>the way programmers react to technical work is very different from the way everyone else reacts to creative work. That's not specific to programmers. I bet te

>the way programmers react to technical work is very different from the way everyone else reacts to creative work. That's not specific to programmers. I bet technical experts in other fields react similarly to works in their fields. I mean, ask any science PhD if they feel their work is appreciated. It's not a programming thing, it's a laymen vs experts thing. Laymen are easy to impress. I can practice juggling for an afternoon and impress my friends. Circus professionals will be less impressed. If you want to optimize for recognition from your laymen friends, there's a sweet spot where your work is both legible to laymen and advanced enough that it looks like magic. Games fall in that category. (Consumer software generally does.) But if you go too far past that, or pick an arcane sub-field, your work is only legible at all to other experts, who understand how magic works, and who think they could have done it twice better in half the time. tl;dr if you want to impress people, build really nice bikesheds, not highly optimized, cost efficient electric turbines.