This post is aimed mostly at beginners like me, except that I've been at it for 4 years, and still don't feel like I got the grasp of things.
Bottom Line: these days I found a really good program: Sunshine, and I loved it to death. They have 34k stars on Github and it's mostly related to networking. I've been picking up networking programming in C lately and I can't ever imagining myself being able to build something as good as that, that can transfer video data so perfectly.
The only programs I can build without bugs or that doesn't end up being a disaster are these super simple ones.
Also, at my workplace, I'm the worst dev, earn the least between all my coworkers, and I'm the only one without a degree. The only reason why I managed to get in was because I was 16 back then and they wanted a young dev that knew how to do some C#.
These past ~1.5 years I've quit programming hard due to being busy with C# at work and mental health stuff that I began fixing this year. I've gotten back lately and I'm looking up to learning much more intensively now that I'm finally feeling better, and see if this feeling of "never writing any big or useful" goes away.
TL;DR: DAE feel the way I feel? Like they will never be more than a code monkey despite being programming for quite some time?