I worked as a programmer, briefly, after college, it sucked, expectations were ridiculous, pay was crap. I would never work as a programmer again.

I really enjoy my career as a Software Engineer though. It's been, mostly, fun, and as I've learned and grown I've got the chance to work on more and more interesting things.

Currently I'm helping to build a cloud provider for a specialized sector of the economy that has eschewed the cloud (until now).