I don't know how old you are and for how long you've been programming but your experience mimics my progression.
I started playing with some kind of programming when I was about 9-10, BASIC on a MSX and later HTML that opened up me for web development on ASP 3.0 and PHP at the time.
It was a very big hobby when I was young and turned into a career when I was pretty young, about 16. It stayed as a hobby for another 9-10 years but I got to the point where thinking about programming outside of my paid time was exhausting...
It helped me tremendously, I would never have a career if I wasn't extremely curious about programming for 15-20 years of my life, I just got to the same stage as you did.
There is an evergrowing and endless list of things I want to learn and experience, staying on top of the latest tech on my own free time is just too costly nowadays. I still do it, when I need it for work and during work hours, and all the accumulated experience helps me to figure out things way faster so I don't need to use my free time to catch up. Increasingly rarely I get that curiosity again, to use my free time to study something work-related. When I do it nowadays it's for much larger and abstract concepts such as organisation culture and change, team spirit and building trust and effective communication.
I noticed that the past 5 years of my career has been much more about the human and social aspect of work rather than technical ones. And I didn't try to become a manager, tech lead or product owner, it has just attracted me as I think I always got attracted to gaps of efficiency at work. It seems that seeing this human aspect of work brought me closer to more human aspects of life (arts, music, sociology) and a bit away from controlling the machine I learned when I was a kid.
This resonates with me too. Instead of spending 2 weeks shaving off 100ms in a request I’ll spend two weeks shaving off 3-4 days worth of time for a request from the marketing or sales team by figuring out a better process for them to request changes on the management side.
I started playing with some kind of programming when I was about 9-10, BASIC on a MSX and later HTML that opened up me for web development on ASP 3.0 and PHP at the time.
It was a very big hobby when I was young and turned into a career when I was pretty young, about 16. It stayed as a hobby for another 9-10 years but I got to the point where thinking about programming outside of my paid time was exhausting...
It helped me tremendously, I would never have a career if I wasn't extremely curious about programming for 15-20 years of my life, I just got to the same stage as you did.
There is an evergrowing and endless list of things I want to learn and experience, staying on top of the latest tech on my own free time is just too costly nowadays. I still do it, when I need it for work and during work hours, and all the accumulated experience helps me to figure out things way faster so I don't need to use my free time to catch up. Increasingly rarely I get that curiosity again, to use my free time to study something work-related. When I do it nowadays it's for much larger and abstract concepts such as organisation culture and change, team spirit and building trust and effective communication.
I noticed that the past 5 years of my career has been much more about the human and social aspect of work rather than technical ones. And I didn't try to become a manager, tech lead or product owner, it has just attracted me as I think I always got attracted to gaps of efficiency at work. It seems that seeing this human aspect of work brought me closer to more human aspects of life (arts, music, sociology) and a bit away from controlling the machine I learned when I was a kid.