I have a lot of respect and admiration for many programmers (I'm not one), but I'm genuinely troubled hearing some of the stories of people in this thread grinding jobs to a Nx times payout and a miserable endgame. Let me be clear I don't think this is true of most programmers. But it seems part of the software industry is following the history of the financial industry (and of course those two are intertwined going back decades) and I don't think this bodes well for society overall.