Career angst, part I

I have a good job. It's in tech support, but I have good co-workers, mostly good clients[1], am at a place that produces worthwhile goods and/or services in a nice location, there is occasional intellectual challenge to the work, the management puts their money where their mouths are with regards to work/life balance, everybody is wonderfully unpretentious when it comes to credentials[2], there's no dress code, and the pay's not bad. That's just about all of what one could want from a job, no?

Yet I am unhappy.

Realized about a year ago that what I'm missing at work is the opportunity to make things... and that I'm not going to be able to get that out of a career in I.T. I currently do have the occasion to exercise creativity in troubleshooting and writing documentation, but that's a far cry from being able to look at something cool and useful and say I made that. And what's worse is that I think I'd rather produce a tangible object -- something you can pick up, or at least kick -- than something that only exists on a computer, so most of the I.T.-related jobs that do make things (sysadmin positions with a lot of scripting or that morph into straight-up development jobs, web design, etc) are just not looking interesting. Doing network engineering is perhaps a little more appealing, but even at that top of that field (being a lead network architect for, say, AOL Time Warner or National LambdaRail) you're still just putting together routers and switches that somebody else made.[3] And going into I.T. management is right out. That rules out most of the jobs that are at least moderately connected to what I'm already doing.

So what does sound interesting?

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[1] Yeah, I hear that's pretty rare in this line of work. In part this is because I'm primarily second-tier support; somebody else usually deals with the really stupid questions before the clients get passed off to me.

[2] One great thing about a field where so many people's degrees (if they even have one) are in unrelated fields is that they care more about what you know than how you did in school. (This probably deserves its own post....)

[3] ...and as far as I know, you still have to be on call in that kind of gig, which is the other thing I really dislike about my current job.