There seems to be some confusion amongst people who move from writing code for fun to writing code for money. Which is of course that they're not being paid to write code, but to solve problems. Writers and musicians usually don't get paid just to write or make music, they get paid to entertain. If you're confused about why you're being paid, you might start to think you're getting a raw deal.
Since I started writing software not because of any love for it, but to solve various problems I was having at the time, it's always sort of shocked me that some people manage to get so far into their careers without realizing what they're being paid for.
I quite enjoy it now, but rarely in the revel of pure creation. Usually it's from the satisfaction of a problem solved in a reasonable amount of time under well considered constraints.
A small example: you have some internal database, and now different teams want to have some data analysis done.
The fun thing to do would be to write a generic reporting front end, and easy enough to use so that non-technical people can use to create their own report.
And the pragmatic solution that is to instead spew out all relevant data as CSV with a BOM, so that Excel can easily read it. Turns out a generic data analysis tool exists, and it's unlikely you can beat Excel at its job.
Producing some CSV files from a DB is orders of magnitude less work than creating your own analysis front end, so in nearly all cases, this is the solution you're paid to do.
Since I started writing software not because of any love for it, but to solve various problems I was having at the time, it's always sort of shocked me that some people manage to get so far into their careers without realizing what they're being paid for.
I quite enjoy it now, but rarely in the revel of pure creation. Usually it's from the satisfaction of a problem solved in a reasonable amount of time under well considered constraints.