I hate the way so much of programming is just fiddling knobs on some old systems.

actually, i believe it's quite the contrary: most of what we need nowadays it's already been invented and developed.

you can be incredibly successful as an engineer at many companies just by knowing what knobs are there and how to turn them properly.

and i think this is relevant because most people end up reinventing a square wheel that only does 10% of what the most used, widely spread, already-open-source wheel does.