Cookie-cutter isn't a bad thing. If it solves a real problem or addresses a real need, it will be successful.

I mean Facebook started out as a cookie cutter app. Heck, it was a basic CRUD app. Look at where it is today.

Outside of such unicorns there are also many examples of reasonably successful products that can be categorized as cookie-cutter. Basecamp. Trello. Snapchat. These apps don't do anything groundbreaking or operate on the bleeding edge of technology. But they are well-known and profitable.

Cookie-cutter is also what 99% of programmers work on. Yes, it's nice that you were on the team at facebook that built the first react prototype, or that you were the first software engineer at oculus. The rest of us are building apps, adding an endpoint to an api, figuring out what the new database schema should look like, etc. And there are a hell of a lot more jobs openings for "blue-collar coders" than there are for geniuses.

I mean, it's great you're working on the latest computer vision algo to make the billboards in Minority Report a reality. I just spent the day wrestling with Google's client API registration and authentication nonsense so I could get per-page bounce rates.

I agree. All of us outside of military hear about pilots and Navy SEAL at work most of the time. But 99% of men/women in military work doing none of that stuff. But that 99% are still gainfully employed doing essential work.

Am not military and especially I'm not American, but IMHO wars on the field are not won with Navy SEALs but with logistics and I'd add artillery. Those sound boring compared to any special forces, but they're not, quite the contrary.

I was talking about the amount of media attention given to pilots/SEAL/etc. But yes wars are won with artillery. But luckily, we haven't had a war like that in awhile, especially for US.

I agree except for Snapchat, the real time computer vision they (or at least the startup they bought) put out I would have to say was on the cutting edge. Real time facial recognition was standard, but the facial transformations and 3d modelling in real time stood (and still stand) alone

I don't use Snapchat, so correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't those relatively new developments? From a quick Google search, it seems that the acquisition of Looksery and the launch of "Snapchat Lens" didn't occur until September 2015. By then, Snapchat already had at least 80 million daily active users. While their current real time computer vision stuff is definitely not something the average engineer could make, it does seem like they started out as a cookie cutter app.

I may need it, but I don't necessarily need to keep it in my head.

That's why I own copies of Knuth, and Sedgewick, and Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein.

Now, the ability to understand and make intelligent use of those resources is something that requires education (formal or self). But oddly no one (that I've heard of) ever tests for that ability in job interviews.