There' a difference between having "large swaths of time that are a bit mind numbing", and having those swaths taking most, possibly all your working time. OP s

There' a difference between having "large swaths of time that are a bit mind numbing", and having those swaths taking most, possibly all your working time. OP said: > I don't think I ever caught myself writing code for my employer and thinking "hey, I really enjoy this" ----- > Our job is not to program, our job is to create value. It's supposed to be the job of every worker out there. Even janitors (believe me, clean toilets are quite valuable). Or maybe you think our job is to think about what creates value, then do it (or have it done)? That part is not programming, it's business analysis. The OP was a junior programmer, and as such likely had no say on BA. Heck, in general, junior programmers don't even get to chose their programming language, nor their build system, nor the high-level architecture of the programs they write. Genuinely thinking of creating value? That's a pretty good way to get fired. Just do what you're told, and watch (edit: and learn from) the consequences as they unfold. ----- > You should be getting your jollies off of making cool shit happen, solving real problems, not necessarily that you just invented some sophisticated new algorithm. True. However, the OP said: > Imagine coming to work to spend hours googling, wiring together unbelievably shitty, amazingly poor documented frameworks and battling Javscript and CSS. This is not making cool shit happens. It's loosing untold amount of time battling accidental difficulties. Solving "real problems" is precisely what the OP would have liked to do: > There were a lot of really hard problems that programmers had to solve that didn't exactly involve javascript hacks to make internet explorer users happy Working around a problem (such as IE6) that could in principle have been avoided in the first place, is not the same as solving real problems. Computers were supposed to augment the damn human intellect, and now they're mainly used to extract money from other people. This emphasises the short term and zero-sum aspects of our economy, both of which are poor at advancing humanity forward.