I've gone back an forth between working as a programmer and working as a system admin (plus some data stuff for grant programs). I have been happiest as a programmer and the most depressed. Strangely, it wasn't legacy code, new creation, programming languages I hated but was good at, or languages I loved that made the biggest delta in experience. It was the policies surrounding the programming that made or broke the job.
I think the single killer to programming is the production support rotation that is something more than emergency pages. At the end of one job, I was constantly being woke at 1AM because of database issues that I couldn't correct (not the DBA). I really don't need much sleep to feel great, but the disturbances for a week at a time was a killer. Worse, our team had no power to fix the problems, and the team who could was really not that interested. They would wake up (maybe) and fix their issues. Management didn't really care because they thought it was part of the job. I really blame our immediate bosses for not making the fix a priority.
tldr: programming is fun even in crappy languages, its the environment that will kill you.
PS: SQR and T-SQL are the from the devil - when you're looking forward to shell, awk, and perl you have issues - VB was ok, Pascal was "really, me, now" moment, and Objective-C & C are still my favorite. Being only allowed to code review other people's C and C++ was bizarre and painful.
I think the single killer to programming is the production support rotation that is something more than emergency pages. At the end of one job, I was constantly being woke at 1AM because of database issues that I couldn't correct (not the DBA). I really don't need much sleep to feel great, but the disturbances for a week at a time was a killer. Worse, our team had no power to fix the problems, and the team who could was really not that interested. They would wake up (maybe) and fix their issues. Management didn't really care because they thought it was part of the job. I really blame our immediate bosses for not making the fix a priority.
tldr: programming is fun even in crappy languages, its the environment that will kill you.
PS: SQR and T-SQL are the from the devil - when you're looking forward to shell, awk, and perl you have issues - VB was ok, Pascal was "really, me, now" moment, and Objective-C & C are still my favorite. Being only allowed to code review other people's C and C++ was bizarre and painful.