[Steve_Baker]

I'd tend to agree, but for myself I think what I enjoyed most about programming was the problem solving aspect. As I've matured as a programmer the problems become easier and thus less interesting and there seems to be less and less undiscovered country. I wonder how to get that feeling of exploration back and I think I should blame myself for not having the time or energy to explore harder problems.

I do think the author is misplacing his angst, it isn't programming itself, it's the business of programming that sucks. How to fix it though?

[j_baker]

The problem is that the really interesting problems in computing aren't tractable as spare-time projects. How do you explore scaling operations to hundreds of computers in your spare time? How do you play around with making a service scale to millions of users as a side project?