You can broaden that statement and say that almost all the CRUD-app bullshit which devs get employed for these days isn't that, either. I've worked as a dev for insurance, B2B fintech, and athletic wear companies. They're all doing trivial CRUD problems behind the scenes, where the only real challenge is dealing with asinine management and organizational issues.

And even if the consumer internet problems are technically challenging, like problems of scale for Facebook, you can argue pretty easily that solving them to increase Facebook's power and profitability is a net negative for society.

For China to simply say "no" to that and invest more heavily in the physical economy is... a smart move, by my estimation. It tracks with what I'd do in my "king for a day" fantasy. Not that I think they're out there building a utopia - they're still a repressive regime - but they're wisely avoiding a class of problems that the West has jumped into headfirst.

Haven't read the article - but this is my sentiment for many years. I went to undergrad for computer engineering, then a masters in electrical engineering...hoping to do actual engineering work. And I end up having a career in web app development because that's where the money is at.

I am surprised that those who continue to work on "genuinely hard technical problems" do so when web app/dev has so many jobs with pretty damn good pay.

As an anecdote, my wife has a PhD in chemistry from a top program. Majority of her peers in grad school ended up taking classes in CS, Data Science, drop their program and work at a tech company.

When she graduated...I remember sitting with her at a career website and just looking at the differences in quantity of jobs for hard sciences vs IT (my wife's career now has nothing w/ her hard earned degree)