"Imagine coming to work to spend hours googling, wiring together unbelievably shitty, amazingly poor documented frameworks and battling Javscript and CSS." Tha

"Imagine coming to work to spend hours googling, wiring together unbelievably shitty, amazingly poor documented frameworks and battling Javscript and CSS." That's definitely not a software engineer routine. Engineers craft/architect solutions instead of "wiring shit together". Of course, being able to re-use existing stuff is part of the job but if your job is wiring things together, specially if you do not know how those things work, you're not a software engineer. That said, there are different software engineering gigs with different level of difficulties and solving different kind of problems. I like the advice of specializing, getting into more computer science, but that's still software engineering. Don't get fooled just because the market is full of shitty web development gigs, that's a small portion of "software engineering".