Nuts and bolts programming isn't a bummer for me. There is room for creativity and ingenuity even in that kind of coding. I find the craftsmanship itself is the fulfilling bit.

The downsides arise when management injects themselves into the process. "Skip testing", "don't use source control", "don't refactor", "don't start building until the spec is complete" are some of the gems I've heard before.

It's one thing to be lazy or make mistakes - we all do it. It's another beast when you want to deliver professionally but you can't because it conflicts with a company's "way of doing things".

The cool thing about being a programmer is that you can use it in basically every field of endeavor out there. If you want to work with movies, you can work with movies. Are you passionate about urban planning, ecology or archaeology, there are lots of roles for programming in all those fields. Want to be a journalist, lots of programming and data mining happening within journalism these days.

There are basically two ways to approach a career as a programmer, one is to see programming in itself as your passion and solving the programming problem you're facing at any given moment as an ends in itself. The other is to see programming as a force multiplier to give yourself 'super powers' for doing the thing you actually care about.

That is a naive opinion IMHO. In all but the core SW roles you would merely be a simple cog being told what to do. If for example you'd be coding for an archaelogy department you would be the code monkey of the professor heads. Even worse you would have to battle their ignorant views on SW. My guess is that you'd hate playing that role and that you would run as fast as you could back to a SW house doing fragmented work with people that at least understand a bit of software.

At least that's my experience of venturing into a non-hardcore SW field (health sector).

I've worked both ends of this 'spectrum' several times in my career and your experience doesn't match mine at all. I've rarely had the problem of domain experts treating me as a cog, and certainly not more so that in a 'normal' SW house. If you come in humble, ask a lot of questions and listen to people you'll quickly become a respected member of the team.

The important part is to understand, enjoy and respect the domain you are working in. Then working with domain experts to use software to solve problems you both care about can be both fun and rewarding. And

You are right that you will have to 'battle' their ignorant views of SW development. But those battles are rarely hard to win if you're a bit diplomatic, because people don't care to much. They might not have any version control in place when you start and might not see the need for it, but I've never experienced anyone forbidding me from using version control. Most of the time they even come around to it as being pretty good idea.

From my experience, with a bit of back and forth I'm helping these non-SW departments systemize things in ways they might not have thought of. Through the power of my business ignorance and having conversations, I'm rubber ducking these people to good systems.

I work with a lot of non-profits, but this mostly just involves editing pre-fab wordpress widgets, and basic computer troubleshooting and repair. It's a simple life.

I'm just glad to have a boss who understands that I do better work when I am getting paid real money. It's surprising how many people want to boss me around for free.

It depends what industry you're in. If you go to work for a boring corporation that doesn't do anything interesting then you will find it boring and unfulfilling. Or you can work for a company that has some kind of ethical mission and you'll probably find that better. Its the same as any job really.

You can always get into embedded programming! Instead of databases you can program things that move and blink!