When I started, I was driven by an interest in video games, an affinity for math and the discovery of the magic that programming makes possible; financial security was also an incentive. At university, chasing the same goal alongside my classmates helped me keep going despite how exhausting the road was.

But passion naturally fades. Time doesn’t forgive, and our brain gets used to stimuli, reducing the emotional response and the joy we get from tasks that used to produce dopamine spikes. Stagnation also shows up: as our skills grow without the complexity growing, we fall into a technical boredom where work no longer demands the cognitive effort that used to be rewarding.

Facing software development without enjoying it isn’t just tedious, it’s a trap. Spending hours in front of the screen without a single line of code sparking any enthusiasm is a problem of work philosophy. Programming without those little shots of dopamine is simply unsustainable. We usually talk about requirements and quality attributes for our systems, but we forget that our own process has to be maintainable.

This career is a long haul. If moving forward is hard for you today, tomorrow it will be impossible; so look after your motivation with the same rigor you look after your code, and treat your passion with the same determination you use to try to master your favorite language.

The Blacksmith Mindset

To find motivation again, I had to resist the idea that it’s enough for things to simply “work”. Although my experience lets me be efficient, there’s a gap between the functional and the “perfect”, understood not as an unreachable goal, but as the willingness to look beyond the obvious solution: separating the patterns that make up the structure and exploring alternatives until I’m sure the path I chose is the right one. There’s a deep joy in this technical mastery; being an expert is also fun.

However, this craftsman’s view clashes with the fast-paced world we operate in. We live in a society (insert Joker image here) hungry for speed and results, full of deadlines, story points and product managers. We ourselves want to see those results fast and without frustration, but learning comes with frustration. To reach excellence, there must be room for introspection, concentration and analysis. We have to look for alternatives and embrace the frustration of learning, accepting that to be good at something I first have to be bad at it. Making mistakes isn’t avoidable, it’s part of experimenting, and we shouldn’t treat that time as wasted time.

That pressure for speed is what breaks the bond with our work. When nothing belongs to us and our work becomes something foreign, a disconnection appears that directly affects our mental health: that’s where excessive workloads, difficulty setting boundaries and the importance of learning to say no come in. There are many ways to lose the joy in what we do, which is why we can’t leave our motivation to chance.

Adopting a craftsman’s mindset is claiming a purpose of your own. When the environment doesn’t offer us a clear sense of meaning, our task is to find satisfaction in the doing itself, rediscovering that the value lies not only in the result, but in the quality of our attention. To dig deeper into this concept, I recommend reading authors who explore “deep work”, like Cal Newport in Deep Work, who argues that regaining our ability to concentrate is the ultimate act of resistance in this era.

In the end, reconciling the efficiency the market demands with the excellence we seek is the only way to make this career sustainable. It’s not just about writing code, but about how we inhabit the hours in front of the screen.