As a founder of a startup in the "boring" category, I really disagree with your take on this.
I used to be all about the great technological breakthroughs, the really cool algorithms, all the stuff you mention. But as I got older, my interests shifted to other areas: making kickass applications that people love, designing usable interfaces, etc.
"[T]hat makes it even more explicit that they're not there to solve interesting problems, they're there for something else. It looks like an awful waste of talent."
See, that's where I disagree. I think it takes a great deal of talent to create software that helps people. It takes different talent than creating a great algorithm, but it definitely takes talent. That's why so much software has terrible interfaces and is an unusable mess.
And it takes even more talent to create something which truly shapes humanity. A lot of the companies that have made the biggest impact have no technological breakthroughs whatsoever: it's all breakthrough on all those "boring" things. Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, they've all done amazing things by solving "trivial" problems.
I cant agree with this comment more, even when I look at the problems that exist in my life (which is far more inclined to be technical than average), not a whole lot of them require technical breakthroughs or "exciting programming".
Music and TV streaming would be one for me that has only been solved recently for me (by spotify and tvcatchup), the streaming problems have been long solved, but convincing the stakeholders to be a part of this business took a long time with many failed attempts, even now spotify arent able to launch in the US because of these problems.
Online banking and micropayments would be another problem in that category that has not been solved as yet. while writing an online bank is hard, it is still at the core a crud system, however its impact on users lives are massive.
While I do love programming, I have come to realise it isnt the technical challenge I enjoy, its the benefits I can bring to peoples lives that I really enjoy.
I used to be all about the great technological breakthroughs, the really cool algorithms, all the stuff you mention. But as I got older, my interests shifted to other areas: making kickass applications that people love, designing usable interfaces, etc.
"[T]hat makes it even more explicit that they're not there to solve interesting problems, they're there for something else. It looks like an awful waste of talent."
See, that's where I disagree. I think it takes a great deal of talent to create software that helps people. It takes different talent than creating a great algorithm, but it definitely takes talent. That's why so much software has terrible interfaces and is an unusable mess.
And it takes even more talent to create something which truly shapes humanity. A lot of the companies that have made the biggest impact have no technological breakthroughs whatsoever: it's all breakthrough on all those "boring" things. Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, they've all done amazing things by solving "trivial" problems.
</rant> :)