Solving real problems is often boring and or difficult. Tedious mass refactoring, fixing bugs in horribly entangled code you didn’t write, convincing groups of

Solving real problems is often boring and or difficult. Tedious mass refactoring, fixing bugs in horribly entangled code you didn’t write, convincing groups of people they need to make a painful change now for a better future, keeping a team of engineers happy and busy. Learning is always more fun and easy. You can read a tutorial and make progress. Even a rigorous online course is still easier than real life problems because the direction you go in is on rails. You don’t have to do that hard part of deciding what to do and why to do it; the instructor did that already. I often see people divert their attention to busy work that’s easy to make progress on instead of the real and immediate problems. Examples would be fixing all the warnings in a large project, optimizing things that are already fast enough. The real stars of engineering resist these tempting short term buzzes somehow .