Yes I think that's true. And I wonder how much of the background radiation of dissatisfaction in our field can be traced to many of us getting into it as the cu

Yes I think that's true. And I wonder how much of the background radiation of dissatisfaction in our field can be traced to many of us getting into it as the culmination of an early interest in (or obsession with) math and science, but then discovering that most of the jobs require a bunch of product work which is not actually very technical. For me, I still get satisfaction in the constant micro problem solving inherent in programming, but it's not the kind of big problems I dreamed of figuring out while reading Feynman late into the night as a teenager.