Question for the professional developers

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Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
3,926
Location
SW London
I've been a professional developer for over six years now and I'm just finding myself more and more apathetic about development.
I got into this job because I enjoy doing it and taught myself to code as a kid (writing absolutely horrible code to start with, obviously!) by doing loads of little personal projects but I have little motivation these days.

Anyone else feel like this?
I still want to keep up to date on the latest technologies, but after doing my job for 8 hours each day I just never feel like doing anything else.

Anyone got any ideas as to how to motivate myself so I don't end up as another middle aged developer who just does the minimum to get by and gets overtaken by all the kids in a few year?!
I still enjoy my job and do learn new stuff when I need to, but the way the IT market moves it's easy to get left behind if you don't do extra stuff.
 
To be fair, if you've no motivation to keep up with something you presumably enjoy doing, I doubt anyone here will be able to help you.

I'm only a lowly front end developer (You don't mention what you actually develop) but I keep many CSS/XHTML/Graphic sites on RSS and go through them frequently and sometimes, I learn something new and other times, I learn a new way of doing something. At the very least, it serves as good inspiration to better myself.
It only takes me an hour or two to go through them (not counting any time spent actually trying things out on my own) every week and not only does it help keeps me employed, it keeps me relevant with what I do.
 
well im an another middle aged developer who just does the minimum to get by and i suspect youve got the job blues :)

tricky one really

At the moment im lucky enough to be in a firm which is making a pretty big commitment with new technology, but once that dries up in about a year or so im not sure what im going to do.

a few people in our office have given up on being developers mind you, one just hated it after about 10 years in IT and went off to do a ski season in france and one back to uni for another non IT related course.

maybe this is what you need.
 
I think you need to work on an interesting project of your own in your spare time, perhaps with friends. Maybe talk to your boss about progressing further if he's the kind of person to take you seriously?

If you've been programming for years, I don't think you should waste it, take it a step further. Whether that be training in a more specialised area or even starting your own company with your own products.

Unless you truley dislike programming, I think you should make the most of your skills. It doesn't sound like you hate your job, it sounds more like you've been bored to death with uninteresting challenges and programming.
 
I'm going with the above.

At work I mainly code Java, but do the odd bit of c++ for a real time embedded device. Generally I prefer working with embedded though, just seems more interesting to me so maybe you could go this way, or start looking at DSP, or FPGA programming or some such.
I suspect being handy with Verilog or VHDL will come in very useful in a couple of years time.
 
Cheers for the replies all.

For the guy that asked, I'm a .NET developer and have done things from Windows services and server side stuff to front end HTML/CSS in ASP.NET apps.
To make it clear, I enjoy my job and am challenged by it and to be honest can't think of many things I'd rather be doing.

I think the problem is that I don't have the same passion for programming as I used to.
I did a maths degree at uni and programming was something that I just did in my spare time. I was regularly up into the small hours back then doing personal projects making cool applications.
Now that it's my career and I do it day in, day out I don't have the same motivation to do that sort of stuff anymore.

I've actually recently started contracting and the new role is 15 minutes drive from home, giving me an extra two hours a day compared with when I was commuting to the city.
Part of the plan for that was to start doing some stuff on the side now that I have my own company and to try and develop that into something viable for the future, but I just don't seem to have the motivation to get started with things at the moment.
 
Been a developer for nearly 22 years now and the last 5 years have been some of the most exciting times in my entire career (and now aged 37).

Motivation isn't a problem at all, and I do agree with what's been said about having exciting projects certainly helps.

Would also consider the contracting side of things if the company you work for is specialist in just one area.

The full time company I work for is solely online sales systems, but my contracting work has ranged from SatNav, RFID tracking, robotic welding and full SOP/POP/Stock systems.

Have to admit, have never lost the passion and doubt I ever will, wake up every morning lookig forward to going to work. The only gripe I have is the bloody bigheaded little ****s that do several years at Uni doing theory and no nothing about deadlines, debugging, change of plans, etc.
 
I am not a fulltime developer, hell, not even a basic one as the last time I did anything I was writing in BASIC at the age of 6 on my C64 :p

But I know what you mean about things becoming stale.

You need to find the reason that you first got into programming, get yourself a little project on the go, something that you really want to do :)
 
Spread your wings.. try something other than .NET.. there's plenty out there that is better than .NET anyway :p

Change jobs, change projects, find something you've not worked on before, etc.
 
Take on something extra as a hobby, something coding-related. For example, AI, computer-vision, fuzzy logic. Leave the everyday, banal coding for the work day. Should help to keep your eye in and provide a challenge.

If you really want to push yourself, write a research paper for an international conference, or a technical journal.

Best to use whatever programming language you are most familiar with, but it can also be a useful way to learn something new.
 
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