I no longer build software

I had a continuous stream of manual labour PT or FT jobs between 15 and 23, before getting my first IT job and when I started it was a fucking revelation. People would pay me $40k/y to sit at a comfortable desk and think and write?! No baking and sweating the hot sun, no threat of injuries, no freezing in the winter time, no clocking in/out, no petty criminal coworkers?! I don't think memory of that feeling will ever go away. And yes, I did do some woodworking as well.

The notion that all the interesting work was done in yesteryear is just looking at the past through rose-colored glasses. At any time in history most software work was glue code. Because the low-hanging fruit is always going to be taking existing systems and applying small tweaks to extend their functionality to a slightly different domain.

Truly innovative software has always been done by the tip of the spear. Building something new and valuable is risky and difficult. 95% of the time the end product is worthless. And that's assuming that everyone on the team is highly competent. You either have to be willing to take a lot of personal risk, or have a good enough reputation that someone's willing to pay you to take crazy risks. In other words, work that never has and never will be done by the median engineer.

But this is pretty much true of any job in the knowledge economy. The average lawyer is just writing templated boilerplate contracts, not arguing Constitutional law before the Supreme Court. The average accountant is just filing personal and small business taxes, not uncovering high-level corporate fraud. The average doctor does the same simple procedure all day long, not working on a cure for cancer. The average academic does by-the-number meaningless research to get his publication count up, not research deep breakthroughs in his field.

I had a plumber quote me $1300 to replace a $250 part that just screws on/off. I did it myself in a few hours.

Since I work on salary, one of the best ways for me to get more money is to save mine by not paying overpriced contractors to fix things around my house.

I used to buy the new Thomas Guide (the 1 inch thick paper map book to find my way around Los Angeles). Having Google Maps on my phone has massively changed that. In the middle we had Nav systems but even then I now live somewhere where public transportation is the norm and being able to ask Google Maps how to get somewhere as been a life changing experience. As one concrete example, from 2000-2010 I pretty much never took the bus except for the one that went by my house. Now, since Google Maps will tell me which bus to take it's so trivial just to take whatever it tells me.

As for VR in arcades in the 80s they were remotely as good as 4 yr old VR today. not even in the same league. That's like comparing a 1970s calculator to a smartphone.

I think it might be possible to say that relative to the entire industry the space for novel or interesting work is shrinking – possibly. But I don't think that actually means there's less interesting stuff to work on. If anything, the spaces for that are growing – maybe more routine work is growing faster, but I can't really say. I'd wager that the majority of software for its entire history has been pretty boring.