Sunk Cost routine
Sometimes I feel like the living image of the sunk cost fallacy. It's only been 3 months since I started my new job and I'm already fed up of programming.
It starts well and comfortable, lots of new things to learn and wrap my head around, so I keep my pace with the new tooling, system architecture and practices. I churn out some PRs, discuss with colleagues and so on.
But always slowly but surely an inner dread slowly starts to creep up on me. Having to thing about a way in code to implement a new bit of logic feels incredibly dull. I keep pushing through, I want to keep my job, but I realize I am way more attracted to the business side of things, about how all the pieces of the organization fit together.
I appreciate having full time frames of one or two hours of uninterrupted concentration in front of the screen, but having to do this for 40h+ a week, every week is annoying.
Seeing my colleagues liking what they do, appreciating the mental challenge of implementing an algorithm, or toying with new tech is amazing. I don't really feel that. I had to discuss with a colleague for hours on end about how to deploy a new system I'm developing and how we would integrate it with Kubernetes. I struggled concentrating and caring about it.
Today I had to do some tweaking for a vue.js application to be run on an nginx in docker and I just don't care.
Last week, I randomly talked with a colleague about his job as a Presales Engineer and it seems fun. He has to write proposals, demos, analyze customers' needs to see how our product would fit in their environment, and I am kind of attracted to it. I've never done it, and I might not like it, but sure feels way more interesting than having to keep programming the rest of my career.
Constantly I remind myself that programming allows me to work from anywhere, get a good salary and live a comfortable life, and having done so for 8+ years means I'm decent at it and employable, but I don't know if I can do this for 8 additional years.
The funny part is that I don't know what I could do instead, I've never done anything else, and I keep seeing people struggling to find a job left and right so it feels like entitlement, but I think I am going to try to make a lateral move in my current company to see if I am fit for other roles, because really it takes a couple of days of bad sleep and a bit of rain and cold outside for all the house of cards I've built in my mind around the benefits of coding, and I care less and less.