I look at web development, and a lot of it seems to be tailchasing on the order of "We had to write a framework to get around a bunch of issues with the framewo

I look at web development, and a lot of it seems to be tailchasing on the order of "We had to write a framework to get around a bunch of issues with the frameworks we had to work with." And it's turtles all the way down, at least until you get to the OS layers (which, after all, have linear decades of experience behind their design). I can understand this kind of stuff in a young technology, and indeed things are getting better as people seem to be realizing that architecture astronaut crap like WSDL / JavaBeans / et al did active _damage_ to the industry. (We end-ran OSI with stuff that _worked_, with the exception of X.509 -- ughhh -- and a few other things). I love hard problems that are inherently hard. I hate "hard" problems that are only there because of a bunch of poor technical decisions (I remember looking at SOAP and getting physically ill). So much of working with computers is working out ways not to hurt yourself. If there is any "fu" to be learned, it's the ability to look beyond a technology's implementation and into how people will actually interact with it on a daily basis. Make things work well, end to end, over the whole stack. That's what I try to do these days, and I'm a lot happier.