The end of the year is coming, and for me it’s always a time of reflection. I’d like to invite you to ask yourself one simple question.
Imagine that from January, the IT job market simply stops existing. No more well-paid jobs, no more “career in tech”. Programming becomes just a hobby.
Do you keep coding?
Or do you throw it all away and say “I’m done”? 😅
To be honest, my own answer isn’t that simple. I’ve technically been coding “forever” — I wrote my first website when I was 12, back in glorious HTML 4.01 😎 But programming has always been more of a medium of expression for me than a goal in itself.
Over the years, my approach to coding has evolved a lot — maybe you’ll recognize yourself somewhere on this spectrum 👇
🔹 First, there was curiosity
How does this even work? Why does something show up on the screen? How does the internet work? How do you build your own website?
That curiosity is still there. I love exploring new technologies and playing with things.
But let’s be honest… curiosity doesn’t pay the bills 😉
🔹 Then came the money phase 💸
If I already have this skill, why not make a career out of it?
I still remember my first manager laughing when, after my internship, he asked about my career plans and I said:
“Well… I don’t really have any. I just wanted to become a junior developer and I did it.” 😄
Luckily he was a great guy and helped me figure out what to do next.
🔹 Then I went full tech-fangirl mode 🤓
New stacks! New frameworks! No legacy ever!
It didn’t really matter what the project did — NGO app or cigarette factory system — what mattered was ANGULAR/REACT/VUE (delete as appropriate 😂). Definitely the newest store management, the newest tools, shiny everything.
I never reached the “I’ll build the worst garbage as long as it pays” mindset… but yeah, once I had the skills and leverage, I negotiated my rates pretty hard 😉
🔹 And then… the famous “what now?” stage
You know the one.
I’m not building a revolutionary product. I’m not inventing a new framework. I’m not writing a browser engine. I’m not a startup founder.
I work in regular enterprise Angular. Problems start feeling repetitive, pressure grows, everything “has already been done”, expectations rise.
Yep. That’s a very comfy road straight to burnout 🥲
🔹 So I had to figure things out
I didn’t want to leave tech — I genuinely like programming.
So I decided: if I’m spending 8 hours a day coding anyway, those 8 hours better mean something.
Since then, whenever I changed jobs, I paid a lot more attention to the project itself. It needed to tick at least one (ideally both) boxes:
- interesting technology
- social impact / meaningful purpose
Thanks to that, I’ve helped build a Fair Trade certification platform, software for retirement homes, hospital equipment management tools, worked in anti–money laundering, and now I work for the European Commission on a huge socially important project. And I can even visit Brussels a few times a year. 🥰
And yeah — work is still work. We joke, gossip, talk about the gym, complain, drink coffee. Nothing magical 😅
But if every job more or less feels the same, and I can choose the kind of work I do… why not choose something that actually contributes something good to the world? 🌍
So now I’m curious:
👉 Why do you code?
What’s your motivation today?
Would you still do it if programming was only a hobby?
Share your thoughts — I’d love to read your stories! 💬
Top comments (5)
You lucky girl! You have the luxury of choosing your missions — and of course, you clearly earned it.
Side note: HTML 4.01? Seriously? 😄 You’re almost a dinosaur.
As for me, coding is, in one way or another, part of my DNA. Designing, building, deploying… I have as much fun as I work. And even if tech stopped paying tomorrow, I’d still code — for myself, for the pure joy of it. I’d find another way to make a living, but I’d never stop writing code.
Haha, yes, almost a dinosaur indeed! Back then nobody was using fancy stuff like CSS — simpler, chaotic, beautiful times 😄
And you’re absolutely right: I really do have the luxury of choosing meaningful projects, and I’m very aware it’s not something everyone in tech can do, especially with the current state of the market. It’s a privilege, and I don’t take it for granted.
I love what you wrote about coding being part of your DNA. That’s such an amazing place to be — having something so deeply yours, something constant no matter what happens around you. That kind of passion is powerful 💛
Haha, exactly — chaotic, simple, and somehow beautiful indeed 😄
Sometimes I think we underestimate how much those “rough” beginnings shaped the way we think and build today.
And I really appreciate how consciously you talk about privilege. Being aware of it — and choosing meaningful projects because of it — is already a way of giving something back.
As for coding being part of my DNA… I guess it’s what keeps things stable when everything else shifts. Markets change, tools change, trends come and go — but that inner drive stays. And sharing that kind of passion with others makes it even stronger 💛
I wrote my first code when I was 16 and since then I was fairly involved in tech but my main focus and hobby at that time was becoming a mathematician as I've always loved Math, coding was secondary for me, though i did write alot of stuff...
During my senior year in high school, I was teaching Calc 2 to a few close friends, my passion for Math was still strong but I've never really abandoned coding too.. same time I met my gf who I'm gonna marry very soon, my high school sweet heart.
My parents did not approve of my decision of me being with my gf so I ran away and had to think quick and I decided to drop Math to just a hobby and prioritize programming, AI wasn't really advanced yet during that time so like every other traditional dev, I learnt through books, stack overflows, breaking and fixing things to learn. it took me about 2 months before I finally landed a junior position at a FinTech company, mainly working on backend.
It was during this time when I discovered so much beauty than to just writing some python code to generate and solve mathematical problems, I realized that I wanted to build products, systems and libraries to solve both business and developers' problems.
The feeling of knowing that your system is currently carrying and holding hundreds of thousands of concurrent requests of hundreds of thousands of users is euphoric to me - the feeling of knowing, even just 2 developers, using my library to help boost their productivity or solve their problems, that's my heaven
I love solving edge cases in code, seeing outside the picture - what is really going on that's causing this or that, I just want to know HOW and WHY does THIS happen in code and when I found the answer, it's a great feeling for me...
and by the way, I actually took programming only because I wanted to reduce workload on my gf's, she was working double shifts so I wanted her to get some rest and I decided to pick this career to support her financially and turns out, it not only relieved her, it benefited me and it's become heaven for me as well.
I'm nearly 6 years into the industry now, I am leading a team of 8 people and I am happy that my team grows and I learn from them every day.
If one day the tech industry just happen to die? I am still coding no matter what.
Your article made me pause because my answer to “Why do you code?” took years to become clear.
I’ve always been a researcher at heart. For as long as I can remember, I spend more than half of my waking hours browsing, reading, observing interfaces, patterns, layouts, UX and UI decisions — basically living inside the web whenever I’m not doing the basics of daily life. Curiosity was never the problem.
The problem was execution.
I first touched code around 2005, writing a few prompts that loaded in Internet Explorer. It didn’t last. Not because I lost interest, but because I couldn’t translate what I understood conceptually into working code. So I stayed close to the web — studying it, not building it.
That changed much later. Around 2021–2022, when AI assistants started appearing in everyday tools (the first thing I asked Meta on WhatsApp was simply: “Can you code?”), something clicked. For the first time, the barrier between thinking and building thinned enough for me to cross.
Now I love web apps — not because everyone around me does (they don’t), but because they finally let me express years of accumulated observation and research. I’m drawn to automation, usefulness, and systems that quietly solve problems. Even if money disappeared from the equation, I’d still build — until the usefulness becomes obvious.
I used to joke that I was born too early. My friends laughed. Turns out I might have just been waiting for the right tools.
Thanks for asking a deceptively hard question — it helped me answer it honestly.