Sometimes, yes. There are always times when the work just needs to be done, and there's always going to be parts that are less pleasant and others that are more pleasant.

But I got into programming nearly 30 years ago because it was fascinating, and amazing, and it still is. I love seeing what I can build, I love using decades of accumulated skills to their full potential. And I love writing code that people use and that makes users happy.

And more and more I see what was once a wonderful /culture/ being taken over by corporate 9-5 types who want to show up, go to a bunch of meetings and talk about anything but work, pick up a few tickets, and call it a day.

There's a dark side to professionalism....

Personally, I'll only work with people who are here because they want to be here - it's too draining trying to get anything done with corporate drones.

I think it is very unlikely. If you're a super disciplined individual and you can continuously overcome your dislike of programming day after day and force yourself to practice, maybe you'll be really really effective, having the skills on one hand and also never getting distracted by interesting programming problems and keeping the focus on business purpose. These people are insanely annoying to work with because they constantly shoot down every fun abstraction you want to implement, but they can get a lot done. They're also extremely rare. To me this doesn't sound like a fun way to live life either, but to each their own..

More commonly, they don't enjoy it so they don't improve outside work. In my experience these people introduce and embrace a lot of synthetic metrics, generally resist change once they get comfortable with particular technical paradigms, generally are not knowledgable about anything that's not directly in the scope of their day to day, and are quite unable to lead anything new. They do best in environments where someone else has already laid the foundation, tasks are repetitive and predictable, and success is measured in story points rather than the quality of software delivered. Possibly they do well in the first few years of a new project, but over time they will bring down the overall quality of whatever they are working on.

I think it is possible however it seems you don't have much incentive to explore more than you need to. Which might be enough to do your work well, but I don't understand that you wouldn't want that. I build stuff all the time, weekends, evenings and try to implement new things I never did before. It's fun and handy for later.