Comparing your six figure white collar job to basic janitorial work is pretty damn cringe and pretty objectively untrue.

Your standard CRUD applications and web services are largely just a rigamarole of reciting the right incantation and duct taping bits together. It's immensely non-stimulating work when done properly.

This isn't an insult by any means. It's a testament to the triumphs of decades of engineering efforts to turn the process of orchestrating extremely complex electronic systems spanning continents into a largely trivial task for most projects.

Not only this, but there'll always be an a**ole to say that we're doing that wrong, and add a few more steps in between just to make the process "better".

I've cleaned toilets professionally, and I'll say once and for all: writing software, no matter how monotonous or boring, is nothing like cleaning toilets. And I'd be willing to bet that someone trying to make such comparisons has ever had to do that kind of work.

I grew up doing hard farm/ranch labor outside in 95-105 degree TX heat and humidity. I agree with the ancestor comment that manual labor is a hell of a lot more satisfying and stimulating than gluing together AWS services with IAM/RAM snippets from stack overflow and updating some design doc about it. If it payed adequately I might do manual labor in the day and solve actually challenging and fulfilling technical problems at night. Programmers don't get to program much anymore :(

There is a big difference. one is cleaning shit other more shit creating more shit :)

Let's imagine building a video chat:

Are you going to build an OS from scratch? Network protocols? Encryption? The rendering engine for it? Compression algos?

Just how much of this do you consider "not configuration"? I think this all sounds very much like "old man yells at cloud" pining for a past that never actually existed.