Comment by ACS_Solver

> Even if you deeply into tinkering, 1 can be an insanely exciting and rewarding step: for example "how could an abstraction look like in which 2-4 become trivial special cases for many classes of programming problems?".

Yes, but I think there's really two different definitions of point 1. It's "figure out what non-software problem you can solve with software" vs "figure out what technical problem to solve".

As the tinkering type, I also find 1 very rewarding but using the latter definition. Exploring a sizable code base and finding the part that, if simplified, cascades to a lot more simplification, that's very exciting. Figuring out what problem some companies or people have that could be solved? Very hard, very unexciting, not rewarding.