Look I get it. I completely emphasise with the feeling. My undergrad is Computer Science, I often dreamed about writing my own compiler and spent years learning low level performance optimization, loved design patterns, re-factoring code to be more elegant, all that stuff.

I just feel like after years in industry and how I’m steering something like Fable now that all of this is irrelevant and the writing is crystal clear on the wall: Writing software by hand is in its death throes. There is no future for it besides some very niche areas. When last have you actually looked at what your high level language is actually being compiled and optimised to? We’re moving up the abstraction ladder with software.

To your point: People care about the actual output, the interface, whether it does what they want it to do, but in no way do they care about the internals and how it’s built. That’s an implementation detail. And that’s where all the fun of the craft actually sits.

This is not unique to software engineering though, go take a look at the maths and mathematics subreddits. There are guys doing PhDs in maths who are too afraid to run their dissertation topics through the latest models because it might just solve the problem they’ve spent the last few years working on in a few hours. They absolutely hate that problems are being blown away where people have spent years trying to figure out. It feels like the same psychological pain software engineers are going through.