Not having fun? You probably need a new job

This post was written by Tal, our superstar mobile developer and permanent semi-finalist in Bizzabo’s daily darts tournament. The post was originally posted here.

I remember creating my first computer game at the age of 11.

The game was an *amazing* simulated football game, programmed in Basic on my beloved Atari. Essentially, it was a black screen with a timer running up to 90 (simulated) minutes. Footy events like goals, free kicks and red cards were randomly plotted to the screen.

I was the only one to ever play it, but even so, I was very excited. I actually had an idea for something, I convinced myself I could pull it off and so I did. Above all, I had fun programming it. About 11 in a scale of 1 to 10.

Soon later I found out about Championship Manager, a game with the same basic idea, which quickly became my favorite computer game.

I’m now a grown-up myself (and act as one most of the time), finished university and spent a few years working for a big software company. I developed solutions for un-trivial problems while working there and was always proud of the result, but something was missing. I missed the fun-factor of programming.

I recently joined a small startup writing it’s first lines of code for a new awesome product. When I sat down to write the first line of code I realized something. Developing new software for a company is much like hacking a small video game when you’re eleven.

There’s an idea, you visualize how it can be done and you do it. Starting with an empty project and growing it into a product people love. It felt just like those Atari hacking hours after school when I was a kid. The fun-factor was back.

It was fun clicking that “New Project…” button in my editor. It was fun seeing the product come to life. It was fun seeing the first user signs up for our system. It was fun spotting people use the product in real life and it’s fun getting great feedback about it from our users.

How much fun are you having at work? if it’s somewhere below 11, you might need to find a new job.