Comment by kevstev

Heh, I agree. There is a vast ocean of dev work that is just "upgrade criticalLib to v2.0" or adding support for a new field from the FE through to the BE.

I can name a few times where I worked on something that you could consider groundbreaking (for some values of groundbreaking), and even that was usually more the combination of small pieces of work or existing ideas.

As maybe a more poignant example- I used to do a lot of on-campus recruiting when I worked in HFT, and I think I disappointed a lot of people when I told them my day to day was pretty mundane and consisted of banging out Jiras, usually to support new exchanges, and/or securities we hadn't traded previously. 3% excitement, 97% unit tests and covering corner cases.