I can understand that sometimes the technology at work might provide a platform to try some things you're interested in, but if you're honest about what your lo

I can understand that sometimes the technology at work might provide a platform to try some things you're interested in, but if you're honest about what your long term goals and dreams are, those probably have very little to do with work. I used to get frustrated at work, thought I could recreate one of our systems in a better way, maybe I could have, but ultimately it was just a CRUD app, and making slight improvements to CRUD apps is not my dream. Running my own CRUD app, maybe, but not for someone else. (Nor were they asking me to recreate that system.) My real dream is something more like "figure out how to bring strong AI to the gaming industry to create more interesting single-player strategy games", but that's hard, much easier to chase some tangent on someone else's CRUD app.