I agree there isn't a perception of them being an enjoyable place to work; I think that is more due to the fact that one isn't really encouraged to talk about it, and the most successful actively avoid the limelight! Now there are plenty of sweatshops out there, but there are also plenty of tech companies I wouldn't touch with a barge pool.

Many people, even at Google, will be writing coding that isn't The Product. Having spoken to people at such firms, and their competitors, there are plenty of dev jobs there that sound boring as all hell, alongside the fun ones.

Pushing money around does sound boring, just like "pushing web pages around" or "pushing 140 char messages around". yawn ;-) In the last 12 months I've worked on custom languages/compilers, custom databases, kernel hacking, oddball processors, little visualization hacks, and have a giant stack of as yet unreleased hardware piled up to experiment with. I get to program against millions of events per second with minimal latency, giant result data sets for batch work, and points on the spectrum in between. The data itself is finance related and it's fun to munge and experiment with trading algorithms on it.

So far I have, over time, swung between product companies and trading companies. Fun to be had on both sides, among many other places. Actually, one of the more surprising things I've learned over time is how little most programmers realize about the variety of fun things out there. And how conservative and fad following most programmers are, funnily enough.