[wsve]

This is exactly how I feel. I knew it already to an extent from my time in college, but so many people come into this industry because they want to be able to produce the end product, or just have a stable job that makes good money. Neither of those are bad reasons to get into this profession, but it does make me sad how few peers I have who do programming because they're passionate about the act of programming. The problem solving, the dance of using programming languages to communicate efficiently and robustly to both machines and humans... I'm very sad how enthusiastically so many of my peers just toss that away.

[IanCal]

Aside from many of these things just being a layer difference - it’s not unreasonable to want to work on databases query optimisation an not enjoy css or enjoy building frontends but just want a db that’s fast and works. The flip of your view is that they may find it sad that you don’t want to make things, you just want to solve puzzles.

[wsve]

> Aside from many of these things just being a layer difference - it’s not unreasonable to want to work on databases query optimisation an not enjoy css or enjoy building frontends but just want a db that’s fast and works.

I don't mean that it's unsetting that people enjoy different parts of the job, I enjoy many of those same aspects, but it's sad to me how few people around me care about the aspect that I originally fell in love with, which was the bedrock of our profession. Specifically, the work of solving problems with the machine/human shared language of code, instead of just writing out plain-english specs of what you want to have happen.

> The flip of your view is that they may find it sad that you don’t want to make things, you just want to solve puzzles.

So what? Their "just get it done" POV is far more common in this industry than mine (apparently), and the enjoyment they get from their job isn't being actively optimized away.