Coding is Really Boring and Here’s Why

Sitting down and staring at a screen for hours at a time while doing work, may not exactly be everyone’s cup of tea. While this is a part of coding, why is coding considered boring?

Coding may seem like a boring and monotonous thing to do if you aren’t fully committed to it, as it is the same with any task. If you aren't willing to fully dedicate time to get better at something that you are passionate about, then don't expect to always be good at it. If you don't have the motivation to do or finish things, you won't prioritize it at all, and then it becomes less and less relevant as time passes on until it is forgotten. That same lack of motivation for trying and doing it could lead into the mindset that “If it was more fun, I would’ve done sooner.”

For some, the initial idea of Coding may not be “exciting”. It’s sitting down and staring at a computer screen, looking and fixing up lines of code, and doing this for hours until you reach a certain quota or conclusion. Compared to other jobs or hobbies, it may pale in comparison. You could work on a project in a group, maybe to increase the “fun factor” of it, something like a Hackathon. A Hackathon is basically a large number of programmers meet to work on various apps and websites, sometimes held in a competitive fashion.

Possibly one of the disadvantages of coding is that most projects can’t be completed in a day and huge projects will generally take a while to complete. Some people are impatient in certain retrospectives and may want to just finish it quickly. Of course, you could dedicate your time to finishing the project faster but not everyone has the patience to do so. Coding itself isn't the easiest thing to do due to the many languages it has, how hard it might be to fully master one, and how different it is from the others. Just because you learned HTML, doesn’t mean that you will be great at JavaScript at first when you start, since it could considerably be more complex.

Hot Take: When you literally describe a task, it becomes mundane and uninteresting which makes the task become anything but “fun”. Despite how I literally described what coding seems like previously, coding is actually great. It also depends on your definition of boring, since if no one thought that it was a fun thing to do then fewer people would try and get into Coding than before when now there are schools offering programs for it, meaning that students are interested. In previous Op-Ed’s, I had stated that coding is great as “Coding provides a sense of freedom and has many components to help create whatever you desire to make.” and it still stands as with this freedom it gives people choices to do whatever they want, even if doesn't happen quickly, it gives you more time to master it and make it even better than it was at first.