One of the things I keep saying is that I made a mistake when I made a hobby (software development) into a career.
I used to love it, would go through hours on my own free time to code usually completely useless stuff, for fun. Only occasionally this would yield something useful. And that was fine.
Fast forward many years, and it's been a while since I've last written a single line of code at home. I don't even have Emacs installed in my home machine anymore.
I can still get excited when a task requires me to learn new stuff. I can still have fun some of the time. But that flame is no longer there.
I guess anything will become a chore once you do too much of it, specially if you are doing it not because you want to, but because you are required to.
That said, you could not pay me enough to do something like sales. So I guess the advice would be "find something that you don't absolutely hate" and you'll do ok. It's called work, not "fun", for a reason.
I've seen/read/experienced this process a lot. My personal theory is that when your hobby becomes a job, you find other hobbies.
One way I've managed to deal with this is by changing what I work on in a fairly frequent cadence. So either within the same company or in different companies, changing your squad/org and working on something totally different kinda satisfies my inner craving for programming. Its not easy or always possible to do so, but I've been lucky so far to be young and single and thus flexible with moving. Not sure how I'll handle this after I'm settled down and stuff.
I used to love it, would go through hours on my own free time to code usually completely useless stuff, for fun. Only occasionally this would yield something useful. And that was fine.
Fast forward many years, and it's been a while since I've last written a single line of code at home. I don't even have Emacs installed in my home machine anymore.
I can still get excited when a task requires me to learn new stuff. I can still have fun some of the time. But that flame is no longer there.
I guess anything will become a chore once you do too much of it, specially if you are doing it not because you want to, but because you are required to.
That said, you could not pay me enough to do something like sales. So I guess the advice would be "find something that you don't absolutely hate" and you'll do ok. It's called work, not "fun", for a reason.