|
Well, it sounds like it's time for someone to put on his big boy pants! Congratulations, son! Yes, real-world software projects that make money for a business (and pay you a salary) are larger than one man can handle. There's a lot of grunt work, and maybe only a handful of new and interesting things to do. At some point, you're going to have to accept this, and just get on with it. If you work for a business, the goal is to make money, not to work on new, kewl, glamorous software projects all the time. Sometimes those goals do intersect, but it's rare. It's called 'work' for a good reason. It also sounds like you're suffering from another common malady, and that is the idea that programming is all about writing code, and programming languages, and frameworks, and fast turnaround results. I think you're starting to realize that this is not really the case, but you can't figure out why, so you suppose that maybe it's due to the insurmountable grandioseness that seems to surround even the smallest programming project. I think you've grown up under the spell of "programming as an end in itself", and now the illusion is showing some cracks. Look, programming is not an end in itself. It's a way to express the solution to a computational problem. Think about that for a minute, or, preferably, the next week. Programming languages are basically the same idea as mathematical notation - it's a way to express an idea about how to solve a problem. Sure, there's also the coolness of having a machine take your expression of how to solve a problem and actually solve it for you, but programming is still just a way to express the solution to a problem. Look at all the posts we see everyday on HN and proggit about programming languages and frameworks and whatever the latest hare-brained language idea that the functional programming circle jerk fest has come up with. Man, it's like going to a math conference and all everyone talks about is the latest ways to write down algebra! It's no wonder that there've been no real fundamental advancements in computer science in the last 30 years. I think you need to rewire your brain about the philosophy of programming, what it is, what it's for, and what it's not. You are at a crucial point where you need to decide if you're ready to go up an abstraction layer, and start thinking more deeply about the various problems whose solutions may be expressible in a computation form, and stop worrying about programming languages, frameworks, and "impact". If you don't want to do that, then you might as well just be happy laying bricks and comparing trowels, and leave the hard thinking to more interested and capable people. |