I don't have exactly the same problems - our dev stack if pretty old fashioned but works well (dotnet). I don't enjoy it as much either though, most business pr

I don't have exactly the same problems - our dev stack if pretty old fashioned but works well (dotnet). I don't enjoy it as much either though, most business problems are either easy + tedious to resolve, or involve making a complexity tar pit even worse. Naturally you'll end up spending almost all your time on the latter. Add on top a lot of interpersonal tension from there being a bunch of almost equally good ways of doing any one thing and it's easy to see why programming can stop being fun (while still being a decent profession). I thought this was well put: > I now understand why there’s a trend of developers who want to go live in a farm or take up woodworking: tough(er) problems, but with less variables & easier to reason about. If the wood breaks, you can see where and can probably guess why. Making a table is a mostly linear set of steps, and the basic tools you use don’t change much throughout the years. There is no invisible ghost that lives in a separate realm (dev environment) that can ruin your work at any time and leave no trace. There's not many things less starting an implementation and discovering a series of hard to anticipate incompatibilities between your implementation and the rest of the system. I'm sure this happens in other professions, but perhaps it's easier to work around?