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.