Rediscovering The Joy Of Programming

The healthiest response to life is joy - Mark Twain

After ten years in the software industry, I started to feel the need for a personal work philosophy: something to rely on during the hard days, when work feels heavier than it should, and I question whether I still want to do this for a living.

Constant pressure, ambiguous career expectations, endless bureaucracy, interruptions, shipping under fear, political self-defense, and random urgent tasks with little context. These are some of the things I have been reflecting on over the last few years, trying to find practical ways to handle them.

Work felt heavy. At different moments, I imagined myself quitting and running away from problems that seemed unsolvable at first glance. I felt tired of people, frustrated with my career, and tempted to leave my job more than once, across different companies.

Because these thoughts kept coming back, I started revisiting what I had learned from other engineers and asking myself: why do I program, and how can I approach this part of my life well?

Early in my career, I read many books about software engineering. Two of them, in particular, touched on these philosophical questions: The Clean Coder and The Pragmatic Programmer. Looking back, the answer that still resonates with me is simple: I program because, at some level, I enjoy it.

By enjoyment, I do not mean constant happiness, excitement, or comfort. I mean the kind of satisfaction that comes from curiosity, problem-solving, learning, and occasionally bringing order to something confusing.

Sometimes, having fun is not easy. You do not choose your feelings, you do not fully choose your interpretation of the world, and in many situations, you react instinctively. So how are you supposed to consciously choose to have fun when you do not fully control yourself, and even less the external pressures around you at work?

My answer, at least for now, is that you need to dig for fun.

It is 3 AM. You are on call, and you get paged because one of your team's services is degrading. Of course, you want to go back to sleep. So would I. There is nothing inherently fun about being woken up by an incident.

But once the page is already happening, there is still a small part of the situation that belongs to you. You can go to your desk, open your laptop, put on some music, and approach the problem as an opportunity to learn something new, restore order, and feel the satisfaction of solving it.

This does not make the situation fair, healthy, or desirable. A broken on-call culture should still be fixed. But in the moment, while the problem is in front of you, frustration is not the only possible response.

As I wrote above, having fun is not easy. It involves consciously babysitting your thoughts when you find yourself in a bad situation. Does that always work? I do not know. But I realized that the alternative — being frustrated all the time — was making me sick and wanting to quit my job over and over again.

So I am trying to choose the better illusion.

Maybe that is all a work philosophy needs to do: not make every day good, but help you remain the kind of person who can still find curiosity inside a bad one.