Yes, programming is a lot like plumbing nowadays. It is more about connecting existing pieces, than it is about inventing new stuff.

If you are looking for more interesting things, then try scientific computing, or work on new programming languages. But don't expect to make a lot of money.

Sadly/Awesomely spot on :P

The thing that really got me into programming, and which I still enjoy about it, is being able to reason and design about code. Understanding the parts, why this happened, the patterns, connections, implications. Building up and reasoning from first principals. Its why I enjoy optimisation, algorithms, explicitly working with read-compile-run cycles and meta-programs, how data is laid out and stored and moved, and what must be mechanically/logically happening in any process.

A lot of "modern" programming seems a bit of a nightmare to me to be honest. Plugging together a bunch of poorly implemented, exception-ridden, "never really sure its working but not throwing an error yet..."

Numeric and science and performance based computing and language work...much nicer there... now if only there were some local employers wanting that and not marketing/web/mobile-apps....

I'm a mechanical engineer and I'm currently in a software job because I fell in love with Project Euler. Turns out a ton of modern software development doesn't care a whit about the algorithmic considerations PE makes you learn about. It's not very rewarding.

>But don't expect to make a lot of money.

What do you consider a lot of money?

Minecraft really demonstrated this concept well within the span of a few years.

When it first came out, it was hard to figure out how to do anything. You either just played and fiddled, or you had to dig through the Minecraft wiki to figure things out. I found this incredibly fun.

Fast forward a few years and now Minecraft is like a modern IDE. Things keep flashing up, built-in help, a guided structured tutorial.. fine, but it's nowhere near as rewarding for quizzical minds.

Does it really have a built-in help and a tutorial now? I played last just a few months ago and did not notice this at all.

I've been scripting php and python for about 10 years, and it's incredibly fun to me. It's like a lot of trial and error while trying to create a 'structure' and it's really fulfilling when it all works in the end. Even though I go to google for specific things like how to get a div in beautifulsoup, I still have to create all the logic and figure out specific things. I actually would not call myself a programmer as I've only been doing this for fun and for helping someone I know, but it certainly feels like I create more than just cut and paste or whatever, and I've also always had a feeling that I wanted the simplest solution possible and not stack endless libraries or frameworks on top of one another

CSS and HTML are frameworks though. You're not having to position elements directly to the graphics card's frame buffer; you're using markup frameworks supported by a browser rendering engine - which often depends on 3rd party code like image libraries (libpng et al) and SSL/TLS libraries (eg NSS, OpenSSL, etc. Then you have OS APIs (Win32, GTK+, etc), graphics and sound drivers, kernel ABIs, hardware firmware, etc. It's quite an extensive stack of frameworks and libraries between your code and what actually appears on screen. Even your PHP server side code depends on hundreds of inbuilt libraries to be useful, dozens 3rd party libraries (OpenSSL, MySQL drivers, etc), plus the usual OS stack.

So you're very much stacking endless libraries and frameworks on top of one another - even if a lot of this stuff happens transparently to yourself. Which is why software can be an absolute pig to debug when remote clients report subtle bugs. Sometimes it's impossible to differentiate between an "eclectic" software configuration and just plan user error.