Title: I&#x27;ve been working as a programmer for about 7 years now.<p>Increasingly it feels like my job has just become gluing together opensource components, which doesn&#x27;t feel creative at all -- there&#x27;s little problem-solving going on.<p>All the areas where I could feel like I&#x27;m contributing something aren&#x27;t valued. For instance, shareholders don&#x27;t care less if the software is reliable, performant, or secure because they only want something that &quot;works.&quot; If it &quot;works,&quot; everything else is irrelevant.<p>It wasn&#x27;t like this when I first started. Back then it felt like open-source was mostly limited to template engines, URL routers, and so on -- stuff you wouldn&#x27;t want to write yourself and probably couldn&#x27;t do better. I&#x27;m working on a (non-JavaScript) project with almost 200 dependencies. I&#x27;ve had entire weeks at work where all I do is edit YAML files (I don&#x27;t work in DevOps, it&#x27;s not k8s) and write glue for code that I&#x27;m not allowed to write myself.<p>Any code I do write myself eventually gets replaced with another open-source package. Even if the package is worse! When I&#x27;ve tried to talk to my manager, he&#x27;s told me we have to think about how maintainable the project is. It seems the company is trying to optimize for having as much code as possible be maintained by &quot;the community&quot; so they can minimize risk.<p>It&#x27;s all left me feeling extremely depressed and I don&#x27;t know what to do. I&#x27;d just leave and work somewhere else, but it seems like this is becoming more and more common. After all, most problems are solved by now. Why not just pull yet another package off GitHub?
Upvote: