Not the essay I was expecting from the title. Programming is less exciting today, at least for me. I'm 55, and have been programming for over 40 years. My firs

Not the essay I was expecting from the title. Programming is less exciting today, at least for me. I'm 55, and have been programming for over 40 years. My first program solved quadratic equations on an ancient Wang programmable calculator that had 3 (three!) registers. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to compute the intermediates and final results while taking the three coefficients as input, in order, once each. That got me used to being very, very careful about memory. I remember my first program that ran really slowly for large N, and getting my first glimpse of algorithm analysis, and then being very, very careful about performance. And I have spent many hours coding low-level data structures and algorithms. It was a lot of fun. Maybe it's my age, or maybe it's seeing all the libraries with the cool data structures and algorithms already written, but programming is often more about snapping pieces together than doing difficult new things. Yes, it's better this way, and yes it's really just a matter of choosing the right problems to work on. But here's the thing: You get used to working in an area. For me it's database internals. And more and more of it gets "done" over time, and available as open source. So there is no point in doing the thing that you naturally want to do. What to do about this? I highly recommend working at startups. And not yet another social media site, (there are probably 15 different scalable NoSQL systems out there, pick one and move on). I'm at a database startup, and while we use a lot of open source software, we are building a ton of interesting, new, low-level stuff too.