I've seen this sentiment many times here on HN. I wonder, who are your customers exactly?

At one of my previous jobs, "my customers" were the managers of some company who asked managers of the company I worked in to deliver some software that will be sold as a part of a software package, to be used by someone downstream. I don't know who ended up using my work and how, because we were isolated by several abstraction layers from that. I did care about the happiness of those people, little I knew about them. But I couldn't care less about the happiness of our customers - a company I didn't hold in high regard, with managers not being particularly helpful. I suppose I did get some small sense of satisfaction when their managers told my managers that the work is good. But that was it.

So, are we talking about happiness of customers, or happiness of people actually using the product? Those are very often different groups. Or, in other words, are we talking about finding happiness in generalized servitude, or making people's lives better?

I was referring to people who were actually using the product. I've had a number of jobs in my life, including being in the services division of a product company and also in an internal consulting team of an extremely large non-tech company. I would typically interact directly with the people who are using what we were building. So I could see exactly what they needed and did not need (despite what they said they wanted) and manage that so they were happy with the end product.

I've also worked in situations you've described. My only interaction with the end user is through layers of middle management. I found that environment to be extremely demotivating and certainly no direct sense of satisfaction. One of the small benefits of being a Data Scientist right now is that a lot of managers don't really understand what it is I do so I get some interaction with the end-user from a requirements and solution validation standpoint. But I suspect in a few years Data Scientists will become invisible cogs (like everybody else) in the Enterprise IT machine.

Personally I work in the health tech space - specifically a pharmacy. Our customers are people who are able to get cheaper medications and better health help and pharmacy technicians who are more productive due to our software. The job is technically just Django/CRUD with some integrations, but the impact can be fulfilling.

I don't think you can get that kind of satisfaction in B2B software as a developer (only a salesperson/exec).