Yep, programming is fun but working as a programmer not so much. For me writing software is a creative activity. It’s fun to come up with problems and find solutions for them. In my personal projects I decide what problem I want to solve, choose the technology I think will be fun to solve it in and then come up with a solution I like.
At work you are usually handed a problem you don’t care about (we’re decommissioning X, you don’t have to know why, just change everything to use Y), the solution is described in detail by someone else and you just have to turn it into some code using 5-10 years old stack.
Fortunately at my current job I mostly do projects without much technical oversight (proof-of-concept type project) so I can choose how I want to do then. I dislike the company culture but I know that moving somewhere else would mean going back to boring coding agian.
Where I work there is a hardware test, where the voltage needs to be changed on the power supply like 8 times. Currently it’s done by hand.
I gave that to a student with the description that I want that automated, let production show you how the test is done. If you have other ideas how to improve it, just do it.
This was 8 working days ago for the student. She still hasn’t started, because she wants an exact description what needs to be done. If you want me to write down how exactly everything needs to be done, I might just write it myself in python and be done with it.
