How do you decide what to work on?

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So, I work as a programmer. Until pretty recently I was working on machine learning, which is really fun and interesting. One thing I like about machine learning is - it's important (and fun!) to actually spend time with your data manually and understand it and look at individual things. But, ultimately, they did not hire me to do manual work! One week I remember thinking "right, my job is to build systems that accurately classify millions of things, not to look at those things manually." So the reason programmers sometimes get paid a lot of money, I think, is because we can build systems that

How do you decide what to work on?

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