alt Hacker NewsThere's also a huge difference between liking to program and liking to work as a programmer. I despise the latter as business programming takes the joy out of everything. Trying to educate management about the current boundaries of the product or having to work extra hard because a product manager promised features that dont yet exist is exhausting. Not being allowed to work on fixing tech debt while having to build on top of it is pain. Doesn't help being a solo dev in a start up either so maybe that's the issue.
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I know dance instructors, cabinet makers and surgeons who all love their work as a hobby but hate it as a job.
Have you found any strategies that help maintain joy while dealing with business constraints? What boundaries work best?
As a solo dev in a start up, man is this true. I have a lot of control over the product, but nobody else understands or cares how features are achieved. I feel your pain.
There's a lot you can legitimately blame PMs for, but promising features that don't yet exist is essentially their job definition. A good PM will allow for uncertainty and flexibility, but at the end of the day, to have some sort of product roadmap, even in the most agile of environments, they have to say things like "at that stage we'll have functionality x, so our product will enable users to y, so that we'll better compete across z"
I think this is just the nature of paid work, though. Academics are generally in love with their topic, and very much not in love with the kind of admin busywork that they have to spend much of their working hours doing.