I'm one of those nutjobs who actually enjoys working with billing and payment. There's something soothing to writing software which has to be highly tested, well-written and handle lots of edge cases.

It's a sharp contrast to the day-to-day startup philosophy of "move fast and break things".

Exactly. The type of software for which it is easy to write automated unit tests and only the most clueless manager would not give you the time and resources to do so.

Most software isn't somebody's dream. It's just dealing with "dumb stuff somebody's gotta do" because there's a paycheck.

(See also - basically every profession. I don't know how many architects choose to design parking garages or dreary subdivisions, but hey, they gotta eat too.)

> or dreary subdivisions

There are a million little details that can go in to making a house more livable, pleasant, or delightful to live in. An architect that loves these details and enjoys knowing how much her work affects the lives of the families that live there would relish working on a subdivision...

That sounds like just the architect we need! I didn't mean they're all dreary; I was just trying to pull an example of a job someone does for the check and not because it's the pinnacle of their craft.

For that matter, some parking garages are quite visually interesting. Most are horrendous, though, in my view at least.

So, the same can be said about writing dreary software as well. It can be fun thinking about the most effective / efficient way to move data around, or to structure your code, even if it's just for a straightforward CRUD app.

This kind of software chooses you :-)

Actually, it's quite rewarding once you get into it. Serious business, people depend on you getting it right, but still nobody dies if a bug slips by.

Getting into it requires a year or two, though.

One of the smartest things you can do is to work on dumb things no-one else wants to do.

Maybe it is no ones life dream to do it, but sometimes you just find a job and it happens to be something 'random' like this.

If someone asked me to work on this and gave me a huge salary, though, I'd gladly jump on it.

If by "this kind of software", you mean software that solves a problem that almost every adult in the country is guaranteed to deal with on a yearly basis... which involves mostly logic, forms, and arithmetic, without any really hard problems... yet which is too complex and ever-changing to want to do it without software tools, and also dry enough that the SV/VC crowd leaves your niche alone...

Yeah, I think that sounds like a pretty good area in which to choose to write software.

Isn't most software a variation on this type of thing, payroll, invoicing, etc.

I doubt it's most software in percentage of code, but I suspect it's by far the biggest value of software to the economy.

Absolutely! I love problems that have an easily understandable value proposition like "we take the grief out of doing taxes." In my experience it's the biggest single success factor in writing good software.

So if you like to write successive business software--and get paid--this is a great problem to go after.