I love programming in general, but I've struggled through my last few jobs. I'm pretty close to hating my current job, despite that fact that I work on a well-k

I love programming in general, but I've struggled through my last few jobs. I'm pretty close to hating my current job, despite that fact that I work on a well-known product with millions of users. The analogy that comes to mind is a pro race car driver who is forced to only drive on an obstacle course, never exceeding 20 mph. The driver has skills that enable him to drive successfully on the obstacle course, but he yearns to do what he loves, opening up on a proper racetrack. In the same way, I have the skills to do tedious debugging of a large, absurdly complex system with tons of technical debt, only making minimal changes to avoid the whole pile of spaghetti collapsing. But I wish every day that I was designing and implementing systems instead, and I'm good at that, too. Ironically, it was early in my career that I had the most autonomy to implement new features and write a lot of code, even if it was on obscure products. In the latter part of my career, I guess my mistake was allowing myself to be lured into working on "famous" things at big companies, even though it amounted to being mostly a maintenance programmer on sprawling, spaghettified legacy software. I guess that next time, I should be more diligent about trying to find out what the day-to-day work will be like (which I find very hard to get an accurate idea of in the interview process. obviously the interviewer is going to paint a rosy picture), and at this point I would rather work on something totally obscure, if it meant I got to do more design and coding.