given the large amount of freelancing, I've got decent project- & client-management skills. My problem is staying motivated at any place of employment. In the time mentioned I've worked (full-time) at six local companies. The longest I've stayed at any company was just over a year. I find that I'll get hired and be very excited and motivated for the first few months, but the work quickly gets "stale." By that I mean that the interesting components (ie. the *programming*) get done, and the rest of the work turns into boring cleanup (move a button, add text, change colours, add a field). I don't get challenged, and I don't feel like I'm learning anything new. This happens repeatedly time and time again, and I always end up leaving for either a new opportunity, or to freelance. I'm wondering if perhaps I've painted myself into a corner with the rather niche work market (although with very high demand and good compensation) and need to explore other career choices. Another possibility is that I may be choosing the wrong places of employment, mostly small agencies, and need to look into working for a larger, more established firm. I find programming, writing code, and architecting solutions very rewarding. When I'm working on an interesting problem I lose all sense of time and 14-16 hours can fly by like minutes. I get the same exciting feeling when I'm doing high-level planning of a complex system, breaking up the work and figuring out how everything will tie-in together. I absolutely hate doing small, "stupid" changes that pose no challenge, yet seem to make up more and more of my work. I want to find a workplace where I will get to work on such tasks, be challenged, and improve in all areas of product development. This maybe a programming job, management, architecture of desktop apps, or may be managing a taco stand on a beach in Mexico - I don't know, and I need some advice and real-world feedback. What are some job areas worth exploring? The requirements are fairly simple:  - working with computers  - interacting with others  - challenging  - decent pay (I'm making just short of 90k / year with a month of vacation & some benefits, and would like to stay in this range, but am willing to take a temporary cut in pay for a more interesting position) Any advice would be much appreciated!

• Answer:

  First of all, you've encountered a dismal reality of the software industry. Most of the work is not programming. Programming's the fun part. If you're spending more than 20% of your time writing new code, you're doing better than a lot of people, including some very well-paid ones. However, the non-programming drudge work tends to rot your brain after a while. You can do it during a "dues paying" period if there's a strategic reason for it, but you don't want to be stuck on it for years. You have two options. If you have a supportive boss and a good reputation within the organization, you probably have a fair amount of autonomy. So look at the boring work and figure out what's causing it. If you have the time and autonomy, see if you can automate the dull stuff away. Treat it as an engineering problem. Your goal is to add value by reducing the time cost of a lot of the shitty work that people have to do. If it takes 10 minutes to make some small change coming from the business side (e.g. the text on a button) your goal should be to reduce that to 10 seconds. Find an elegant solution that is a pleasure to use for your users and the maintenance programmers. Put some time into really doing things well so that maintenance isn't such a burden. (Most programmers do not have enough autonomy to do this, or work in constrained, bureaucratic environments where too many decisions have already been made. If that's the case: move to #2). Find ways to sneak away enough time to learn the skills (which may be non-technical) that your next job will require. Put your weekends and evenings (or mornings) into this. "Steal" an education from your boss if the work is as bad as you make it sound. Upgrade your job to get more interesting work. I've never used PHP so I know it only by its reputation, but you may want to look into functional programming (FP). FP and machine learning / data science seem to be two consistently recognized marks of elite programmers, but the problem with ML is that it's hard to get ML experience without already proving that you're a good programmer (not one of the commodity developers toward whom the uninspiring typical work environment is geared). So leveling up on functional programming is a really good idea if you know you want to be a programmer for the long haul. Scala is a great language for actual professional use, but I'd recommend that you start with Haskell to get a feel for it, and then Clojure for a very different take (dynamically typed, being a JVM Lisp) on FP. One other piece of advice: take jobs as opportunities to learn social skills as well. Something annoying but probably intractable in the software industry is that even the good engineers have to spend as much time establishing credibility in order to get the interesting work as they get to spend actually doing it. The better your social skills are, the less time you have to spend on that sort of "proving" work. I actually think you'll grow a lot faster, technically, you level up socially now, because that will take a lot of slack out of your career.