Sure! Can you provide for my family while I do?
Once you have kids, you can't as easily say, "well, we'll just sleep in the car for a year", or "I'll just stay at work ten hours a day and take advantage of their free meals" (or something). For most parents, our risk-taking preferences change dramatically once we have something to lose, and the pressure from our spouses makes it a little bit harder to take on risks of catastrophic failure.
My advice to anyone who doesn't like their job: please don't come to work in a shitty mood all the time, bitch and moan, and spread your poison around. You don't have to love your job, but quit making excuses and being lazy and go get yourself one you will love.
Finding a job I love would require me to change my career and–in the best case–would most certainly offer a starting salary that's far less than I need, given my current financial responsibilities (e.g., my family and $130K in private student loan debt).
Furthermore, I would most likely have to earn another Bachelor's degree.
See where this is going...?
Also, how can I fulfill my financial obligations with an entry-level job in Archaeology?
Poor guy. I write stuff I enjoy for my employer all the time.
> I don't think I ever caught myself writing code for my employer and thinking "hey, I really enjoy this"
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> Our job is not to program, our job is to create value.
It's supposed to be the job of every worker out there. Even janitors (believe me, clean toilets are quite valuable). Or maybe you think our job is to think about what creates value, then do it (or have it done)? That part is not programming, it's business analysis. The OP was a junior programmer, and as such likely had no say on BA. Heck, in general, junior programmers don't even get to chose their programming language, nor their build system, nor the high-level architecture of the programs they write. Genuinely thinking of creating value? That's a pretty good way to get fired. Just do what you're told, and watch (edit: and learn from) the consequences as they unfold.
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> You should be getting your jollies off of making cool shit happen, solving real problems, not necessarily that you just invented some sophisticated new algorithm.
True. However, the OP said:
> Imagine coming to work to spend hours googling, wiring together unbelievably shitty, amazingly poor documented frameworks and battling Javscript and CSS.
This is not making cool shit happens. It's loosing untold amount of time battling accidental difficulties. Solving "real problems" is precisely what the OP would have liked to do:
> There were a lot of really hard problems that programmers had to solve that didn't exactly involve javascript hacks to make internet explorer users happy
Working around a problem (such as IE6) that could in principle have been avoided in the first place, is not the same as solving real problems. Computers were supposed to augment the damn human intellect, and now they're mainly used to extract money from other people. This emphasises the short term and zero-sum aspects of our economy, both of which are poor at advancing humanity forward.