I've been working as a software engineer for the past 8 years or so. Part of that was a large company working on os level stuff, part a successful company post series-B to further growth, part at my own startup. The last two were web based products.
One thing I keep returning to is how tedious software development is. I'm trying to understand if this is a function of my own lack of innate passion for it, or if others feel the same way. It's exciting to spend a few minutes, hours, or days thinking about the solution to a problem, but the following days, weeks, months, years building it are so dull. Most of it boils down to wrangling poorly implemented libraries, poorly specified API's, poorly documented language constructs or poorly implemented platforms.
Isn't it just all so sickening? What do I do with myself now? I can't see myself doing anything besides software engineering, but building things is really just wearing me down.
How do you get through this? I thought using a different language would help, using a different platform would help, but haven't really spent too much time on it. As far as I can tell, iOS is sort of a panacea, but that's probably because I haven't spent that much time trying to develop and maintain a project on it. Is it really this bad for everyone? College was so much more fun, short term assignments, lots of brain work, perfect environments.
