> i've never worked for any software company that "wasn't about the users"

Startups are going to tend to have devs focused on users and "quality is everyone's job" etc. In fact, you should never hear the phrase "that's someone else's job" in a startup.

Big corp jobs, especially at non-software companies will tend to treat people as isolated cogs in the big machine, a machine you're told by everyone is "someone else's job" to understand and steer.

The article isn't dishonest. It's that the experience of "being a programmer" varies very widely. Our field has no professional standards.