Comment by jiggawatts
5 years ago
Look at it this way: Other people tell us what they think we should do with our lives. What we should find interesting, or fulfilling, or is good for our career.
Meanwhile, I feel like I'm an adult and can make my own decisions. I don't care if what I like is not "cool" or "hip" or some "up and coming technology". I don't have to be in research or the cutting edge of something to make interesting personal discoveries.
In my career I've accidentally stumbled upon multidimensional OLAP cubes (in the form of SQL Server Analysis Services) and discovered that they're quite fun to work with, actually. The reputation of business analytics as something "dry and boring" is undeserved. It's a wonderful mix of human problems like "manufacturing calendars" and quirky sales bonus calculations on top of fancy optimisation tricks to make calculations over terabytes of data nearly instant.
I've also had the incredibly gratifying experience of making a bog-standard web app with only a few mildly tricky technical bits for a department of education. It helped about a million kids read more than they would have otherwise. That's something. In fact, I'm certain that my one library app made kids read more books they wouldn't have otherwise than a dozen English teachers.
My parents were educators, and I outperformed them a hundred fold without ever stepping foot in a classroom as a teacher.
I actually did take a couple of years off and try to make a living on my own selling music software with a lot of handwritten DSP code in it. I learned a lot and it was a lot of fun but I also realized that to a certain extent programming is programming no matter what the domain is. Things that seem exotic and sexy on the surface actually involve a lot of the same considerations and problem solving that building a website does.
So yeah there's no shame in working in more mundane & utilitarian areas. And, like you said, you might reach more people with your work that way.
I had the same experience doing game programming. It's not at all like gaming, and almost exactly like all other programming, except with more linear algebra.