Code is (can be) an art just as much as tax preparation can be an art. But at the end of the project, for most of the rest of the world, it's just a means to a

Code is (can be) an art just as much as tax preparation can be an art. But at the end of the project, for most of the rest of the world, it's just a means to an end. I've written some very elegant code in my life that I later revisited and was very proud of. But as a life's achievement? No way. Most code you will ever write will be thrown away or not used. And of the percentage that is used, most of that could have been written less wonderfully by a more crude programmer and still met the requirements. Programming is not hard. Good programming is not hard. Good solutions can be difficult to achieve, but that is less about the difficulty in writing good code than it is about understanding the many different objectives and variables in a situation and reconciling that with the legacy or other constraints. Who am I to judge where someone finds their self worth. But at the end of a decade of doing something, maybe it's good to look around and as, "What is this worth to humanity - even some small subset of?" There are too many "photographers", but at least they can show their work to the general population and evoke some kind of emotional response (other than, "ooh, that looks sooo boring"). There are many, many exceptional musicians who will never make a living with their music, but at least they bring joy to listeners. Meanwhile, Github fills up with the latest Javascript version of something that's already been done a million times (and could probably have been done with Unix shell scripts).