There is absolutely nothing about the incentives structure of for profit corporate business to care at all about the people actually doing the work, and in isolation they will do everything they can to eek every drop of productivity out of their employees they can.
Traditionally when switching jobs was less common employers would care more to maximize long term productivity over the short by not overworking people into mental illness but in todays regular turnover culture there is no long term incentives to bother with - put your employees to the grindstone and bleed them dry, then discard them for some new starry eyed ignorant youth.
Its the duty of society via collective bargaining (unions) or collective action (law) to reign in the predatory behavior of the profit motive but in the US (and thus most of the world due to US economic imperialism) that hasn't been happening or has been crippled for decades.
From my perspective I'd say that programmers, in general, have it pretty good, as jobs go.
That doesn't mean a programmer is going to be happy. You just might not be happier doing anything else, either, and you might even dislike it more. Imagine punching a clock, which is practically unheard of in the western software industry...
Punching in and out isn't so bad (I've done it), it's probably gone out of fashion because then people would get paid for all the hours they work :)
What seems wrong nowadays is how exploited workers are (and not just programmers).
Probably, probably not. Maybe you know people who went on to became multibillionaires, whereas you're still tinkering and broke. I feel like I missed so, so many boats, and am in no position to catch the next one even if I could recognise it.
What is old is new again...
> Still more significant, authority over the freewheeling brotherhood of programmers is slipping into the paws of administrators and managers -- who try to make the work of the programmers planned, measurable, uniform, and faceless. [0]
[0]: http://www.softpanorama.org/Articles/Ershov/aesthetics_and_t...
My experience with computers has been the same. That and music. I make it a major point to watch for flags of that kind of environment with any company I speak to.
I'm a realist and not every day can be the most fun ever—sometimes there's a bit of a grind—but it shouldn't be the default status. I would lose too much if they stopped being fun. I've had it happen once before and it took several years to find that fun feeling again. Life's too short for that.
The impact of a product on its users is also important—does it have a positive or negative impact on their wellbeing?
A business that creates negative happiness should be viewed just like one that creates negative cashflow.
I'd also prefer less "product" worship—but that's probably more personal, and a different sub-topic.
Given the subject matter and I happened to be listening to Avicii at the time, there was a particular resonance.
But take one look at the traffic jams in LA and you'll see a much different story. All of those people had dreams, I'm sure a good amount of them never predicted they'd be stuck in a job they hate but there they are, wasting their lives away in a car that's sitting there polluting the environment on their way to a job that they hate.
As a greybeard, messing with computers has always been fun for me. Yet somehow, slowly the system has morphed it into a way to grind talented people into the ground with impossible deadlines and insane demands - to the point where we need websites like this.