The majority of amazing software that has not been created yet is "CRUD". Why developers keep thinking the low level stuff is the good stuff.
A huge class of such systems that are waiting to be created are crowd labor systems. How do you create leaderless organizations that produce what google or boeing or walmart produces and that compensates individuals for performance.
The answer today is a messy unorganized market system. Proper information systems that better organize that would create a lot of value. The analogy would be this site. Thousands of people communicating, without the organizing software it would be much worse (thousands of people standing around talking to each other, the good ideas spoken would not easily reach the top as it does in this organized software system).
tldr; the biggest value opportunities lie in CRUD apps, not the low level code
The answer, of course, is that the "good stuff" is subjective (and almost never aligned with "the biggest value opportunities", ick).
Yes, CRUD pays. Being able to make more CRUD in less time (and/or CRUD that is better performing or more maintainable, etc...) is a valuable skill.
But it's boring. And more, it's just not impressive in the same way that, say, qemu/kvm is (or Mesa, or Linux, or llvm, etc...) That stuff is hard, and fun, and interesting in a way that CRUD will never be. So it has value too, and IMHO it's entirely reasonable to celebrate its practitioners even if they don't make as much money as CRUD jockeys like Zuckerberg do.
I agree, the classic engineers like to work problems with an easily definable end result (so that business types don't tell them what to write).
It's a pity though, there's a huge space of products that are needed but the talent is going into slugging it out in societally useless and relatively low paying niches (such as many of the most talented programmers entering the game industry or social networking or linux kernels). Meanwhile dumbasses are raking in millions with shit like SAP and the like.
While I agree on your remark about talented programmers in game and linux kernels. I don't necessarily agree with lumping social networking with the two fields aforementioned. I also disagree of your remark about SAP.
I don't necessarily agree with SAP or SAP consultants but there are cases where people would prefer to use SAP to implement some of their core: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Building-a-Hybrid-Cloud-a.... SAP is a complex, specialized tools that requires specific knowledge on how to tame it.
(I'm not arguing if complexity is good, bad, or anything like that. I'm focusing on what SAP is good at).
A huge class of such systems that are waiting to be created are crowd labor systems. How do you create leaderless organizations that produce what google or boeing or walmart produces and that compensates individuals for performance.
The answer today is a messy unorganized market system. Proper information systems that better organize that would create a lot of value. The analogy would be this site. Thousands of people communicating, without the organizing software it would be much worse (thousands of people standing around talking to each other, the good ideas spoken would not easily reach the top as it does in this organized software system).
tldr; the biggest value opportunities lie in CRUD apps, not the low level code