How Do I Get Back a Passion For Programming? 516
bigsexyjoe writes "I am a somewhat experienced software developer who is pretty much an office drone. I used to enjoy writing code. I even enjoyed writing routine code before it became routine. But now I just come in day in and day out. I work for manipulative jerks. I don't care about the product I create. I don't enjoy coding anymore. I'm not great at interviewing. I don't have an impressive resume. I stick in more advanced stuff into my code when I can, but that is always on the sly. So my question is how do I get back the enjoyment I used to have writing code?"
Projects (Score:5, Interesting)
But like anyone else I can only really give you suggestions that would work for me or I know worked for someone else. you have to really discover it again on your own.
Retrain (Score:5, Interesting)
Do like I did: retrain and start a new career. I used to be an overworked software project manager with the love of coding drained out of me, and now I'm a happy gunsmith.
It's never too late to go back to school. No sense in living a life you don't like, you only have one life and you need to enjoy it to the fullest.
Re:Sucks to be you! (Score:4, Interesting)
Join an OSS project that does something neat that you like.
Doesn't matter what it is, if you like it you will want ot work on it.
Do all you OSS work on your own machine at home. DO NOT let it touch your company machine at all.
-nB
Re:Good advice .. but check your contract (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good advice .. but check your contract (Score:4, Interesting)
IANAL, but the answer as far as I'm aware, is that they're a lot like non compete agreements in the sense that the vast majority of them are written overly broad and are unenforceable. If you are careful to never use company time, company equipment or any other company resource and your pet project is different than your normal scope of duties you'll almost certainly win any such case and your employers lawyers will probably advise them not to sue if it looks like you won't roll over.
If you follow all the above with regards to company resources, but write something that's similar to your work, you're in a bit more of a gray area, best case scenario you will probably be required to license said software to your employer at no cost, worst case they may own it, it really depends a lot on the circumstance. This is mostly to prevent you writing crap code at work, and then writing something great at home and selling it back to your employer at extortionate prices.
If you any kind of company resources you'll almost certainly end up with work for hire owned by the company, even if you do it in your own time. The only way you'd retain ownership would be if your employer explicitly granted you it. If you use company time especially you're absolutely screwed(and will probably be fired anyway).
The obvious way around all this of course is to use a bunch of GPL code in your project forcing the GPL license. Under those circumstances it won't really matter who owns the software as they won't be able to change the licensing without a major rewrite and you'll get to keep it, you won't make any money off it, but you'll still have the code and be able to release it.
Re:Sucks to be you! (Score:4, Interesting)
Surprisingly few companies will actually let you telecommute - they like to see you in the office.
Some companies will pay for quality, a lot of them won't. It depends on whether the people doing the hiring actually know anything about coding. In a lot of places it's a departmental manager who has no coding experience and just sees "I can get coder A for £lots or coder B for £little". The relative experience of the two often doesn't enter in to it.
But really the only way is to change jobs - just trying to code for fun in your free time won't work. If you have a job coding for a living and it's making you fed up with coding, it just puts you off coding at all. You spend all day working on code you hate and have no interest in, the last thing you want do is spend your free time writing more code.
You can change jobs in this economy, I just did it and am somewhat happier for it. The software I work on now is actually interesting to me. I still hate having to commute to work, but you can't have everything.
The root problem with being paid to do your hobby for a living is it stops being your hobby and becomes your job.
Re:Good advice .. but check your contract (Score:4, Interesting)
Disclaimer: IANAL
Use a source code repository. Never work on the project from the office (or from a computer lent by the company). Never commit from your office. Never commit during office hours. Never reuse code you wrote at work in your project.
The repository log will be a good help to show your good faith if ever you get in trouble. Especially if the repository is hosted by a tier (Gitorious, GitHub, Google Code, SourceForge...) that could help to garantee that you did not cheat with the logs.