Bull. If this was true trey would line up to join our company and I could charge them at the door for working with us.
Some programming is fun. Sure. Many part of my work are fun. But I'd rather do other things with my life if money was not an issue.
Programming on stuff I care about is fun, and for some beautiful moments at work there is overlap of "stuff I care about" and "stuff that is valuable to the business", but most of the time the work is "meh" and I mostly view it as "this is much better to me than most other jobs would be for me".
I imagine just about nothing is 100% fun 100% of the time. If many parts of your work are fun, it’s fair to say your work is fun. If you’d rather be doing something else, you could try that, too. Maybe you’d like it more.
But when I compare programming to RPGs, I feel the same way. In both of them, I spend a lot of effort supporting the really fun parts with work. I enjoy both, and I keep doing both. But RPGs have a ton of grind that I generally don't like except that it enables me to get to the fun stuff.
Most of my hobbies are like this. There are things I have to do in prep for the fun stuff, or after the fun stuff to finish the project. And I do them to get back to the fun again.
I would program even if money was no issue. There are many who would.
Then programming usually does not come by itself: meetings, company politics, little mgmt, all usually come with it when programming professionally. Many of those tasks I consider less fun than the programming itself.
