I've felt this same way for a while now. What I find interesting (and hard to reconcile) is how society loves to reward the intangible, derivative, overcomplic

I've felt this same way for a while now. What I find interesting (and hard to reconcile) is how society loves to reward the intangible, derivative, overcomplicated stuff, and ignores the foundational things. The overused (and valid) example is "compare swe to teacher compensation". In truly fractal fashion, this is also true within our own industry: Build an engine capable of running an ML model very fast? Meh. Take that, and layer an API on top, and charge $$ per image-generating call? Shut up and take my money. I don't have an insightful mental model for how to deal with this, except to note that this pattern is prevalent in all human occupations -- the "higher up" you are in the "value chain", the more derived/bullshit-y your fundamental contribution to society is, and simultaneously, the more $$ you can make off of it.