I definitely felt a lot ennui about the state of things when I was about 4-5 years out of college (although to be fair I jumped out to join the dotcom boom). I

I definitely felt a lot ennui about the state of things when I was about 4-5 years out of college (although to be fair I jumped out to join the dotcom boom). I'm actually pretty stoked about the state of things right now though. Ubiquitous compute power through virtualization, big data (map reduce!), open cv, machine learning, SAT solvers, you name it. Now that we have cheap, plentiful and fast computational power all that stuff they dreamed about back in the 60s and 70s is now a reality. CS as a discipline is nowhere near tapped out. Sure, we're probably not going to find too many more core algorithms in many of the various disciplines, but come on.. we don't even have true general purpose AI at this point!