in this context it may be interesting to think about teachers and doctors. People do both because of their high passion for these professions. Do they end up excited every day? Well, it depends on so many things.
Can it be the same with programming?
Like take the happiest programmer ever and ask him/her to refactor some old spaghetti code for 6 months. Or maybe work on a new project (yay!) with infrastructure/devops not ready, underlying API changes or some other out of control things...
in this context it may be interesting to think about teachers and doctors. People do both because of their high passion for these professions. Do they end up excited every day? Well, it depends on so many things.
Can it be the same with programming?
Like take the happiest programmer ever and ask him/her to refactor some old spaghetti code for 6 months. Or maybe work on a new project (yay!) with infrastructure/devops not ready, underlying API changes or some other out of control things...
I did some pretty awesome hacking on old spaghetti code.. got it reshaped into something sensible. Got accolades for it too.
So as long as you can rip things out and do some massive changes it can be cool to work on old stuff too.