Shelley has a good post here that gives her answer to "why would anyone wanna be a programmer?" My answer is remarkably similar to hers. The part that really caught me was near the end:
Never take a coder for granted.... In moments like this, we almost have all the power of the universe in our fingertips because we make things work.
That's it--that feeling of YESSSSSSS! It's a control thing.
When I physically create something beautiful (a piece of jewelry or a book, for example) I am usually more stunned than proud. I have absolutely zero confidence that I will be able to make something that gorgeous again. It was probably a fluke, you know. I got lucky--didn't even know my hands could do that. I'm grateful more than anything else.
But when I get a piece of code working the way I want it to, I am intimately aware of every piece of the process that went into it. I remember the sticking points, and the leaps of logic that got me around them, and the Aha! moments that lead to something brilliant. I made it, I own it, I understand it. (Well, I may not understand it a couple of months from now, but we're talking about the immediate results.) I feel pride, definitely. I admire my brain for a little while, until the next insurmountable problem comes along.
This is one of the things that has kept me at my job through some pretty unpleasant times. Because as much as I admire my own brain ;-) I realize that my coworkers really know what they're doing.
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