I personally love programming. I'd gotten to a point a few years ago in my career where I moved out of programming roles only to discover that I missed it. Helping my younger brother through a CS programming really got me going again, and I credit that experience with getting me going on a startup.

That said, sure there's very little cool about being programmer #45 for an insurance company. The truly gifted developers need to be at a software firm, a consulting company (more new dev, less maintenance), working on an open source project, or (best yet) creating their own software.