> The big question is who you're solving problems for
> Once I started working with other developers,
I think the problem is about drift. Moving from working on your own problems as a freelancer, to bigger teams and organizations, tends to shift problem solving to a more nebulous state. As the freelancer you fixed problems that perhaps you saw directly, and could fix end-to-end. These could be business or technical problems. The cost of certain actions was evident.
As you progress up to larger and larger organizations you lose that connection. The organizations are supposed to have processes that make up for this lack of connection, but, at best, only do a very average job of it.
Further, you have new sets of problems to deal with, that are not limited to: your colleagues' code, a worse understanding of requirements, PMs having less of an understanding of the requirements than you because management has perverted their work, not being allowed to work on small fixes because everything has to be A/B tested, sales teams perverting the priorities of management, the support team being sidelined by management even though they know the real problems etc.
These articles about solving problems versus writing code never capture this progression for me because the authors generally don't have that experience. That's fine because we are all different and it still leads to valuable discussions.
I think the problem is about drift. Moving from working on your own problems as a freelancer, to bigger teams and organizations, tends to shift problem solving to a more nebulous state. As the freelancer you fixed problems that perhaps you saw directly, and could fix end-to-end. These could be business or technical problems. The cost of certain actions was evident.
As you progress up to larger and larger organizations you lose that connection. The organizations are supposed to have processes that make up for this lack of connection, but, at best, only do a very average job of it.
Further, you have new sets of problems to deal with, that are not limited to: your colleagues' code, a worse understanding of requirements, PMs having less of an understanding of the requirements than you because management has perverted their work, not being allowed to work on small fixes because everything has to be A/B tested, sales teams perverting the priorities of management, the support team being sidelined by management even though they know the real problems etc.
These articles about solving problems versus writing code never capture this progression for me because the authors generally don't have that experience. That's fine because we are all different and it still leads to valuable discussions.