Kids, I hate to break it to you, but there is no such thing as magic.
The cool whizzy stuff on your screen that impresses you: that’s the result of work. The button that was broken yesterday, that now works correctly today: also the product of work. The screen that was discussed in a meeting last week that suddenly appeared today on the development server: yup, work. When you look for a feature in the web application and it isn’t there, there’s this thing that can create it and put it there: it’s called work.
Someday we’ll all get over the mystifying aura of technology. Someday people will learn to recognize that programmers are not magicians, just workers, and that the work they do involves mundane, non-magical tasks, like wrestling with code libraries and frameworks to get them to do what we want, reorganizing files to make sure stuff exists in sensible places, and figuring out what to do when changing one piece affects three other pieces in unexpected ways.
And this means, someday, people will understand that, like any other kind of work, software development takes resources (namely, time!), not a magic wand. And no amount of “ambition” (read: wishful thinking) can really change that basic equation. You can pretend magic exists, but that doesn’t make it so. You aren’t fooling anyone. You just look childish.
When software development is recognized as work, there can be clarity about what is possible with a given set of resources. Then tasks can be sanely identified, specified, prioritized, coordinated, scheduled, executed, completed.
And then some really cool things can happen. Not magical things, but really cool things. Great things, even. The kind of great things that result from understanding, dedication, and hard work.