> very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product
Right. Why is this getting harder to find? Engineers are feeling like their labor is increasingly becoming unimpactful vaporware; their work life is increasingly subject to the whims of nontechnical people; product complexity is going beyond the amount that's just natural in software and getting disproportionately bad.
It's because the market is driving people to the software world like tourists to a national park that's gone viral on social media. The mass of people trying to make a buck off software are unknowingly degrading it. The park's land is still good - just a little too good for its own good.
As long as software makes it easier to reach many eyeballs and wallets at once (which is "always") people will flock to it. What's less inevitable is what makes fluff and snake oil rampant in other industries, like health: a deadly combo of unbridled capitalism and masses of uneducated people.
This makes people, including many software engineers themselves, view software engineers as natural resources you can just endlessly extract from, instead of people with biological limits and dreams of making cool things with their hands.
The remedy to this - people democratically owning the means of production, and providing each other with reliably good schooling - might seem like a pie-in-the-sky idea but will be common sense in 100 years if we're still around.