&quot;you were, are and will be a software developer, that is, a relatively expensive factory worker, whose tasks your managers would be happy to offshore no matter what they tell you.&quot;<p>this is exactly my experience. writing software really doesn&#x27;t require any great creative mind or cleverness. i&#x27;m a pretty mediocre programmer. i got roped into programming as a kid by, first of all because i wanted to make video games, but then once i&#x27;d dipped my toe in i found learning new, exotic (seeming) ideas and making clever solutions to problems was a lot of fun in and of itself. but i can think of only one time i got paid to do anything that felt like that: working on a tetris game with bombliss, without the official tetris rules. the rules of tetris are surprisingly deep and refined, in case you didn&#x27;t know, so that endeavor was utterly insane and disastrous, which was the general character of the company i was working for. but still, it was a lot of fun playing physicist from the tetris universe, trying to infer the rules through experimentation.<p>to write software, once you have the skill down, is really just about doing the work. it doesn&#x27;t require any insight, unless you intend to write good software, but no one cares about good software. no cares about the software at all. they have things they want to do, and the software, the making of it, is, if anything an impediment. so is the person making it.