The fact that debug cycles are fast. I started out working in nanotechnology, and spending 3-4 days of fabrication -> electron microscope -> optical verification was soul crushing cause 99.9% of the work never led to anything and you practically never knew why.

Software development is logical and predictable. It's (relatively) easy to break a large task down into small ones, prove to yourself that they will work, and compose them together to complete a large project. Sure, things go wrong here and there, but for the most part, you can be confident that whatever you're doing should work every step of the way... without having to worry that you committed some irrecoverable error at any step in the process.

I liked computers in general since highschool, felt natural.

Didn't think that much about the money there or now and IT is slowly becoming bluecolar anyway.

Thought it was the best way to meet hot guys

Kind of destiny 🤦🏻‍♂️

I started programming when I was in primary school. And I liked it very much, even though I didn't understand much even then. But it was impossible to stop and here I am writing this after about 30+ years.

What exactly attracted me - my father soldered a Russian clone of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, showed me a couple of games loaded from a tape cassette, and I was curious how it works.

I loved (and still do) the rush of solving the puzzle. Programming languages give you a constrained set of rules to express yourself with. And yet we know that you can create literally anything with those rules if you can just put them together in the right way.

I love when a program actually comes together and it works for the first time! When I've started from nothing but a vague desire and then pulled a solution from out of the void. It's as close to actual magic as anything else I can think of.

I compel lightning and stone to my will, commanding them in unspoken tongues.

Programming class at school when I was 15. Basic Delphi/object pascal back then. Was always into technology beforehand, especially tinkering with the first android phones, rooting them and installing custom ROMs

I loved math, so a friend of my mother said I could make the computer do maths for me.

6 years later and I'm still amazed computers do what I tell them. And now that I work with this everyday, I'm even more amazed anything works at all.

My middle school algebra teacher sparked my interest in coding.

Due to moving around a lot, I never learned any mathematics, not even basic arithmetic before middle school. In the seventh grade, I was put in a class where the teacher just handed out worksheets with arithmetic problems, and then usually left the classroom until the end of the hour. On the rare occasions when she stayed, I asked her to teach me arithmetic, but she didn't believe I couldn't do it, so she never taught me and I failed the class.

But in the eighth or ninth grade, they allowed me to sign up for the Algebra for dummies class, which taught in two semesters what the normal class taught in one. My new teacher taught me arithmetic the first day, and I was his star pupil from that point.

He invited me and some other students to stay after school to learn FORTRAN. We did not have a computer at the middle school--it was at the university. We didn't even have a card punching machine. So we had cards that looked like punch cards, but instead of punching holes in them, we coded the Hollerith code in them by filling bubbles with a number 2 pencil. Then we sent the cards on a mail truck to the university and got back a printout a week later.

It wasn't the money, it was the ostracizing. I was bullied mercilessly for years and my only retreat was the inside. Computers were the most entertaining thing, so spending a lot of time on it, made me good at it.

Nobody knows what I sound like, smell like, look like, etc. online. I could delete this account right now and pop up with a new one - to anybody but the admins, it'd be like a new person showed up. Also: I can leave whenever I like.

Semi-related: opensource is great too. If something doesn't work, I can try and fix it. If the maintainer(s) doesn't want it/can't integrate it, a new fork can be created (soft or hard).

Finally, it's cheap. No need to buy expensive equipment, materials, space, pay teachers, or have a team.

One thing I really like is that you can build anything with no cost. I like to build things (woodworking, etc) but software is by far the least expensive.

I like making things. And coding had an overall lower cost of entry, and lower overall cost than wood working and making custom hardware projects. I still enjoy the other two, but when money is tight or I'm waiting on delivery of supplies, I work on coding projects.

Interesting that it looks like everyone has come from computers. I got into it because of electronics and robotics. To me controlling stuff in the physical world seemed really cool and it still does. I went straight in with assembly language for microcontrollers.

Hacking early shareware to unlock features because I didn't have money.

Wait... That's still about money. Uh... Puzzles.

I studied chemical engineering in university, but I realized it wasn't what I hoped.

What I hoped: sitting at a desk, drawing schematics, crunching numbers, designing chemical plants, coming up with smart ideas, etc.

What it actually was: walking around a chemical plant or factory and managing plant operators (they knew way more than I did).

It turns out programming is exactly what I hoped from chemical engineering. I love solving problems from the comfort of a desk.

Math was always my favorite subject in school, and it seems programming is a type of applied maths.

Interacting with something consistent and deterministic while growing up in a crazy, random world. Also power. Power over my computer minions.