Depends. Throughout my professional coding career (about 22 years now) I have had to cover a range of tasks outside of just programming. I always prefer programming, but I learned to also love the processes involved in every other part of software development. When you have pretty much complete control of the whole process, then it's much more rewarding when developing something new, rather than just coding blindly (sometimes you don't even know what the code is even for, or what it really does in the scheme of things) exactly what somebody else decided was right . Supporting 20 year old code though, trying to find a bug, can be a nightmare.
Overall though I still love my job (same one from 1995), as I work on a massive system where a new task or amendment is nearly always something new. I so wanted to work on games professionally when I came out of Uni (CS degree), but ended up working in the travel industry (many various types of booking systems from Teletext type efforts to Web based).
I know a few people who worked for game companies, and overall it seems like it can be a bit boring and extremely stressful (compared to what I do). I mean what if your main responsibility is creating menus or the high score chart. For every single game. Yawn. Even the main game dynamics can get a bit taxing if you are testing with QA people day after day on one little thing. Put it this way, one game I put on iOS took me one excited Sunday to pretty much get 95% of the gameplay in place. It was a simple game, so the graphics only took another day or two (note was working full time as well). Adrenaline pumping, and I should have got it submitted by the end of the week surely. Nope. Took about 3 weeks putting together a Nintendo inspired draw your own signature high score table, which while neat was a git to get working fast enough on multiple device types (mainly iOS and WebOS at the time). Another week or two for the menus. In the end I took about 3 months from start to finish, with the remainder mainly fixing bugs or polishing the odd thing. At least two months of that was tedious repetitive testing, which was more annoying with different platforms that didn't quite work the same way.
Then again, an old Uni friend of mine worked for EA in SF on a few big titles, and it sounded pretty good, but he now works for Amazon on Lumberyard, and looks pretty damn happy. All that 1st class travel to conventions around the world probably helps
He was the guy coding raster routines on the Atari ST in assembly when the rest of us were playing games. Heheh, possibly should have taken more notice
Then again the guy was like a kickboxer, and was learning to fly planes with the RAF (side thing while doing a CS degree). Hard to keep up to that level, when getting out of bed at 12pm was an effort...
Also I think it depends on how into programming a *lot* you are (try putting in 5-10 years and see if you feel the same enthusiasm), the job you get, and the people you work with/for. Coding professionally can be hell, boring, and depressing, but in the right environment with the right frame of mind, then it can be the best thing ever. At some points I wouldn't have swapped my job for twice the pay. I had the chance a few times too, but look back at the people who took the opportunities and don't regret it (eg. 90 hour working weeks for months/years on end was one example). Personally I'm happy with my balance of work (4 days a week from home in a hot country these days), relaxation (3 day weekend helps), and hobby programming, even if I rarely get a game out these days
Oh, and I'll also add it depends how nice your company is. I worked for years in a company that felt like family, then 911 hit, and the owner got cold feet and sold up to our main competitor. A year later and half of my colleagues (quite a lot were good friends) were redundant. Something like 5 years of large scale redundancies after that doesn't do your stress levels much good.... For that period I probably would have been much less positive in describing my job to you. Fun times! Heheh, you can almost see the bitterness and general ground-down-iness on experienced professional coders if you look over some of the old job discussion threads here.
Hell, I'd only been in my job about 5 years when I joined here (2000 when the original forum was used), and loved everything about my job. Even doing nuts hours for 3 months in Dubai just made me love it more
Ah, it was like prequel shiny Star Wars me, compared to battle worn X-Wing me nowadays
Sigh. And now to think about writing that damn book I always wanted to (I took 3 years of my life writing novel writing software to write my book as all other software was a massive rip-off and rubbish at the time (2001-ish), before giving up at the last hurdle (needed to upgrade everything to .NET from VS6) and getting married instead
)...
Cheers
Current fave quote : Cause you like musicians and I like people with boobs.
