I keep hearing this argument, and I always feel sorry for these people. I see all this new stuff being developed, some of it by me, and I think, "Man, why can't they just go do that?"
It's almost like they're broken. They've decided they need to work for the man, and that they can't do exciting things on their own time. They can see the path they want to take, yet they keep walking the same path they hate.
I work for the "man" and lucked out in the sense that there are still pockets of new product development where you get to do some interesting coding that has nothing to do with plugging libraries together. And I get to buy a $10K scope if I need it - happy camper!
But even without funds or a cushy R&D job, I would go farther and say that this is the best time ever for the type of coding the author suggests is more stimulating: for next to nothing I can buy a fairly powerful microcontroller for robotics or whatever, for less than your monthly smartphone bill you can buy an embedded Linux system and do some really heavy lifting.
So he writes an article that makes it sound like he has this problem, but he's really just holding a pity-party for other people that he's imagining, and -I'm- the one that gets modded down?
Working for small companies. They tend to invent new things, instead of trying to leverage existing off-the-shelf products into synergy, and other market-speak that just means they put libraries together and call it a product.
There's plenty of untapped stuff out there, and some fields are so crazy about business logic that there's no way to re-use anyone else's, so you have to write it yourself.
I also develop random things that suit my fancy in my free time.
I have yet to feel like I was just putting Lego blocks together.
It's almost like they're broken. They've decided they need to work for the man, and that they can't do exciting things on their own time. They can see the path they want to take, yet they keep walking the same path they hate.