TL;DR:
Being a programmer is weird. Sometimes you solve tough problems and feel amazing. Other times you spend 8 hours hunting a missing semicolon. You can feel exhausted, yet have nothing concrete to show. It’s a job full of mental gymnastics, and it’s both deeply rewarding and utterly frustrating.
I’ve multiple times been confronted by blue-collar workers who joke that we, programmers, “just sit behind a screen all day not doing nothing.” And I get it. They work hard, physically. But our jobs are hard in a different way.
Programming can be deeply satisfying. On good days, you solve tricky problems, feel productive, and walk away energized. Other days? You stare at the screen for eight hours and the only thing you accomplished was finding the missing semicolon.
It’s also mentally exhausting. Especially when you’re trying to keep good chunk of logic flow in your head, to solve something or just to understand the code, and then you are interrupted by a meeting, a college or an email notification. Then it takes forever to rebuild that mental image again. And sometimes, it’s not only interruptions, sometimes your brain just loses the thread – you’re in the zone, holding five different logical states in your head, nearly at a breakthrough… and then poof, it’s gone. That mental toll is real. I end some days completely drained.
Meanwhile, physical workers come home and collapse on the couch. We do the same, but not because we’ve lifted anything heavier than a coffee mug.
What frustrates me most about working as a software developer, is spending a full day debugging, changing maybe three lines of code, and having nothing that feels tangible to show for it. You look at your commit history:
“fix typo, fix bug, cleanup” — and you’re like, “That’s it?”
And sure, I’ve had great mentors who reminded me that it’s not about how many lines you write, it’s about writing the right ones. I know they’re right. But there’s a difference between knowing, and feeling it.
Some days, I feel like an imposter. Like if someone reviewed my output, they’d go, “Why the hell are we paying this guy?” And yet, I’ve built real things, fixed real bugs, shipped actual features.