[pabb]

Great comment. Echoes a lot of the sentiment I've been feeling since graduating college. Started out at a web startup where everyone was focused on learning the next new framework and applying clever language quirks and idioms, and heralding that knowledge as if it made them more valuable. And then applying it to a company whose product was stale and completely reproducible and non-innovative. I switched into embedded software after less than a year there and I've made a point to focus less on languages, or programming for the sake of programming, and more on learning hardware and Linux kernel internals because it's a domain toward which to apply the programming knowledge that, as you and GP pointed out, is relatively non-novel on its own.

I believe Carmack has a quote about how programming is just a mundane manner in which to solve more interesting underlying problems. I would imagine the world, or more specifically the economy, will eventually see it that way as well.