I would wholeheartedly agree with that. Developers don't talk about enabling people or making lives better anymore, they don't talk about helping people work more efficiently or use their computer more effectively. Developers treat their users like cattle now. They addict them and herd them and farm their eyeballs for ad-revenue. They don't program to make the world a better place, they program because it's a fun way to make entirely too much money at their favorite hobby: reinventing and overcomplicating the wheel.

To be fair, the user profile also changed a lot over the years. What used to be a 'programmer for power user' space, now it's all about minimalism and pretty, dysfunctional interfaces. I can see why one would become jaded and separate themselves from users.

Also another problem that doesn't seem to be talked about a lot is that way too often, the stake holders and the developers have nothing in common with the end user.

As I see it, it's plain and simple: companies want to make all the money in the world at any cost. This "growth" is how they measure their success among each other. But caring for their users and treating them as adults with agency doesn't earn as much as manipulating them into doing something they never intended. And this manipulation drives the ongoing dumbing down of everything. Back in the day, if you were annoyed by something in a piece of software, you went looking for a setting to make it your way, and more often than not, you found and changed it. No more.

Apple in particular is a good example here. They used to position themselves as a company that makes great tools that empower people. But now they're putting their own agenda, and, conveniently, bottom line, before that. That's how we end up with endless redesigns of things that worked perfectly fine for everyone (e.g. safari).

I'm sick of this bullshit. I always push back against managers or leads who're trying to get in a feature that users won't like, or will find confusing. And I'm not the only one. Not every programmer works for the surveillance-industrial complex.

That's what I did at VK too. At some point though my opinion just stopped being respected because by then developers were demoted to mere translators from human to computer language.

Runtime efficiency is just one consideration to be balanced against others. Maybe you would have an easier time getting a job if you would accept the new stuff and be willing to compromise on runtime efficiency so your team could crank out more features and more quickly meet its business goals. Note: the issue isn't your individual productivity; being willing to go along with the pack has its own advantages.

> meet its business goals

I don't want to work at a place that has "business goals". I don't want to work on a proprietary product either. I just want to use my skills to make the world a better place, and moving money around ain't that. I don't want to participate in the rat race or help it in any shape or form.

Having business goals isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's possible to develop a good product that improves the lives of its users, while compromising on some things so the business can sell the product before it runs out of money. The money from those sales can then be used to fund more worthwhile work. It may be hard to find a position at a company that lives up to that ideal, but it's possible. I believe my cofounder and I are trying to do that with our bootstrapped company (but we're not currently hiring). You have to be willing to compromise on some ideals though; I struggle with that myself.

Your unprovoked comment about not having a job read like you were desiring one.

I am indeed desiring one, but I'm too picky. And it's not for the money, but rather mostly for socialization (I'm lonely af). Maybe I'd work at a startup, but there aren't many of those that would want an open-source app, and there are even fewer that do something legitimately useful instead of inventing a problem and then heroically solving it.

I worked at VKontakte (Russian social network) and was the only Android developer for several years. It was amazing when Pavel Durov was still the CEO. I was living the dream. It all went downhill form there when it was acquired by mail.ru group and I had to quit because it started feeling like an abusive relationship. My app being closed-source didn't help either.

Then was Telegram. Same Pavel, mostly same team, but the tasks were much more ambitious, and the product itself much more complex and internally intertwined (every single update touches the chat screen, which in the Android app is more than a megabyte of pure Java). I did the VoIP library from scratch. In hindsight, this certainly isn't a one-person endeavor, but I didn't know any better. So, yeah, eventually, but very unexpectedly, I was fired by that same person who I was a huge fan of for so many years. The reasoning was that "our calls are shit". Apparently I was supposed to write code that didn't contain bugs and just "test it myself". Oh all those foolish other companies having QAs, right?

I have no idea where to go now. I want my 2011 back. I want to be passionate about something again.

I would suggest the crypto industry, specifically DeFi. Reasoning:

* It's (mostly) all open-source.

* It's self-directed. Don't like a team? There are a dozen others waiting scrambling for developers that you can join with no bureaucracy nonsense. Want to work alone? The tools are mostly mature enough that you can release products as a one man team.

* You seem to have disinterest or even aversion towards money, from its role in tricking people into mindless jobs. DeFi is about the roots of what money is, voluntary transfer of value between people, which is something I think everybody can agree is fundamentally good.

* You can have a huge impact.

To be honest, I don't really believe in crypto. All the blockchain stuff is mostly solutions looking for problems. And, after all these years, cryptocurrencies still haven't replaced regular money. I still can't buy a coffee with bitcoin. There were numerous efforts to create such a cryptocurrency, but they've all failed — because governments aren't letting go of the control they have over everything, and they have the necessary physical force to enforce these views. Currently, all I see about cryptocurrencies, is people mostly using them for trading or see them as an investment. Sometimes they buy drugs with them. And that's really it.

Though, yes, if I wanted easy money, I could go work at such a company. Or I could as well go to a FAANG-ish megacorp and earn craploads by working an hour a day.

There is a place where "a visionary founder with technical ability and clear view of the UI they want" no longer aligns with what we can provide. It can turn into a soul-destroying farce just like a "growing company admits as many middle-managers as there are designers/engineers" simply because The Visionary woke up one day and decided that "this UI we have is shit". Combine it with the Russian approach to "find the closest person responsible and punish them the hardest way possible" and you get the setup you have described.

Be very careful when putting your trust in visionaries.