You are right. It's the society and the market that rewards such situations. The ugly sweater startup makes millions but the charity fundraising you mentioned will probably fail. Because one would prefer to look out of fashionly grandma-like cool (?) than help someone else. It's a problem of education in the broad sense, and I don't know, overcoming our natural impulses for egoism, greed and fear ? Sound like clichés but I belive they are at the heart of our problems as a whole.
You make it sound like developers are not one of the privileged classes in this world, that they can't make money easier and accumulate more of it with less physical, psychological and emotional degradation than the vast majority of the world. That they might "only" be in the top 10% instead of the top 1% does not make it less true.
No one in the top 10% has any business complaining except about the condition of the bottom 50%, and then they should be doing something about it, as 7_7 suggests.
I think you're incorrect about this. I think you aren't counting the mental and emotional toll of working on projects that get arbitrarily shitcanned, or working 120-hour weeks because you think you'll be the king of the roach bucket because your investors said so, or the constant dehumanization of "You are programmer beep boop why can't you just make this business concept work?".
As far as physical hardship, look at all the folks with carpal tunnel syndrome, obesity, diabetes, bad backs from slouching, or any of the other issues endemic to white-collar long-hour development work.
And for all that, we're still probably just going to be me, complaining about the working conditions and things that suck, and you, dismissing those same issues because some Kazak iron worker works in a dangerous foundry. This is stupid.
No one in the top 10% has any business complaining except about the condition of the bottom 50%,
See, this line of thinking expands easily: "Nobody in the top 30% has any valid complaint, except..."
Suffering is suffering. Handcuffs are handcuffs, golden or not. Abuse is abuse, whether it is from a shitty founder or a shitty secret policeman. Being underpaid is being underpaid, whether it's by one dollar or a hundred thousand.
Your line only suits the super-rich, and is a great appeal to guilt to help people ignore how much they're getting shafted.
EDIT:
So, again, not a single act of self-abasement or renouncing of privilege is going to do anything to help those truly in need. Face facts: there's not enough room in the clubhouse for everyone, and we don't help ourselves by voluntarily standing outside, unless it's with torches.
These aren't problems inherent in the profession. Not every white-collar worker is fat with diabetes. Plenty of developers find time to work out and take care of themselves, and being part of this 10% affords them the luxury to get a gym membership or buy healthy food.
This is very different than someone who puts in grueling hours of manual labor or makes a wage that puts them below the poverty line, forcing them to eat cheap, unhealthy food every day.
Or, you know, where the folks are so buried in loan and student debt that are effectively below the poverty line, but they just get to claim a nicer cell. They're no more free than your blue-collar folks.
If all you do is code and sleep, then your notion of 'stress' is entirely tied up in what it's like to be sitting in front of the monitor.
While that can truly be very stressful, it always seems like the people who don't get as upset at work run, or hike, or swim, or are musicians on the weekend.
For a long time I thought that meant "If you're put together well enough you have energy left on the weekends." but eventually I decided if I waited until I was put together then I'd be infirm at an early age, so I just started doing things.
Now I think it's the people who have extracurricular activities that are more put together than the other way around. They have a more diverse definition for the word 'adversity' and things don't bother them as much.
There are companies every day trying to genuinely make the world a better place, like the healthcare IT one that I work for, trying to open up a Steam-like platform to do signal processing in hospitals. Or the not one but two charity fundraising startups bootstrapping in my city. Or the test-grading automation startup in Dallas.
And yet, because these companies aren't within walking distance of the Valley VCs, and because they are sometimes tackling industry problems that take more than a year to close a basic deal on (seriously, fuck hospital invoicing and billing), they have enormous trouble getting out of the valley of startup death because no funding available that permits easy growth. And because the local VCs in these cities are looking for easy deals, they just fly over for their day trips to the coast, and ignore what's in their own backyards.
So, for fuck's sake, let's not complain about the developers who are trying to eke out a living--let's instead take a long, hard look at the market and society that rewards them, and understand that that is the root of the problem.
EDIT: Minor clarification in paragraph two.