There are good employers out there, reject the trash and advocate for your self-worth.
My theory is, if you are not desperate for money and the job market is reasonably good - go into the later interview with specific probing questions about their processes and policies. They might reject you as being "not a team player" or whatever - but if they do then its probably not where you want to work anyway.
If you experience that type of treatment in Seattle, NYC, SF, etc you should quit immediately. That is not the norm and you don't have to put up with it. For everyone else, maybe remote gigs? People are killing each other for great devs in the biggest tech markets and most companies know they have to take care of employee happiness and culture to be competitive in hiring.
Well, if that’s true, there’s only one conclusion that the abused/unappreciated can draw: they (we) must not be that great.
Well, here’s the thing about that: if I measure myself against the expectations that are being put on me, I’m orders of magnitude short. Compared to the expectations put on everybody who carries the title “programmer”, I’m not even qualified to be in the same room as one. But who’s setting those expectations? Not other programmers. Certainly not anybody who could walk over, roll up their sleeves and say, “See? Here’s how easy it is. Just do it like that next time.” No, these expectations come from “project management professionals” who cringe at the thought of typing a formula in to Excel. These expectations come from people who attended a two-week seminar on managing programmer “resources” and whose sole contribution to the practice of developing software is asking “are you done yet? Why not? Are you the one who’s stupid, or is it somebody else who’s stupid?”
> half the developers I have worked with are more capable than me
Really, though, how do you measure that? If you have the self-awareness and humility to consider that it’s possible that somebody might be better than you, you also have the introspective capability to improve - which makes you better than a lot of the people out there.