Drupal's Golden Handcuffs

I don't have this problem, currently. But I've previously used boring, lucrative work to bootstrap my way into more interesting work. Here are the steps:

1. Identify what you would rather do

2. Keep doing boring work, but part time

3. Reduce expenses

4. Use money from boring work to subsidize skill development in interesting area

5. Switch to interesting area

Obviously, this only works in fields where you can get away with ~4 per day spent on your main work.

Interesting article, perhaps if a few of those "I'm bored"s were changed to "I'm helping make Drupal suck less by writing some documentation" or "I'm learning cool new stuff cos Drupal does the generic boring stuff for me" the author would have a more fulfilling life.

If everyone blows a little more energy back into the Drupal project, it'll suck a lot less ;)

I am puzzled by this:

"Good Drupal developers are making a lot of money right now, much more than I'm seeing for Django or Rails or Node devs in general."

I am curious where this is? This is not true in New York City, where I am. Developers who are good with a given PHP framework (Drupal, Symfony, etc) will make something like $60 to $70 an hour. The top Rails devs will make at least the same amount, and usually a little more than that.

Couldn't agree more. Having built a range of Drupal sites on a freelance basis, I can confirm that you can do crazy amounts of work with just a few clicks of the mouse. The moment you realize you need to customize, however, is a dreadful one.

Developing via a GUI is good for rapid prototyping or CMS applications, but I prefer traditional coding for web applications. It's easy to change something in a GUI and not notice it. You can't "grep" a GUI to find the screen you need to access to change something (as you may need to click through several screens to get to where you want to go). Version control becomes more complicated as well: when development is defined by data in a database it's more complicated to have a staging/production setup than with straight-up code in version control. Plus text is expressive: there's a reason humanity moved to the written word from pictographs.

Performance can also be an issue as well in Drupal, depending on your use-case. Stuff based on layer upon layer of abstraction uses more memory and can be slow. "Just add Varnish" works for some use-cases, but not others.

Upgrading can be painful as well. Because third-party modules are dependent on Drupal core, when you upgrade Drupal core you also have to upgrade all your modules at the same time. For a complex site this can take awhile. If a module isn't upgraded you either have to do that work yourself, drop it as a dependency, or wait to see if the module gets updated. With less monolithic systems you can deal with upgrading components individually which can make the process more manageable.