Is Programming Pointless and Unfulfilling?
At what point do we say goodbye to a career we no longer love?
An acknowledgment of fortune and privilege
After reading my own writing here, I can’t help but notice that if I was to have read this article a couple of years ago, I would have probably reacted with a, “Are you kidding me? You have it made. Shut up and stop complaining!” type of comment. I realize I have very little to complain about when it comes to my work, this is more about achieving the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the ever-elusive self-actualization. It’s not simply about making more money or advancing in my career.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs is as follows:
Self-actualization is the need to fulfill one’s “full potential”. I think most would agree that their own “full potential” doesn’t stop at being a corporate lackey — no matter how prestigious the company or high the pay.
That Nagging Feeling
It’s one of those days — as I’m sure we’ve all experienced from time to time (for me it's at least once a week and often multiple times) — where I find myself wondering if what I do for a living is my “true calling” or not.
I certainly make great money, amazing money (relatively speaking of course)! And I have amazing benefits too. I have more freedoms than nearly anyone I know who works a 9–to-5 style job. I can even work outside of the United States practically whenever I want, and indeed, I’ve been doing just that from a beautiful beach house on the southwest coast of France for the last month and a half.
I’ve worked my entire software career (close to 5 years — which is a long time in my opinion) to find this exact opportunity and I have gradually approached the lifestyle I want to have each year with each successive jump to a better company — better in the sense of being more aligned to what I care about.
But despite every amazing perk I get from working at a top-notch tech company, I can’t help but feel unfulfilled on a regular basis. I can’t help but feel like I’m doing something I don’t actually love and why should I spend my life doing that!?
This feeling usually creeps up on me halfway through the week — usually after some meeting I have mid-day where I have to listen to others talking about how we can improve some part of our development process or scrum board. Sometimes I feel this feeling after perusing a messy codebase in order to fix a bug that nobody can easily fix. And sometimes I even feel this feeling after I’ve had a pretty fun time working on a green-field project and getting to design the entire front-end replete with custom CSS — which is probably the thing I enjoy most when it comes to programming.
But even at its best and most enjoyable, programming and working each and every day to bring someone else’s vision to life feels completely and utterly vapid, boring, and quite pointedly NOT self-actualization.
I realize the 9-to-5 lifestyle probably smacks of discontent for almost everyone. But there are additional reasons why programming specifically can feel even more agonizing and unfulfilling.
Sitting in front of a computer
Let’s ignore the fact that developers don’t exactly work for 8 hours a day and that we certainly don’t need to sit for the full day or even work particularly hard each day. There are moments of frantic work and moments that are more casual and learning-filled.
But for the most part, the life of a developer is sitting down staring at a computer screen. This is true whether you’re teaching development or whether you’re doing development, it’s true if you’re reading documentation or writing documentation and it’s even true if you’re writing about development or learning about development. Yes, this is true for most white-collar work in the pre/post-pandemic world, but programmers have much less interpersonal interaction and the work itself is nearly devoid of a human personality.
“the act of programming is devoid of human personality”
Think about it for a second, programming is one of the most dehumanizing processes in the world. Your personality, your quirks, your humor, your perspective, your origins, basically everything that makes a person a unique person is irrelevant to the work and thus is not selected for in the daily motions of work and advancement. As a programmer, your utility lies almost solely in your ability to solve a problem and/or improve a system (yes, teamwork and working with others is huge as well — but secondary to our programming ability).
Compare this to other professions that are often in front of computers nowadays. Lawyers, architects, teachers, doctors, real estate agents, sales, designers, writers, cinematographers, — all of these careers and their work involve the person and their personality much more than programming. Each and every one of these careers involve huge amounts of human interaction to accomplish their work. The work itself is usually collaborative and your success depends enormously on your personality and whether other people want to work with you. Only in the world of software development can a person be the absolute most unpleasant person in the world with zero personality and zero social skills but still be extremely valued on the team.
And without a doubt, becoming a successful programmer and working as a successful programmer involves much more time in front of a computer screen than any of these other careers. Perhaps more than any other career in existence today.
I know it’s painfully cliché, but we only live once, and the great big world exists and moves around us full of people worth meeting and experiences worth having. I feel like I’m missing out on so many things each day while I sit there surrounded by monitors, adjusting the font color of a hyperlink to be the brand-specific shade of green or updating some logic because someone changed the payload returned from a dependency. I do a huge variety of things as a full-stack developer, but each thing invariably starts to feel mundane after the 10th time it’s done. And what’s more, the thought of advancing in my career only to then delegate these tasks to other burgeoning developers sounds equally mundane.
A Fulfilling Life
I’m sure that most people have different feelings about what makes life fulfilling. But I think I have a good idea about what I need in mine, and unfortunately, I’m realizing that being a developer for a company doesn’t align with much of what I consider to be possible and important to living the best life possible.
Here is a quick list of things I want to be part of my life in order for me to confidently say that I’m living a fulfilling life:
- Plenty of human interaction and meeting new people:
- Humans are social animals, we love to interact with other people and it’s a well-acknowledged part of what makes us happy and fulfilled. Programming sadly doesn’t involve very much interaction with people, certainly not compared to many other lines of work. And it involves even less interaction with new people. - Ample free time and the freedom to choose which days you work:
- I’m 100% sure that I will never be happy working a traditional 9-to-5 for obvious reasons. - Ability to work from wherever I choose for as long as I choose:
- I want to travel the world while I’m still relatively young, travelling while you work 40 hours a week is really cool but it’s extremely difficult and your days still feel absorbed by work. - To do something that allows me to express myself or discover myself:
- Did you notice how Mazlow’s self-actualization involves a creative aspect? That’s no accident. - Not needing a computer for every aspect of my craft!
- Doing something that has a meaningful presence in the world:
- Programming feels more like being a cog in a large machine than a unique individual in the world.
Programming as a stepping stone
Programming isn’t all bad and I’m not trying to dissuade others from this career, after all, everyone has different needs in life and at different points in their life.
Maybe being a developer has been more like a stage along the way to having a fulfilling life. It’s given me the means to develop my critical thinking skills and better understand the systems that dominate the world today, and it’s given me the financial freedom to actually stop and consider what I really want to do. I’m very thankful to this career for that. But at what point do we say goodbye to a career we no longer need or love?
If you’re someone who has taken the leap to quit your 9-to-5 I’d love to hear about how you did it and how much savings you had before you did it and what you did to wean yourself off that corporate paycheck.
Also, feel free to follow me as I make this transition away from a life of programming.
