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Those jobs exist, but are few and far between, since cool ideas tend to be packaged up into reusable libraries, and don't need to be redeveloped, while everyone

Those jobs exist, but are few and far between, since cool ideas tend to be packaged up into reusable libraries, and don't need to be redeveloped, while everyone else uses these reusable libraries differently, so you have a constant need for "sanitation engineers". Tensorflow or OpenCV or UnrealEngine get written once, then everyone uses them to build whatever they're building. You write some cool glue around these, that's the interesting code, then spend most of your time wiring everything together into a larger package that actually does something useful. Once you've wired everything together, now you need to track version, build artifacts, manage release processes, test them and qualify them, etc, so you do a lot of QA and DevOps work. QA, DevOps and sanitation engineering is so product specific that it can't be packaged up, it's a craftsmanship position, and that's why all of us spend most of our time doing this kind of work.

_bxg1 7y ago
Yeah, that's what I figured. It's a bit depressing when you think about it. I guess for most of us that itch just has to be scratched by pleasure-programming.
- oppositelock 7y ago
  I don't know how long you've been doing this, but I've been continuously at it for almost 30 years now, and no matter where, there are challenging problems to solve, particularly outside the "web app with a backend" family of products. Doing optical recognition of malformed chicken patties as they whiz by at 60mph on a conveyor belt sounds mundane, but it's a lot more fun than writing REST API's to a SQL backend. In your career, you will go through new and excited, then sort of bored, then you will find a niche that's both interesting to you, and that you're good at - you become an expert in something. At that point, you do as much of that as you can, and the sanitation engineering doesn't seem so bad when its directed at something interesting to you, especially when you work with colleagues who are better than you at something and challenge you professionally.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    > I don't know how long you've been doing this Much less than 30 years :-) Thanks for the insight/encouragement!

_bxg1 7y ago

Yeah, that's what I figured. It's a bit depressing when you think about it. I guess for most of us that itch just has to be scratched by pleasure-programming.

oppositelock 7y ago
I don't know how long you've been doing this, but I've been continuously at it for almost 30 years now, and no matter where, there are challenging problems to solve, particularly outside the "web app with a backend" family of products. Doing optical recognition of malformed chicken patties as they whiz by at 60mph on a conveyor belt sounds mundane, but it's a lot more fun than writing REST API's to a SQL backend. In your career, you will go through new and excited, then sort of bored, then you will find a niche that's both interesting to you, and that you're good at - you become an expert in something. At that point, you do as much of that as you can, and the sanitation engineering doesn't seem so bad when its directed at something interesting to you, especially when you work with colleagues who are better than you at something and challenge you professionally.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  > I don't know how long you've been doing this Much less than 30 years :-) Thanks for the insight/encouragement!