rdos wrote:
Most of today's programming tasks area boring and non-inspiring
That, I would very much
not agree with. I think the field has become
more interesting over the last, oh, 30 years or so, simply because there is so much more that computers do today. Ad hoc I could not think of a single subdiscipline that has actually "gone away" (although some have certainly changed very much). Of course the number of people
working in the field has increased, so there is much more competition for the really interesting positions. Also, the knowledge on the subdisciplines has increased as well, so you need to have more up-front knowledge to be a viable candidate. Back in the day, very few people knew
anything about e.g. OS development, so being a capable programmer was enough of a qualification in its own right. Today, you need to be able to show quite some up-front qualification to even dream of a position as OS programmer.
Over the 22 years of my professional career, I've worked on software that collected stock market data and used that to avoid insider trades and money laundering, and to calculate the risk a bank held. That was interesting mostly because the huge amounts of data involved and the rigorous testing and system security regimens.
Then I've worked on software that analyzed name and address data, auto-correcting misspelled or outdated addresses, faciliating cross-compares of distinct data sets for duplicates etc.; that was interesting because it involved parsers / interpreters for several domain-specific languages, and taught me a lot about Unicode as well as specifics of various locales with regards to names and addresses.
Now I am working as Software Quality Engineer on software that helps with analyzing and optimizing production lines to even out workloads, allow solid predictions on when orders are processed, and generally make administrating a production line easier for everyone involved. This involves development and maintenance of automated testing as well as manual tests, training other developers in writing tests (and, by extension, testable code), and being the contact person for anything QA related (which puts me in the position to really make a difference for the company).
Things didn't happen as I thought they would, and some assignments were "all the work and very little fun", but I really cannot complain that my job had ever been "boring and uninspiring". I learned a lot, worked with people both pleasant and not-so-much, made some friends and one or two enemies. It's been quite the voyage, and I certainly hope I can sail this ship till the end.
My message? If you don't fixate on one thing that your job has to be to make you happy (like "working on a specific operating system's kernel"), there is so much variety in this job (as in most others) that can be quite interesting if you embrace it. Don't let yourself be discouraged.