> "I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong."

It was truer in the 1980s-1990s, when programming was not a prestigious or high paying job and computers were much cruder and required much more skill to get adequate performance from them. Generally, aspiring hackers were very well read people.

There were, of course, corporate programmers doing business programming back then too but they weren't considered hackers and wouldn't even have wanted themselves to be considered hackers.

if you wear yourself out mentally all day as part of your occupation, digging into a "good" book is often too much work.

As anecdata: My wife has a "brainy" occupation and her brilliant sister does not. Correspondingly, my wife has no interest in "brainy" books in her free time whilst her sister is always recommending new 900 page tomes.

I love learning, but I hate reading. Most of my learning now is via audio books while I'm doing something else.

In my view, software development is mostly skimming and pattern recognization. Very little actual, deep reeding in my opinion.

I have had periods where I mostly gave up on books because I actually rarely found them to be the right level of stimulating. Novels rarely stimulate, or even when they do, it often comes with relatively little learning per unit of time. Meanwhile some books such as advanced physics textbooks can be so overwhelmingly difficult and have so many missing prerequisites that you hit a brick wall in understanding and also learn little.

Now even knowing some great books exist, it can be quite difficult to find those works in the goldilocks zone of being worthwhile while accessible enough. So difficult even that the part where you are searching becomes so time consuming that it still ends up missing the mark on stimulation or learning per hour.

And so generally I find programming or working on other intellectual projects more worthwhile than reading, and reading books has kind of drifted into being a low stimulation activity I do when I'm tired or don't have the focus time for projects.

How do you get around that? How do you find and select what is actually worthwhile to read?

Given that I have mental bandwidth available, I enjoy a mentally stimulating read (though, the definition of that surely varies between individuals), but people do indeed come into programming from a variety of different angles.

What initially attracted me to programming was the ability it gives one to create. As a kid the idea that a “regular” person like myself could make computer programs — and not just simple CLI toys but full on lovingly crafted, end user friendly complex GUI applications — blew my mind. Programs weren’t like every nearly every other product which only ever came out of some factory that nobody saw themselves.

As such my interest in programming comes with a slant towards practical usability. I don’t do well with abstract concepts without a rock solid grounding real world use case, even though those are intellectual candy for a few subgroups of programmers.

We read, a lot, but not books. We read manuals, get started docs, apis, git repos, AI responses, wikipedia, tik tok comments just for fun, we read constantly and will read till the end of times. That's the way we learn and entertain ourselves, there is no other way around that.

> I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong.

Perhaps the fact that our jobs are intellectual is the problem. I find that at the end of the day I don't have the capacity for intellectual pursuits and I find physical hobbies / activities more relaxing. I suspect the opposite is probably also true.

Can you recommend me a book to read?

> Like...you're a programmer? And you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong.

The rise of vibecoding and the disdain many in the industry hold for the skill of software development should fully disabuse you of any vestiges of this notion...

Every single day, here, on "Hacker" news I see folks describe coding as just a means to an end, and that things like code quality, architecture, etc, don't matter.

Welcome to late stage capitalism, where if you can't immediately monetize it its not worth doing (consider how this might explain the rise of gambling as recreation).

You are a programmer? You understand that different firmwares and operative systems work in different ways and excel at different things?

For the record I do like reading. I just don't like all the reading. I tried learning rust by reading the book. Ugh. Horrible for me. Much better experience working on a project of my own. I saw that for some people it worked. Good for them. It didn't for me, and I had to find a different path. I learn by tinkering. Others might learn by copying, or by drawing boxes and arrows. Who am I to judge their firmware?

This is not a bad thing. That's good! Variety in ways of thinking is one of humanity's strengths.

If you find someone who is good at programming but doesn't like reading, try to find out how. You might be able to learn some of their abilities that complement yours.

Programming probably is more intellectually stimulating than reading fiction novels.

I gave up reading when I got my first portable computer. Not sure why. But after some time I got sick of it and got back to reading and I love it!

For some reason I suddenly got an urge to read long deep fantasy. Storm light archive is perfect for this, I recommend play some fantasy reading music on background. It's a bliss, especially in summer afternoon with cold coffe.

I gave up on reading because the authors want to spend a considerable number of pages telling me the color of the buttons on an imaginary character's outfit. They have no such right to waste my time with (or even worse, charge me money for) that.