While I agree that there are parts of software engineering that are merely 'tedious' rather than 'hard', there are definitely parts that are legitimately 'hard' too. Just because you've had a particular set of experiences that you've classified as tedious doesn't mean your perspective represents the totality of the industry.

The problem here is that 'hard' is dimensionless and relative. There are people in Australia right now storming the gates of hell with a shovel and a hose because that's the job they signed up for. If that type of work is on the spectrum, I can't really think of anything in software/systems engineering that's 'hard'.

That sounds more like courage to me. Many of those shovel and hose carrying people would not make very successful software developers from my experience.

It takes a certain kind of mindset; attention to detail and an ability to visualize and work at high levels of abstraction.

To do it well, that is. Copy-pasting framework cruft until it sort of works is simply boring and the world would be a better place if we stopped doing that.

Hard as in unpleasant, obviously not. Hard as in mentally challenging, obviously yes.

10 years ago everything was tedious but possible because you had full control. Now it's super easy until impossible/difficult.

> Now it's super easy until impossible/difficult.

That's interesting, I've never thought of it this way. I'm bored out of my mind at work more often than not due to not having full access to a monolith where it's actually possible to understand/work on the whole thing. Instead, I have to work until I hit a black box/3rd party and I have to either work around it or knock on the black box and ask the proprietors for help. I know that's a generalization, but it's a real cost of componentization of everything into services and the like, at least in the web world. It's _super_ fucking easy to get like 95% to a solution to almost anything on the web, but that last 5% where you spend the most time is like a constant root-canal.