Programming is a Terrible Job

An anecdote to highlight your point.

I'm a web developer, but I've built furniture four our new house last year. It was fun, I've learned some new things and, most importantly, it's still there once the electricity goes out. It provides, in my opinion, a lot more value than nth iteration of some corporate website re-design. I thought in a parallel universe I could become a carpenter and live a great life. Then I've imagined the parallel universe in which a frustrated carpenter dealing daily with stupid client demands, building the same table over and over again, physically tired and risking dismemberment on a daily basis, comes home. He wants to make him a website to reach to more clients, so he picks up HTML and CSS and Wordpress, builds it and it's fun, it works, you can interact with this creation from anywhere in the world! He goes to sleep thinking "I should've become a programmer instead...".

No wonder we have so many product managers, project managers, UX designers, UI designers, other forms of designers, but very few developers.

No wonder people rather be PMs of different sorts.

Being able to create full stack websites excite me, since I am able to create websites for friends and/or communities I am a part of, providing a valuable service that isn't all too common I find.

I disagree with the conclusion drawn - it's only terrible if that isn't what you want to do. However, that is more on the author, and less on programming.

But in order to make a program that is actually useful, you have to understand how computers can be useful, and that's what you need to understand if you want to make your programming skills useful.

There are still many ways computer can be made useful, the problem is, programs need to adapt to real life problems.

What the author describes is its inability of doing actual innovation. Innovating requires one to know a particular domain, and propose a solution that can be done with a program.

Specializing in an existing domain, like graphics, kernel writing, or compilers, is not productive in itself, because those are niche domains which only revolves around computers, they don't solve real life problems. Maybe they will one day, but I doubt advising many students to focus on those issues is really a good idea. Those domains are important, but there will always be enough skilled people to take care about it, and often, those people work in particular company background.

Don't put programming or computers on a pedestal. It's awesome, yes, but innovating can't be a circlejerk. You have to get out to prove your skills are useful. You need to do business with it, and often, most companies don't do it well because entrepreneurs don't understand what computers can do.

You just need to understand computers are intelligent, but you need to teach them. That's what true programming is. A bunch of GOTO, a functional language or any new embedded device will not help you make computers useful. If you're not happy with your job, invent your job, and it will be hard to be heard because your project will need to be rock solid if you want to start it up.