Yes, I want to do something more meaningful than build and maintain web CRUD apps. Despite the media perpetuating this notion that there's a shortage of engineers, I actually feel that this field, particularly the web space (where most of the actual jobs are), is starting to get really saturated. And from a job security perspective, the barriers to entry are fairly low.
These days I'm most interested in economics and politics because I believe that our most important problems right now are in this realm (eg. poverty, job automation, healthcare costs, housing prices, college prices). The Javascript framework wars are laughably insignificant compared to these problems, yet unlike web development, there aren't enough logically-minded people really tackling these problems. Unfortunately there's probably no job out there that I could realistically obtain that would pay me to work on these problems, thus I'm just saving money for retirement and learning on the side.
Oh man, 1000x this. This election season in particular has made me consider how we could get more smart, rational, self-less people into positions where they could influence the overall outcome positively for the vast majority of the population. I don't think our current political system achieves that outcome.
I'm smart. I think I'm rational. I'm not self-less enough to give up my and my family's financial security to leave the field to tilt at these particular windmills. (I'm unconvinced that any single politician, even the President, could change the systemic problems our system is facing, to say nothing of the likelihood that any individual would be cast aside at some point during the election tournament ladder.)
This is an economic problem at heart. If you could find a way to make investing in, say, peace, or hunger, as tempting to investors as software we could solve the really important problems.
These days I'm most interested in economics and politics because I believe that our most important problems right now are in this realm (eg. poverty, job automation, healthcare costs, housing prices, college prices). The Javascript framework wars are laughably insignificant compared to these problems, yet unlike web development, there aren't enough logically-minded people really tackling these problems. Unfortunately there's probably no job out there that I could realistically obtain that would pay me to work on these problems, thus I'm just saving money for retirement and learning on the side.