Programming is 5% of painstaking work to break down a problem into hyper-detailed description that leaves no space for ambiguity (that's the "meta work"), and 95% of dealing with self-inflicted bullshit like build systems, package managers, platforms, service architectures, devops, devsecops, secdevops, and all the procedural nonsense necessary to give people paying us a modicum of control over delivery.

It's a series of simple tasks interrupted by two week diversions.

Wow. This may explain why I don’t really like programming anymore. After doing it for years the solutions often seem immediately obvious. It’s the modern programming process (the “self-inflicted bullshit”) that sucks.