I have met a lot of people in my life. Lawyers, bartenders, teachers, nurses, waiters, accountants, dentists — you name it, I've probably sat across from them at a dinner table or shared a drink with them. And rarely, rarely, have I heard someone say that they genuinely love their job. Work, for most, feels like a means to an end. A thing you do to pay for the thing you actually want to do on the weekend.

I get it. I really do. For two years I was doing a menial job that brought me absolutely zero joy and was slowly degrading my mental capacities. I started writing code and learning about it in the evenings and on weekends, not to change careers at first — just to make my little grey cells work again. To feel something. And it felt good. It felt really good. I got hooked on the rush of pushing code to Git, just to see that sweet, sweet terminal output.

"It felt like I was starring in the movie Hackers. Does it make me look old if I reference this?"

(It might. But it was my birthday when I wrote the original LinkedIn post about this, so I get a pass for being emotional. 😄)

The Addiction No One Warns You About

Here's what happens when you write software for a living: you start enjoying it. Then you start enjoying it a lot. Then, before you know it, you're catching yourself thinking "just one more try, then I'll stop and put my child to bed". And then an hour later, your husband is yelling from the other room because it's 9 o'clock again and you're still hunched over the laptop with a triumphant grin on your face.

It used to be video games that captured my free time. Now, video games feel like a waste of time — and I say that as someone who grew up on a Commodore 64 and spent the better part of her teens playing Counterstrike on LAN. I would rather learn something new and build something that didn't exist before. The act of creation is, it turns out, far more satisfying than the act of consumption.

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Writing software is so much fun it almost feels wrong to get paid for it. Not many people can say that about their work. I think about this a lot.

So Why Isn't Everyone Talking About This?

This is the question I can't shake. Software development is objectively one of the most engaging, stimulating, creatively rewarding activities a person can do. You're constantly learning, constantly problem-solving, constantly building things that didn't exist an hour ago. And yet the narrative around it — especially online — tends to skew toward burnout, imposter syndrome, exhausting interview loops, and the general misery of 10x engineers arguing about semicolons on the internet.

Where are all the people dancing around their living rooms after finally getting their code to work? I know they exist. I am one of them.

Are most people just working on boring projects? Is it that the fun kind of coding — the curious, exploratory, "let's figure this out" kind — gets crushed somewhere between the sprint planning and the ticket queue? Or is the fun there, and people simply don't talk about it because it sounds insufferably smug? ("Oh, you love your job? How nice for you.")

"I've been like Jesus, spreading the word. People don't seem to care. That's good, I suppose — otherwise I'd have to fix my own teeth, and there would be no restaurants."

The Honest Answer

I think part of it is that coding is genuinely hard to explain to someone who hasn't experienced that particular dopamine hit. Telling someone "I spent three hours debugging a race condition and I loved every second of it" sounds either deeply nerdy or slightly unhinged — possibly both. It's one of those things you have to feel to understand.

What I can say with certainty is this: if you are in a job that feels like a slow drain on your enthusiasm and intelligence, and you have even the faintest curiosity about how software works — try it. Write one small thing. A script that renames your files, a tiny web scraper, a game of rock-paper-scissors in the terminal. See how it feels when it runs. See if you want to do it again.

For me, seeing "Hello, World" appear on screen after typing a single line of Python felt like I had split the atom with my bare hands. That feeling never entirely goes away. You just get to experience it with increasingly complex things, which makes it even better.

I have no idea why more people aren't shouting this from the rooftops. But I intend to keep doing so, even if my audience of converts remains modest. Someone has to be the one telling lawyers and dentists that there's a better way. 😄