[JonChesterfield]

Software is a mixture of engineering, art and mathematics.

Everything we build is somewhat broken some of the time and layered on other things that are somewhat broken some of the time, all the way down to the interpreter baked into magic sand which is itself somewhat broken some of the time.

So yeah, the field is intellectually demanding. The top level symptom can be "wrong answer" and the root cause "error in someone's verilog from before tapeout". Or "sometimes it's broken in prod" and the answer "solar flare".