Is it always intimidation, though? I find programming unimaginably boring.
Yet I do it for a living, because building things is incredibly satisfying. Ya about 90% of the time I'm kind of bored, but actually finishing things (useful things!) makes it all worth it.
Interestingly I found that I have the same feeling in other endeavors. When I remodeled my house I found construction to be just incredibly dull. But man, the result was absolutely worth it. I don't know if I've ever felt more satisfied with anything.
personally, if I find something dull for a longer amount of time, there is no way I could push through it; luckily, in programming, if something is dull, you either don't have the creative freedom you need, or you have chosen the wrong abstractions (which leads to the fun task of looking for better ones :-))
It's a personal crisis...
A typical month, for me, has probably 5% exciting programming work. The rest is just tedious churn that you inevitably have to do to support the exciting bit.
I found myself wondering what a person might have to change to be able to up the exciting work to 10, 20 or 30% of the work-month.
At my last job, I was brought on into a role of leadership and immediately had all of it usurped by my boss (formerly doing my responsibilities) upon my first couple of this-is-unexplored-territory-so-I-stepped-on-a-rake mistakes. Looking back, I was checked out by April (and I started in February).
"Checking out" for me is hard to see until I'm not checked-out anymore. I can't even feel it in the moment, because I still like to argue and I still want to do capital-R Right, but my brain stopped really working for a while. My mental health followed. What few good projects I did and was proud of felt more like the work of other people (even though in retrospect I more than carried my weight) or were things I built out of spite to prove that, no, I really did know what I was talking about, jerks.
Of course, they're not jerks, and I'm friends or friendly with even the folks in my management chain now that I no longer work there. (Getting a 50% raise to leave didn't hurt.) But I can't be a meat puppet, it's not in my nature, and I feel like that's the case for most of the really really good programmers I know.