I cope with this with #3, I guess - not programming as a career. I can then do crazy prototypes and hackathons in my spare time and work on the general big-pic

I cope with this with #3, I guess - not programming as a career. I can then do crazy prototypes and hackathons in my spare time and work on the general big-picture, product vision stuff that I really enjoy in my actual job as a product manager. My workplace isn't reliant on my shipping great code (and we'd all be worse off if it were!).