Comment by the_only_law
5 years ago
It happened to me too. In fact I'm in the process of leaving the field for something else altogether. I do tend to get weird looks and "whys" when I mention it, but its difficult for me to really explain in a concrete way, but I've just lost all excitement and motivation to do anything with programming (despite my mind still operating in very much a hacker mindset, where I see X and thing "I bet I could make X do Y)
Try building something of your own just for fun. See if you see sparks of your old love back.
That's the thing, I've been trying to do that for years now. I've got about a dozen cool ideas that bounce around in my head and a new one every few months or so. I can spend all my non-free time thinking about and designing them in my head, but when it comes time to actually write the code, I just kinda lose all motivation.
Just do it at work. All this side project stuff is ok but a lot more stress (I.e. deep thought killer) than just being a bad attitude employee and doing something awesome because you think it will be good. Don’t spend too long on it. If your learn something, you win. If it is useful to other people at your job, double win. The worst type of employee or a software project is the well-intentioned sincerely obedient one. That is how mega disasters happen in software. Despite sprint scheduling stuff, you can take a week and play with some new stuff. You will look bad in Standup for a while, but cost of victory is looking bad for a little in some bogus unimportant context. When you finish the new thing, write a story for it and then sell the hell out of it to the other people.
Yes, wait until writing code is no longer your job though.
I'm in a similar boat. At my job, the junior engineers do most of the coding and I get to enjoy designing systems and project management.
I'm considering just hiring people to do the side projects I wish I had the energy to write the tedious code for.