Oh, you hate your job? Why didn`t you say so?
There`s a support group for that. It`s called
EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.
--Drew Carey

I have a good friend who is an amazing artist.  For as long as I have known him he wanted to be a book illustrator.  He certainly has the talent but unfortunately lacks the persistence and thick skin required to deal with criticism.  So, for the past seven years he’s been designing websites for a marketing company.  He is one of the unhappiest people I know.

For a long time, I resented being a software developer and was absolutely convinced that I made a wrong career choice.  Programming jobs can easily become tedious; even when I worked on interesting projects such as developing games, designing interactive websites or prototyping an app for a physics experiment, I always hit a point where looking at thousands lines of code became almost physically painful.

To entertain myself, I learned new programming languages, explored new technologies and occasionally got drunk and complained to anybody who would listen about how much I hated my career choice.

12 years, a dozen of programming languages and about a 100 projects later, I realized that I was looking at this all wrong.  Software engineering is one of those rare jobs that can be as boring or as exciting as you make it.

The best way to find the bright sides or programming is to meet with people who are passionate about their jobs/projects.  In 2008 I was “volunteered” to work on an interactive web application that involved a major Flash/ActionScript component.  Prior to this project, I’ve never used Flash seriously.  

For the first time in a long time I was excited about programming – a chance to play with a new technology is not something that’s very common in most software engineering jobs.  To get started with Flash, I read a few books, slept through a couple workshops and attended the FlashPitt conference (http://flashpitt.com).  

The presenters at FlashPitt truly inspired me – they worked on absolutely amazing projects and they were passionate about their work.  After sitting with my mouth agape through a few presentations I realized that the one thing that all these developers and designers had in common is that they made their jobs fun.  Instead of thinking of their jobs as time spent writing thousands of lines of code, they think of each project as a challenge, as a problem to be solved, as a chance to come up with a creative way to achieve a desired result.

That conference really changed my perspective – seeing how excited and how amazingly good these people were at their jobs made me want to be a better geek.  I started coming up with little projects that explored my creativity – building a Jack-in-the-box for my daughter, creating stop-motion animation, developing a navigation UI based solely on hand motions in front of a webcam and helping my wife make a “quiet book” (http://homemadebyjill.blogspot.com/2009/06/finished-quiet-book.html).  

Doing all these things helped me see my job in a different light and actually enjoy debugging code once in a while.  Hanging out with people who genuinely love technology as a means for solving problems has been the greatest help and the greatest inspiration in my quest for being happier with my 9-5 job.  Of course, if it weren’t for beer, no one would ever be happy:)