Are you a freelancer?

I moved away from developing software in a corporation to freelancing/startups few years ago. The paycheck and benefits dropped, but man, do I have free time. Even though there are some days or even weeks now when you work dawn to midnight, I feel like I somehow manage to get much more personal stuff done. Plus there is always the possibility that we come up with the next Minecraft or Uber.

In the good days, pretty much the same, but it's definitely not the norm. Sometimes I spend 12 hours in front of a screen and realize it's about time I headed home.

Working with tight deadlines and potentially lackluster management will get you in places where you don't want to be on occasion. Everyone paints this idyllic picture when talking about jobs in IT, when the reality is that it depends on a lot of things, just like in any other field of work.

Talk about a kidney punch :). OK, I hereby withdraw any complaint I had about my current lack of free time :D.

No, though I am considering it as one of my future career options. As you probably guessed, I'm a corporate peon for now. "Work Work". "Zug Zug". "Dabu". "No time for play".

Programming sounds like a much bigger pain in the ass since the last time I looked at it.

Programming is easy! Here, have a simple function I wrote in C.

double *reciprocal(double x)
{
double result;
if (x = 0)
{
puts("Can't divide by 0, aborting.");
abort();
}
result = 1 / x;
return &result;
}

(Sorry about the lack of indentation, but this forum does not preserve whitespace, wich is an issue when sharing program code.)

As I said, programming is easy! There's nothing that could go wrong, right?

One of the benefits of coding in anything except Python is that there's usually an IDE that will fix that whitespace for you.


OP: Personally, I'd probably stick with programming rather than switching over to teacher's aid. I'm not sure what it pays over there, but around here it's more or less starvation wages. Probably doesn't work for people unless they're married to somebody that makes a lot of money or don't mind living in the park.

You can try starting with something more comprehensible than something which came out of Microsoft. Ditch Visual Studio and UWP (first time hearing about that), and start with something simpler.

Heck, for starting out, I'd even say that you should say starting text mode only applications.

Check out Python, it's often recommended as a starting point in programming. Some people hate it though (not me). Java can be good starting point too and is hugely used in corporations. Basic concepts are not too hard.
Programming should be your passion, else staying in some job could be very hard. As a programmer you are constantly, every day challenged with something you don't know about and need to learn something new every day (involves lot of searching on the internet, of course). I am average programmer and doing this for more than 10 years and I still learn new things. The frameworks are ever changing. I even had to learn completely new language recently.

Try to start from something easy. Making GUI is not something easy. It usually requires good knowledge of the language, objects and whatnot to be able to use the tools provided for creating it.

Now, that's just mean.

XenForo 2 is good to know for steady forum work but Discord is the current 'next thing' and pretty easy to learn

It sounds like you're currently viewing "programming" as "UI programming", given you're framing your experience around UWP. Personally I don't enjoy UI development, I find it unrewarding, partly because (as you kind of say) there's a lot of cookie cutter development where you're just taking the pre-built controls and plugging them together, configuring properties. It gets even worse when your manager asks you to start using some additional third party control set like Telerik or Infragistics, where he's seen a nice demo and therefore assumed it's fully functional in all areas, and will meet all requirements.

Luckily UI programming is a really small subset of the industry, it just ropes in younger programmers because they like to see the end result on screen. Once you start working on systems beyond simple apps then the depth of the profession becomes more apparent. Since starting my current project back in Feb 2017 I haven't touched a UI, my days involve exactly what you said programming was not, coding, debugging, testing (though on the rare times when I am being well behaved I do it as it should be - testing, coding, debugging).

However the other thing my days involve, which is where you really get the diversity in programming, is talking to people. From co-ordinating with colleagues on how we're going to actually build the system, to understanding why the person/persons you're building the system for actually want it.

In my 15 years of professional programming I have written systems in tracking stock, planning production line flow, managing customer relations, co-ordinating national level waste disposal, invoicing, planning promotional campaigns for a national brewery (they never gave me a single beer in thanks), writing the UI for a video on demand system (this was in Silverlight), calculating flow levels for heating systems based on valve configurations, visualising network data for law enforcement, rebuilding a whole product for designing enterprise architecture, and now all sorts of stuff with trading systems. This isn't a comprehensive list, there were other projects too. I worked for consultancy firms for my first 5 years, and they just parachute you into any situation and tell you to make things work.

There's so much more to coding than just little apps, you might find that you'd enjoy it more in something more technically diverse. I certainly don't regret those first few consultancy years of being thrown into the deep end and told to learn to swim, it's hard but rewarding.

Now, this is good satire. Well done!