Honest Question: What do you do when you lose motivation to code?
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This is one of the least talked about topic. Believe it or not but programming is hard and creating a mind-blowing software (or even going about changing/fixing an existing one) is a creative task about as difficult as creating a best selling novel or story. Irrespective of whether or not you believe software development is creative (yeah, some folks like to think of it as a purely logical "hard science" which is full of rules and no creativity), you can't deny that there are times when you feel low motivation. Even the most experienced of coders face this sometimes. A problem here is that you can't ask this on any forum because the most usual reply you get is, "Programming isn't for you dude, just choose any other field"! This, I think is both uncalled for and inhumane. If you have nothing positive to offer, at least don't demoralize further an already troubled soul. Well, coming back to the title, what do you do to motivate yourself when there is a project ahead but you just don't feel like working or you sit on the desk and start typing but nothing gets typed there, almost like a "Writer's Block"!
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This is one of the least talked about topic. Believe it or not but programming is hard and creating a mind-blowing software (or even going about changing/fixing an existing one) is a creative task about as difficult as creating a best selling novel or story. Irrespective of whether or not you believe software development is creative (yeah, some folks like to think of it as a purely logical "hard science" which is full of rules and no creativity), you can't deny that there are times when you feel low motivation. Even the most experienced of coders face this sometimes. A problem here is that you can't ask this on any forum because the most usual reply you get is, "Programming isn't for you dude, just choose any other field"! This, I think is both uncalled for and inhumane. If you have nothing positive to offer, at least don't demoralize further an already troubled soul. Well, coming back to the title, what do you do to motivate yourself when there is a project ahead but you just don't feel like working or you sit on the desk and start typing but nothing gets typed there, almost like a "Writer's Block"!
My father used to say that lack of motivation means you don't have a big enough mortgage yet.
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This is one of the least talked about topic. Believe it or not but programming is hard and creating a mind-blowing software (or even going about changing/fixing an existing one) is a creative task about as difficult as creating a best selling novel or story. Irrespective of whether or not you believe software development is creative (yeah, some folks like to think of it as a purely logical "hard science" which is full of rules and no creativity), you can't deny that there are times when you feel low motivation. Even the most experienced of coders face this sometimes. A problem here is that you can't ask this on any forum because the most usual reply you get is, "Programming isn't for you dude, just choose any other field"! This, I think is both uncalled for and inhumane. If you have nothing positive to offer, at least don't demoralize further an already troubled soul. Well, coming back to the title, what do you do to motivate yourself when there is a project ahead but you just don't feel like working or you sit on the desk and start typing but nothing gets typed there, almost like a "Writer's Block"!
I have this feeling with some regularity. In your case, I'd wonder what exactly you're working on or trying to. I'm very familiar with the feeling of having bitten off more than I can chew, the dread of things getting gradually more complicated and fragile. Yes it is all a creative endeavor.
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This is one of the least talked about topic. Believe it or not but programming is hard and creating a mind-blowing software (or even going about changing/fixing an existing one) is a creative task about as difficult as creating a best selling novel or story. Irrespective of whether or not you believe software development is creative (yeah, some folks like to think of it as a purely logical "hard science" which is full of rules and no creativity), you can't deny that there are times when you feel low motivation. Even the most experienced of coders face this sometimes. A problem here is that you can't ask this on any forum because the most usual reply you get is, "Programming isn't for you dude, just choose any other field"! This, I think is both uncalled for and inhumane. If you have nothing positive to offer, at least don't demoralize further an already troubled soul. Well, coming back to the title, what do you do to motivate yourself when there is a project ahead but you just don't feel like working or you sit on the desk and start typing but nothing gets typed there, almost like a "Writer's Block"!
Do anything but look at a monitor, maybe for a day, maybe for a week (and in that case take vacation in the Rockies). It usually means that either you've exhausted all feasible outcomes in your imagination or there are so many routes you can take that you need to mull over them away from the computer. To me 90% of coding is actually on the whiteboard (the exception being looking through the 100+ functions and classes in an API)
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This is one of the least talked about topic. Believe it or not but programming is hard and creating a mind-blowing software (or even going about changing/fixing an existing one) is a creative task about as difficult as creating a best selling novel or story. Irrespective of whether or not you believe software development is creative (yeah, some folks like to think of it as a purely logical "hard science" which is full of rules and no creativity), you can't deny that there are times when you feel low motivation. Even the most experienced of coders face this sometimes. A problem here is that you can't ask this on any forum because the most usual reply you get is, "Programming isn't for you dude, just choose any other field"! This, I think is both uncalled for and inhumane. If you have nothing positive to offer, at least don't demoralize further an already troubled soul. Well, coming back to the title, what do you do to motivate yourself when there is a project ahead but you just don't feel like working or you sit on the desk and start typing but nothing gets typed there, almost like a "Writer's Block"!
Retire. It's pretty great (except for the health care system in lolUSA#n). Seriously, do more analysis on the lack of motivation. Is it really lack of motivation to code, or is it the particular project/environment? In my example, I was at a place where they had these consultants who'd been around for years. Aggressively ignorant on doing things more right(ish)--hard coding magic values, the "new" stuff (MVC) was too hard and they didn't want to learn it, etc, etc, etc. Couldn't get the boss to move on getting rid of these people, so I left. I can't coach people to be better who refuse to try to learn. Fortunately for me, I had the resources to just retire, but short of that, I would've just found another place with more a competent staff. Wasn't demotivated to solve problems, just to be around solving them in a demonstrably terrible way.
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This is one of the least talked about topic. Believe it or not but programming is hard and creating a mind-blowing software (or even going about changing/fixing an existing one) is a creative task about as difficult as creating a best selling novel or story. Irrespective of whether or not you believe software development is creative (yeah, some folks like to think of it as a purely logical "hard science" which is full of rules and no creativity), you can't deny that there are times when you feel low motivation. Even the most experienced of coders face this sometimes. A problem here is that you can't ask this on any forum because the most usual reply you get is, "Programming isn't for you dude, just choose any other field"! This, I think is both uncalled for and inhumane. If you have nothing positive to offer, at least don't demoralize further an already troubled soul. Well, coming back to the title, what do you do to motivate yourself when there is a project ahead but you just don't feel like working or you sit on the desk and start typing but nothing gets typed there, almost like a "Writer's Block"!
following is 90% rant coding for a job, is a job the do what you love, and you wont work a day, fallacy is that day to day work, does not cover the reason you might have first loved to program. The "not for you", is either short term thinking. 35 and only in the last year diagnosed ADHD, learning and rethinking mind set around how I approached things, ie I am procrastinating vs PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance) and yeah im mind wondering for hours on end, but once I finally kick into coding, the results are 2 or 3 steps iterated along, vs the times I have written first pass, then 3 hours of adjusting. expand this out to days, weeks, months. Is that healthy for all demands of work, no but also sometimes yes. Depression and other mental exhasutions, hyper fixations, also do not help along with the creative load that coding requires. Rubber duck debugging works for some. But explaing to a human, junior, kid, work collage how it works might be enough to get them fingers clicking.
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I keep a list of fun, side projects for those times, say, a small app or helper library.
Franc Morales wrote:
I keep a list of fun, side projects for those times, say, a small app or helper library.
Catch-22: The "fun", small apps or helper libraries (the stuff I used to do on my own time, evenings and weekends) is what caused me to burn out. On workdays, as soon as I finished dinner, I worked on my little pet projects until late at night, and I'd dedicate my entire weekends to said projects. As much as I loved it, at one point I just hit a wall and it stopped being "fun"; to this day there are periods where I've literally gone for months without writing a single line of code for myself. I go through my work stuff, sometimes begrudgingly, as it is the way I make a living, but how I use my free time is up to me, and these days I use a very tiny portion of my free time coding. It's not like I don't like coding anymore - right now I'm on holidays, and I've spent quite a bit of time going back to those little side-projects, and I'm loving it - I wished I could do this full-time. But I can't bring myself to code on a "regular" weekend, it seems, knowing I only have 2 days to wind down before going back to work on Monday... I've come to the conclusion that I'll use my free time to code if I feel like it, and if I don't, well, those will be my retirement projects. Translation: What started as a hobby in my teenage years lead me to working in this field (and I wouldn't trade it for the world), but from my perspective work is, still after all these years, getting in the way of my hobby.
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DerekT-P wrote:
it has the potential to have a LOT of users and that could mean a LOT of support issues, at a time when I'm trying to wind down my coding activities.
If you don't want to support it, you can always open source it and offer it for free. Let the community support it.
Jeremy Falcon
Jeremy Falcon wrote:
If you don't want to support it, you can always open source it and offer it for free. Let the community support it.
I find it interesting you'd suggest this and word it this way. This is no criticism...but hear me out. When "open source" started making waves, I viewed is as kind of a "bad" thing - someone writes something, releases it to the world, and if there's problems, the wonderful thing is that you can go fix it yourself. At least that's how it had been (poorly) presented to me, and my stance against open source had often been, there's no accountability. Who in his right mind would want to commit himself to using a library when there's no-one to shout at when it's broken? Fix it myself? As a developer, I need to spend my own time writing my own software, not fixing other people's bugs. I've come a long way, but (for example) when I look at the amount of NuGet packages out there, and how often things need to be updated...it sometimes makes me wonder if this approach is really the best.
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This is one of the least talked about topic. Believe it or not but programming is hard and creating a mind-blowing software (or even going about changing/fixing an existing one) is a creative task about as difficult as creating a best selling novel or story. Irrespective of whether or not you believe software development is creative (yeah, some folks like to think of it as a purely logical "hard science" which is full of rules and no creativity), you can't deny that there are times when you feel low motivation. Even the most experienced of coders face this sometimes. A problem here is that you can't ask this on any forum because the most usual reply you get is, "Programming isn't for you dude, just choose any other field"! This, I think is both uncalled for and inhumane. If you have nothing positive to offer, at least don't demoralize further an already troubled soul. Well, coming back to the title, what do you do to motivate yourself when there is a project ahead but you just don't feel like working or you sit on the desk and start typing but nothing gets typed there, almost like a "Writer's Block"!
I totally get you. I started coding around 11 - I’m now well north of 50 and I’ve probably thought about coding almost everyday since. It’s obsessed me, it’s a beautiful activity that is also hard, frustrating but rewarding. I’ve often blocked for different reasons:- - the requirements were vague - deep down I didn’t think the feature was valuable (to the user) - I didn’t know where to start - I was burnt out (often because of the above times 100) Depending on above:- - go and do something else (cycling, swimming, etc) - go speak to the (REAL) end user. It will either give you purpose or prove its not valuable - write a failing test for the new feature. Then make it pass! - write a todo list for the feature. Here’s the thing, though, make the next action really, really small so you could just do it will zero effort. Then make the next task that small. Keep going (read “getting things done” for more on this) This should get you going. But remember to look after your mental health x
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My father used to say that lack of motivation means you don't have a big enough mortgage yet.
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This is one of the least talked about topic. Believe it or not but programming is hard and creating a mind-blowing software (or even going about changing/fixing an existing one) is a creative task about as difficult as creating a best selling novel or story. Irrespective of whether or not you believe software development is creative (yeah, some folks like to think of it as a purely logical "hard science" which is full of rules and no creativity), you can't deny that there are times when you feel low motivation. Even the most experienced of coders face this sometimes. A problem here is that you can't ask this on any forum because the most usual reply you get is, "Programming isn't for you dude, just choose any other field"! This, I think is both uncalled for and inhumane. If you have nothing positive to offer, at least don't demoralize further an already troubled soul. Well, coming back to the title, what do you do to motivate yourself when there is a project ahead but you just don't feel like working or you sit on the desk and start typing but nothing gets typed there, almost like a "Writer's Block"!
Good comment. I've been writing code since 1966 - I was actually the first person at The University of Kansas to major in Computer Science, though it had to be called B.A. in Math with Emphasis in Computer Science because it had not been officially recognized until the year after I graduated. However, in this long life of writing programs, I've hit this wall several times. I learned that it is temporary and whenever I was left feeling frustrated and empty, I just went for a walk, played my guitar for awhile, took a nap -- whatever it took to get past the roadblock. The reward for cracking a tough nut was making the computer perform some cool backflip, clever dance, or magic trick. Part of what I enjoyed being part of the first wave of independent developers was being ultimately responsible for a large, multi-function, monolithic, high-reliability application for a small target user-base. I'm "retired", but in this business, there's really no such thing. Enjoy life.
TwangGuru www.twangguru.com
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This is one of the least talked about topic. Believe it or not but programming is hard and creating a mind-blowing software (or even going about changing/fixing an existing one) is a creative task about as difficult as creating a best selling novel or story. Irrespective of whether or not you believe software development is creative (yeah, some folks like to think of it as a purely logical "hard science" which is full of rules and no creativity), you can't deny that there are times when you feel low motivation. Even the most experienced of coders face this sometimes. A problem here is that you can't ask this on any forum because the most usual reply you get is, "Programming isn't for you dude, just choose any other field"! This, I think is both uncalled for and inhumane. If you have nothing positive to offer, at least don't demoralize further an already troubled soul. Well, coming back to the title, what do you do to motivate yourself when there is a project ahead but you just don't feel like working or you sit on the desk and start typing but nothing gets typed there, almost like a "Writer's Block"!
The only time I code lately is when someone makes a request, and I always aim to please if reasonably possible. Other than that, they made me the manager and I can tell someone else to do it.
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This is one of the least talked about topic. Believe it or not but programming is hard and creating a mind-blowing software (or even going about changing/fixing an existing one) is a creative task about as difficult as creating a best selling novel or story. Irrespective of whether or not you believe software development is creative (yeah, some folks like to think of it as a purely logical "hard science" which is full of rules and no creativity), you can't deny that there are times when you feel low motivation. Even the most experienced of coders face this sometimes. A problem here is that you can't ask this on any forum because the most usual reply you get is, "Programming isn't for you dude, just choose any other field"! This, I think is both uncalled for and inhumane. If you have nothing positive to offer, at least don't demoralize further an already troubled soul. Well, coming back to the title, what do you do to motivate yourself when there is a project ahead but you just don't feel like working or you sit on the desk and start typing but nothing gets typed there, almost like a "Writer's Block"!
Talk to your boss and ask for a junior dev that you can mentor in this job. It will take longer but will provide you with some higher purpose as well as help you realize how much you've learned and have to offer. If motivation comes from Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose (per Daniel Pink) then you appear to have the Autonomy but are lacking the Mastery (this is not a challenge for you), and Purpose (the goal doesn't resonate for you). Given that you've posted here, you're not a reclusive troglodyte (not that there's anything wrong with that) and you might enjoy bringing someone up to speed on something they couldn't do on their own.
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This is one of the least talked about topic. Believe it or not but programming is hard and creating a mind-blowing software (or even going about changing/fixing an existing one) is a creative task about as difficult as creating a best selling novel or story. Irrespective of whether or not you believe software development is creative (yeah, some folks like to think of it as a purely logical "hard science" which is full of rules and no creativity), you can't deny that there are times when you feel low motivation. Even the most experienced of coders face this sometimes. A problem here is that you can't ask this on any forum because the most usual reply you get is, "Programming isn't for you dude, just choose any other field"! This, I think is both uncalled for and inhumane. If you have nothing positive to offer, at least don't demoralize further an already troubled soul. Well, coming back to the title, what do you do to motivate yourself when there is a project ahead but you just don't feel like working or you sit on the desk and start typing but nothing gets typed there, almost like a "Writer's Block"!
* Sit at your gosh-darned desk and grind it out. You're a big boy. They don't pay you to play. * Code something else. It's not like there is only one task ahead of you in a big project. * Do some non-coding project task. It's not like a project is 100% coding. * Read about coding, listen to videos about coding, anything that you can convince yourself will improve your usefulness. * Get lunch, take a walk, but always set a time limit for your distraction. * Rage-quit your software job, and open a gluten-free bakery.
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This is one of the least talked about topic. Believe it or not but programming is hard and creating a mind-blowing software (or even going about changing/fixing an existing one) is a creative task about as difficult as creating a best selling novel or story. Irrespective of whether or not you believe software development is creative (yeah, some folks like to think of it as a purely logical "hard science" which is full of rules and no creativity), you can't deny that there are times when you feel low motivation. Even the most experienced of coders face this sometimes. A problem here is that you can't ask this on any forum because the most usual reply you get is, "Programming isn't for you dude, just choose any other field"! This, I think is both uncalled for and inhumane. If you have nothing positive to offer, at least don't demoralize further an already troubled soul. Well, coming back to the title, what do you do to motivate yourself when there is a project ahead but you just don't feel like working or you sit on the desk and start typing but nothing gets typed there, almost like a "Writer's Block"!
I take a break, or take on less demanding tasks. Or switch to something unrelated, but then again I have more tasks at my work, than just coding, so I have a lot of freedom of choice. But sometimes I just wait for my muse to come to me.
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Jeremy Falcon wrote:
If you don't want to support it, you can always open source it and offer it for free. Let the community support it.
I find it interesting you'd suggest this and word it this way. This is no criticism...but hear me out. When "open source" started making waves, I viewed is as kind of a "bad" thing - someone writes something, releases it to the world, and if there's problems, the wonderful thing is that you can go fix it yourself. At least that's how it had been (poorly) presented to me, and my stance against open source had often been, there's no accountability. Who in his right mind would want to commit himself to using a library when there's no-one to shout at when it's broken? Fix it myself? As a developer, I need to spend my own time writing my own software, not fixing other people's bugs. I've come a long way, but (for example) when I look at the amount of NuGet packages out there, and how often things need to be updated...it sometimes makes me wonder if this approach is really the best.
Yeah, that's a fair point. For the enterprise, I'll never use a package/software without a larger community support for that very reason. In this instance though, the alternative would be for the project to be abandoned it would seem. At least if it's open sources, perhaps someone else can take it and run with it. Never a one perfect solution to anything in tech though.
Jeremy Falcon
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This is one of the least talked about topic. Believe it or not but programming is hard and creating a mind-blowing software (or even going about changing/fixing an existing one) is a creative task about as difficult as creating a best selling novel or story. Irrespective of whether or not you believe software development is creative (yeah, some folks like to think of it as a purely logical "hard science" which is full of rules and no creativity), you can't deny that there are times when you feel low motivation. Even the most experienced of coders face this sometimes. A problem here is that you can't ask this on any forum because the most usual reply you get is, "Programming isn't for you dude, just choose any other field"! This, I think is both uncalled for and inhumane. If you have nothing positive to offer, at least don't demoralize further an already troubled soul. Well, coming back to the title, what do you do to motivate yourself when there is a project ahead but you just don't feel like working or you sit on the desk and start typing but nothing gets typed there, almost like a "Writer's Block"!
Prahlad Yeri wrote:
that there are times when you feel low motivation....when there is a project ahead but you just don't feel like working
Either phrased oddly or those, at least for me, are not the same. If there is a point in the day where I stop then it is probably because I am tired. So time to call it a day. If there is a "project" that I don't want to work then it lacks requirements, it lacks a schedule, the schedule is wildly over optimistic or a combination of all of those. And one or more people did not listen when I pointed out those problems.
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This is one of the least talked about topic. Believe it or not but programming is hard and creating a mind-blowing software (or even going about changing/fixing an existing one) is a creative task about as difficult as creating a best selling novel or story. Irrespective of whether or not you believe software development is creative (yeah, some folks like to think of it as a purely logical "hard science" which is full of rules and no creativity), you can't deny that there are times when you feel low motivation. Even the most experienced of coders face this sometimes. A problem here is that you can't ask this on any forum because the most usual reply you get is, "Programming isn't for you dude, just choose any other field"! This, I think is both uncalled for and inhumane. If you have nothing positive to offer, at least don't demoralize further an already troubled soul. Well, coming back to the title, what do you do to motivate yourself when there is a project ahead but you just don't feel like working or you sit on the desk and start typing but nothing gets typed there, almost like a "Writer's Block"!
1. Switch languages (The swearing is a bit offensive but Learn a Haskell for Great Good is entertaining and Haskell is a great language.) 2. Write video games or Physics simulations instead of boring business code 3. Create art with your code 4. Create virtual instruments for Cubase/Garage Band/Fruity Loops or create Blender/KDENLive Plugins 5. Find a problem you are passionate about or that really annoys you and fix it with code. 6. Write *short* YouTube posts or blogs about a very specific problem that you can explain better than anyone else. Last but not least - don't touch no-code/low-code with a ten foot pole. Unless you see an obvious application where no-code/low-code is the easy way out, stay away from that stuff because I believe low-code/no-code drains most passionate developers... Blender geometry nodes are an exception to this. Blender geometry nodes seem to use a no-code/low-code "IDE" that actually makes sense and "gets you results". NOTE: Code Project will probably flag this post of mine as SPAM. I don't know why but the Code Project algorithm is really bad about flagging me for unknown reasons. Is it a political thing?
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1. Switch languages (The swearing is a bit offensive but Learn a Haskell for Great Good is entertaining and Haskell is a great language.) 2. Write video games or Physics simulations instead of boring business code 3. Create art with your code 4. Create virtual instruments for Cubase/Garage Band/Fruity Loops or create Blender/KDENLive Plugins 5. Find a problem you are passionate about or that really annoys you and fix it with code. 6. Write *short* YouTube posts or blogs about a very specific problem that you can explain better than anyone else. Last but not least - don't touch no-code/low-code with a ten foot pole. Unless you see an obvious application where no-code/low-code is the easy way out, stay away from that stuff because I believe low-code/no-code drains most passionate developers... Blender geometry nodes are an exception to this. Blender geometry nodes seem to use a no-code/low-code "IDE" that actually makes sense and "gets you results". NOTE: Code Project will probably flag this post of mine as SPAM. I don't know why but the Code Project algorithm is really bad about flagging me for unknown reasons. Is it a political thing?
Shawn Eary May2021 wrote:
NOTE: Code Project will probably flag this post of mine as SPAM. I don't know why but the Code Project algorithm is really bad about flagging me for unknown reasons. Is it a political thing?
Nope, the automated system has no idea what you politics are, and in fact wouldn't know any politics from a hole in the ground. The message was flagged, but that's most likely because you posted something it considered dodgy in the past and it takes a number of "legitimate" posts before it takes it's beady little eye off you! Keep posting non-spammy messages like this one, and it'll get bored and look elsewhere fairly soon. Sorry about that, but the automated system is there for a reason: you would not believe how much spam we got before this was turned on - literally thousands of poost an hour at one point. Unfortunately, a site with 15,000,000 members and a good reputation is considered a "good target" by low IQ spammers and they keep trying new ways to hit us. The automated system tries to detect these (and does a pretty good job) but sometimes a legitimate post gets caught as well and it takes time to teach it that you aren't a risk.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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This is one of the least talked about topic. Believe it or not but programming is hard and creating a mind-blowing software (or even going about changing/fixing an existing one) is a creative task about as difficult as creating a best selling novel or story. Irrespective of whether or not you believe software development is creative (yeah, some folks like to think of it as a purely logical "hard science" which is full of rules and no creativity), you can't deny that there are times when you feel low motivation. Even the most experienced of coders face this sometimes. A problem here is that you can't ask this on any forum because the most usual reply you get is, "Programming isn't for you dude, just choose any other field"! This, I think is both uncalled for and inhumane. If you have nothing positive to offer, at least don't demoralize further an already troubled soul. Well, coming back to the title, what do you do to motivate yourself when there is a project ahead but you just don't feel like working or you sit on the desk and start typing but nothing gets typed there, almost like a "Writer's Block"!
Play one (!) round of online Backgammon (or whatever board or card game you prefer) and get back to the topic afterwards. Can be especially helpful at the beginning of large projects, when there's not a good balance between effort and reward yet.
