I'm not employed as a programmer per se, but I work with a lot of programmers and other kinds of engineers. I wonder if you're talking yourself out of the value of your work. A great deal of engineering is not creating fundamentally new components, but organizing and arranging things, fitting them together, and so forth. Is this a bad thing?
As businesses and their products get more complex, "systems" behavior becomes a larger part of making things work, until you might only need a few people working on components, and everybody else on fitting those components together in different ways. There's hardly any loss of honor in doing the 90% of the work that needs to be done and makes the business successful.
I think you can do two things. First, look into new technologies that you'd like to dive into. Second, start to rehearse your elevator speech about how great your present work is, until you begin to believe it yourself, because it might be true. Doing great work and looking for better work are not mutually exclusive.
As businesses and their products get more complex, "systems" behavior becomes a larger part of making things work, until you might only need a few people working on components, and everybody else on fitting those components together in different ways. There's hardly any loss of honor in doing the 90% of the work that needs to be done and makes the business successful.
I think you can do two things. First, look into new technologies that you'd like to dive into. Second, start to rehearse your elevator speech about how great your present work is, until you begin to believe it yourself, because it might be true. Doing great work and looking for better work are not mutually exclusive.
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