My suggestion : forget you CS degree, drop the idea of doing something interesting during your work hours, think about it as inevitable procedure to earn your montly salary. At 5pm run away from your office and focus on whatever you think is interesting.
I work on "boring" stuff (CRUD, frontend and backend) and love it.
Maybe because I remember all to well what jobs I used to have:
- farm hand (heavy work on smaller less automated farms)
- construction (noisy, wet, dusty etc)
- security
- help desk
Being paid 8 hours a day to work on borderline interesting tasks, getting free lunch, being paid to study etc feels great. Oh, and I can work from home if I need to.
I also make my work interesting by putting some effort into it.
Agree this is a problem. Here's how we make it work:
Work with great people. Also code reviews make sure new dependencies don't usually in unless the team agrees (we are a reasonable bunch).
Standardized on Angular. It seems to me Angular has less churn. Yes: there is a life cycle and we have to follow the releases but it is mostly well documented.
For me it doesn’t seem a daily grind. When I am actually writing software, I completely love it, even after 14 years of doing it professionally full time (and several years part time during uni).
The only parts that I never liked were the bureaucratic bullshit, production support even at insane hours of the day, and the politics with your colleagues.
Usually those were a relatively small part (20-40%) of the total and I still could enjoy writing good software the rest of the time.
Now finally contracting I’m in a position were my coding skills are really appreciated and I enjoy my time coding and helping my colleagues without all the bullshit.
Maybe I don’t score high in the interesting jobs lottery, but I’m perfectly happy of the pretty good amount of money that I get doing something that I love in old, boring, huge companies.
A job doesn't have to be a calling, and a job that isn't a calling doesn't have to be a soul-crushing grind.
Most developer jobs are for CRUD apps, and you'll rarely be doing greenfield development. There's not a whole lot of room for passion there. If you just treat it as a job, though, rather than something you have to force yourself to be passionate about, it doesn't need to be that interesting. Once you make a living, you can satisfy your creative urges elsewhere.
I've always wondered who the magical developers are that did the greenfield development of every project I've been on-boarded to. I never seem to get ahead of the maintenance grind to the point of being one of those creating the mess instead of wading through the mess.
I do. I've only had two jobs I truly enjoyed doing the 9-5 work for, all the rest have been a slog to get through to pay for my other interests and family-related stuff.
C'mon we are almost at the point when there will be no social life but virtually connected individuals exchanging their personal data for likes and views.
Computation has made everyone able to connect with each other with practically no barriers. AI will make connection with machines and people seamless. These are super powers.
There is absolutely no reason to be miserable at your day job. You should be preparing for superpowers if not actively using them.
I recommend watching lectures/talks during work, skipping meetings and reading from thought leaders instead of working hard to reach deadlines. Everyone is connected which means you can read and watch what Ian Goodfellow has to say about unsupervised learning or see what the issues with the world computer are from Vitalik himself as easily as listening to your marketing department figure out how to grow 10% in the quarter.
