[binarymax]

I got lucky and transitioned (in the same company) to a search project from CRUD - which I find vastly more interesting.

But my advice is to pick hard problems yourself and try to solve them. You need to start somewhere! Sure its expensive to get your hands on driving car hardware, but there are plenty of hard problems out there that need solving and can be done using opensource and your personal computer.

If you are able to get yourself through a really tough problem, you will come out better on the other side - even if it takes you years to solve.