[efuquen]

You think this: "Developers have very little positive to go off of, and few professions have customers as discerning and grumpy as compilers."

Yet you mentioned this example: "A doctor sees someone walk back in for their checkup who couldn't walk a week ago."

Is not seeing a product in action, one that possibly effects millions of lives (to be more realistic lets say 1000s, hell even a few dozen should be satisfying) in a positive way not very satisfying? I doctor helping a patient might not be as personal, but when I think about software I right the people who are using it and enjoying it are not far from my mind.

[greenyoda]

Unfortunately, many developers don't get a lot of opportunities to see their product in action. If you work on some public-facing service like Google or Facebook, you'll get to see your code being used. But if you work on a product that big companies deploy on their internal networks to improve their productivity, you won't see much of it.

[dasil003]

You can walk over to someone else's cubicle can't you?

[krenel]

Not really. I have been developer of VoIP application for about one an a half year and our clients only call us when they have a problem. Conectivity problems, delays in the audio when doing calls (due codec errors), problems with NAT, problems with the voice mails, etc... If everything is fine you just see no errors on logs and a beautiful graph expressing the increase of number of calls every month. Anything else.

Same when I was working generating telephonic bills for the clients. You will only have feedback if something went wrong.

Is that satisfaying? For my its enough; if the work have been done fine and the clients are reporting (almost) any error, I'm happy with that.

[Evbn]

VOIP is the best! When your clients have a problem, they can't call you!