I'm a programmer and I completely agree. When everything was new it was fun and exciting. I started programming seriously when I was 12 years old. By the time I was in college programming was an absolute chore.
Yet I do it for a living, because building things is incredibly satisfying. Ya about 90% of the time I'm kind of bored, but actually finishing things (useful things!) makes it all worth it.
Interestingly I found that I have the same feeling in other endeavors. When I remodeled my house I found construction to be just incredibly dull. But man, the result was absolutely worth it. I don't know if I've ever felt more satisfied with anything.
Everything new is interesting to me, that's the problem. I like building things too. So I'll think I need to make a go of being a programmer. Then two weeks later I'll doubt that and think, maybe I should be a builder / real estate developer? Pretty much everything interests me when it's new and challenging, but I'm not interested in being a master of anything.
thats a powerful talent to have; although there is the danger it can lead you down the wrong path
personally, if I find something dull for a longer amount of time, there is no way I could push through it; luckily, in programming, if something is dull, you either don't have the creative freedom you need, or you have chosen the wrong abstractions (which leads to the fun task of looking for better ones :-))
It probably depends on the type of programming and the challenge it presents.
A typical month, for me, has probably 5% exciting programming work. The rest is just tedious churn that you inevitably have to do to support the exciting bit.
Maybe you just need to work on something you actually care about. There are a lot of hard and interesting problems which need programmers working on them, but boredom is understandable if you are just churning out the one-million-and-oneth generic web app.
In addition to topical interest, this is exactly how I feel when I don't own something and don't have responsibilities.
At my last job, I was brought on into a role of leadership and immediately had all of it usurped by my boss (formerly doing my responsibilities) upon my first couple of this-is-unexplored-territory-so-I-stepped-on-a-rake mistakes. Looking back, I was checked out by April (and I started in February).
"Checking out" for me is hard to see until I'm not checked-out anymore. I can't even feel it in the moment, because I still like to argue and I still want to do capital-R Right, but my brain stopped really working for a while. My mental health followed. What few good projects I did and was proud of felt more like the work of other people (even though in retrospect I more than carried my weight) or were things I built out of spite to prove that, no, I really did know what I was talking about, jerks.
Of course, they're not jerks, and I'm friends or friendly with even the folks in my management chain now that I no longer work there. (Getting a 50% raise to leave didn't hurt.) But I can't be a meat puppet, it's not in my nature, and I feel like that's the case for most of the really really good programmers I know.
The times when I've gotten the ratio that high have been times when I've been learning new skills while building new things. There's something to be said to building something using that new cool new framework. Its got to still be relevant but this can definitely help. There are many right ways to solve most problems and some are more fun.
