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I used to lease office space a 15 minute drive from home, couldn't stand it. Going out into the cold in the winter, wasting 30 minutes of my evening driving to and from the office if a client had an emergency or a server was having issues, having to put on clothes on days that I didn't need to see anyone...it was all very annoying and inefficient. Did that for 3 years until I found the perfect live/work setup for me and the business...now I roll out of bed, put on a robe, walk 20 ft to the front office and usually spend the rest of my day like that. Awesome.
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OriginalGriff wrote: [EVENSMUGGERFACE] So do I - 15 seconds each way.  [/EVENSMUGGERFACE]
Sorry for you... sounds like you 'work from home'... if not properly managed that 15 seconds can be much to close for comfort.
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Nah.
I used to work 35 miles from home; worse I lived in Hampshire, and worked inside the M25 (the London orbital motorway). Which meant that I had to fight traffic each way every day as I went with the flow of commuters heading into London. Those 35 miles took an hour on a good day (on a motorbike, a car would have doubled it): but all it ever took was some moron to do something stupid and that would easily double. And there were a lot of morons. So to be sure of getting in for 09:00, I left home at 07:00. Which meant the alarm went off at 05:00. And in those days, I was drinking a lot (partly to relax after I got home, partly I was under huge amounts of stress without even knowing it) - so I had to average 8 hours sleep a day, which meant I was in bed by 10 or earlier. My "me time" was working out at a couple of hours a week, and most of that was taken up with shopping, mowing, cleaning, and related cr@p. OK, I earned a lot of money - but I spent a lot of it on travelling as well! And I made nowhere near as much as my efforts earned the company, not by several orders of magnitude.
Now? I work when I want, how I want. I hardly drink at all, I sleep 5 to 7 hours a night, and I am unstressed. I enjoy what I do, rather than doing it because it needs to be done.
Work / Life balance is important. But I prefer to load the "life" part, rather than the "work" part.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Good!! Very few find the ability to walk away from the desk at home and 'live' or to turn off the job. It sounds to me like you've mastered that. I managed it when I had a home office for a number of years but knew several of my coworkers that ended up spending nearly every waking hour on the phone behind the keyboard. Getting the balance right is the key. My hat is off to you!
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KC@CahabaGBA wrote: Sorry for you... sounds like you 'work from home'... if not properly managed that 15 seconds can be much to close for comfort.
So maybe the next question might be: how many of you work from home?
I guess "loving to code" and "working from home" are strictly related
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OriginalGriff wrote: If you aren't loving it ...
Well, when you're right, you're right.
Jeremy Falcon
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Same as 
We can’t stop here, this is bat country - Hunter S Thompson RIP
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My commute consists of descending into the basement to the luxurious Embedded Developer Office Suite. Maybe 30 seconds each way, and that makes this one of the best jobs I ever had, especially when it's -5 and snowing outside. I can work in a nice place to live (Nebraska) instead of some tech ghetto like California or Arizona. If an idea wakes me up at 3am I can head right to the keyboard to capture it, and if I'm brain dead at 2pm I can take a break to watch some awful TV show on Youtube (ever watch those Belarussian military TV mini-series?).
My job is about 75% software, 25% hardware so I get a much-needed break from coding every now and then. Yes, I still like to code, but I also like designing the controller board I'g going to program. It's always a challenge to optimize the hardware layout to best advantage for the firmware. Only down side is testing for all those edge cases that show up in embedded designs, like batteries suddenly failing when it's only -40 outside, or the solar cell ices up and battery charger shuts down.
I am isolated, no co-workers sitting next to me in cubicles, but that's equally good and bad. Skype and Slack takes up some of the, err, slack in socializing and talking out problems. The team is diverse and spread out across North America but we do have good communications and keep in touch daily. Management works hard to limit meetings to a minimum for those actually producing, and that's a big plus too. I can go all day in the coding zone without interruptions.
After some 40+ years writing software and laying out circuit boards I would never do anything else. Not sure I'd feel the same way writing web pages to sell shoes, but even e-commerce websites have their place in improving society.
Jack Peacock
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Management that understands interruptions aren't conducive to productivity? WTF? Are you pulling our leg? How the heck did that happen? If upper management finds out, your bosses are looking at pink slips. 
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Love what you do? There's no such thing. As soon as I start HAVING to do something, it becomes something to tolerate and not enjoy. Has happened with every job, including those outside of software. Don't ask me, but that's just the way it is.
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Yes, I love to code and create something, even if it is just a brownfield project or some SQL; better yet if there are some requirements attached to it. Jaded? Isn't everyone?
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jgakenhe wrote: Jaded? Isn't everyone?
Nope - I get pissed off at times when things are not going well but I know (from experience) that it will all work out one way or another. 
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Sometimes.
I still really enjoy problem solving but when I end up having to write pages of boiler plate I start to get a bit peeved. My perfect gig is to build just enough of the prototype to know it'll work and then hand it over to a minion to finish 
veni bibi saltavi
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At times I still love it. Creators want to create. At other times I'm sick and tired of it, but I think that has more to do with the industry rather than the creation process.
Jeremy Falcon
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How you getting on? Have you adjusted to life on the left coast?
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Yeah, like anywhere, there are some really cool people here... then those you gotta learn to avoid. With the amount of people here, you have to learn how to sharpen your avoid radar. But once you do that, it's all good.
Jeremy Falcon
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It's complicated  .
I like coding new features, where I feel like I'm not bound by what's gone before. Unfortunately that doesn't happen too often. Our products have a lifespan of 10 years or more, so we end up spending a lot of time on maintenance. Most of the time when I'm adding a new feature, I have to keep in mind a bewildering pile of constraints, prior practice, backward compatibility, and so on.
Misquoting Norm Abrams of The New Yankee Workshop, I have to "measure 3 or 4 times, then cut. And always wear your safety glasses!".
Software Zen: delete this;
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Gary Wheeler wrote: The New Yankee Workshop
Love that show. Seems like it is not on any more. What a pity. And this old house. Wonderfully cheesy stuff.
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Jaded, but still love it. I like the creative problem solving aspects of the job. What I'm not a big fan of is shifting requirements. People (read as management) seem to know what they don't want instead of what they want. You code to spec, and then when they get it in front of them they look at, and say they don't like it or its not what they wanted. What do you mean that is not what you wanted you put it in the #@#$% spec and signed off on it. 
Alright so maybe I'm leaning more toward the jaded side. However, this doesn't stop me from my side projects. And those are always accepted and coded to spec. 
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I like to code just a bit, or a byte, maybe.
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1
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0
we like bit both of them!
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R. Giskard Reventlov wrote: and can't wait to start.
I stopped feeling that way when I got my first full-time job programming. Customers, deadlines, and silly requirements took all the fun out of it. 
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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That is a shame - I made a career change, purely by chance, and have never looked back and, for the most part, have enjoyed it all. I am sad when someone does not get the same sense of joy from the job they have, for now, chosen to do. 
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