It's hard to love a computer programming job sometimes. When you're doing a bad job, you'll be told so regularly and forcefully by frustrated users, but that's only if they have no choice in using your program. If you're doing a mostly adequate job, people will still complain, but less. If you're doing an amazing job, you won't hear anything at all. Positive feedback about your work is almost non-existent, so if you're an affirmation kind of person, you'll have a very tough time. You need to find something else to love about the job.
Mokalus of Borg
PS - This may only be true of business software such as what I do.
PPS - Games and some other applications do have vocal fans.
4 comments:
I never really thought about that ... but it makes sense.
And I realise that I would never last in that kind of job.
I don't need a lot of affirmation, but I do need some. And if I'm not getting it, then I fish for it. And if I never got it, I would become very disenchanted, very quickly.
I haven't gotten permanently disenchanted yet, but I'm looking forward to my holiday. I don't think that's unique to my line of work, though.
Can empathise with you John - this is a common problem in service roles - like you, I need to get my kicks from sources other than client's affirmation.
Maybe we will have time to share ideas in the next couple of weeks :)
In general and so far my joy at work has come from learning new things and designing code that is beatiful. However, I don't expect anyone but programmers to actually see the beauty in code.
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