At some point you may end up with too few resources and too many deliverables and the inevitable burnout. I chose to remove myself from that situation. Life is too short. And I guarantee that any remorse on my death bed will not be about wishing I had gone to work "one more day"

I've been programming for some four decades, and the biggest challenge has actually been not throttling other developers for their ignorance, ineptitude, and the outright moronic halfwit BS they seem to delude themselves into thinking are good practices.

It only gets worse as time goes by; blindly including libraries or frameworks they don't understand, blindly trusting that the people who wrote those libraries or frameworks actually knew what they were doing, generally not knowing enough about the underlying technologies to have ANY damned business working on them in the first place...

It truly does induce in me a desire to introduce my metacarpals to a great number of proboscis with a significant amount of force and velocity.

In web development it's become an epidemic; fat bloated multi-megabyte train wrecks doing tens of K's job -- it's like a return to the days when I was starting out and the scam artist jerks working in Cobol and DiBol used to actually BRAG about padding in unnecessary comments as they were charging by the K-LoC! (thousand lines of code)

Now it's like people are sleazing together this same bloated, inept, overthought rubbish without that reason to do so... call it ignorance, call it ineptitude, but when there are people DUMB ENOUGH to see a legitimate purpose for outright mouth-breathing dumbass halfwit short-bus rubbish like turdpress, bootcrap, jqueery, OOCSS, LESS/SASS/SCSS or other preprocessors...

... well, I really have to wonder if the soda and cheetos programmers diet is leading to worse brain damage than tap water from Flint, MI.

Hell, even HTML 5 with it's pointless redundancies, undoing all the progress of 4 Strict, and doing everything it can to drag web development practices back to the worst of the proprietary post 3.2 crap that wormed it's way into 4 tranny... Leaves me wondering just how it's even possible anyone sees a legitimate purpose to any of this so called "modern" garbage.... people call it "the future" and all I can think is "really? Looks like the worst of 1997 to me!"

HERPAFREAKINGDERP people!!!

I look out upon the landscape of development, and the current bloated nonsense and bad practices being promoted as the best thing since sliced bread -- and I find myself overwhelmed with disgust to the point of nausea! It is as if the entire programming industry has been taken over by a bunch of dirty, filthy little degenerates.

After graduating in 2010 now I'm in my sixth year of professional software developing. My first challenge was working in a big counseling enterprise, serving as Professional Services Consultant in a national newspaper newsroom, developing their professionals-oriented databases software and websites. Working in such a big company (thousands of people counseling for various high level customers), in a 10+ devs environment, I always felt as the "last wheel on the truck", as we say in Italy: I was the low end of the chain, with very little chance to grow up. After 3 years and a half I left for a completely different environment, a tech startup, developing security, anti-burglary, domotic and automation systems. I moved from an edge to the other: I am in charge of software development, but we are 2 software developers and around 5 firmware developers for all our product. Here the biggest challenge is to figure out exactly the estimations about products to be developed, and even more to respect the given deadlines. But on the other hand this is so much rewarding, and this jobs is giving me the opportunity to learn a lot about IoT and cloud development.

The biggest challenge for me, as a developer was to convince higher authorities to agree upon a technology! 2 years into my career, I had to develop a Travel Portal in Struts 1. I was like, Not Struts again! It was Spring's blossom period and it was gaining traction. I suggested Spring, stating the advantages of Spring over Struts, but company was so adamant, they said we do not want new technology now! After a lot of face-palming and explaining, I finally made CEO realize it is not a new technology, but rather improved Struts framework(I know, but what can I do to make them accept?). And he agreed. So we had brain-storming session, POC session and after a month, we were into development of travel portal in Spring.

But I couldn't replicate this success everywhere. Because people are too comfortable to see outside. If I suggest we'll do X module in Y language, they will look at me like a fool. For me, this was, and still IS biggest challenge! I have couple more, but I guess this eats them for breakfast.

I'm a self taught 36 year old programmer. I've been programming since the late 90s. My first real programming job (where I was actually called a programmer) was in my early 20s (2002 or 2003 I think). so my biggest challenge was always convincing employers that I actually knew what I was doing without a college degree. It was frustrating at first, but now a days, it's a non issue. The only issues I see now a days (fortunately) are just differences in skill sets required. Without a degree, you take a chance on which language you choose to learn and sleep with; theres no blanket degree that at least says, you know something.

Overcoming this; is roughly what I've said on Hashnode in the past. Build build build. Degree or not, programmer numbers are increasingly rapidly - and a big differentiator between programmers is those that write / ship and those that just learn. My resume; my list of shipped projects in production generally trumps any degree I could of gotten. I still regret not getting one sometimes; I know it's hard to work for some of the bigger names in the industry without one; but most would say I make a damn good living for myself without a degree.

That, and learning Objective C hahahaha - compared to Javascript / PHP / C# and other languages I've written in, I still struggle with Obj-C. I can get by, but I'm no pro. And I just haven't had the time to play with Swift...

The biggest challenge I had was taking charge of a project and taking it to production for the first time. It wasn't the technical side so much as bearing the responsibility, and I found myself being overly critical of my own work and getting bogged down in the details, to the point that I had burned myself out and ground to a halt. Fortunately I worked with someone who recognised what was going on and was able to set me straight (I still work with said person). It took a while to get it into my head that a project is never really "finished" and sometimes you just have to hit the button and push it to production.