I had a period in the early 10's where I worked with a lot of startups and it made me very cynical (though it could be said that that's more or less my default anyway); it was clear to me early on that most of them were just a retread of someone else's big idea (social network site for animators back when MySpace was fading and Facebook was booming is one that comes to mind that I actually encountered, though I tend to abbreviate this sort of thing as "Uber for dog massages" after someone's sarcastic comment I read). The goal seemed to be for founders to live the startup lifestyle by siphoning money from some VC or other. Obviously the money was a big motivater, but I also got the sense that a lot of it was a sort of status game - people wanted to be viewed as the visionary leader and be showered with attention for it, but they just didn't have real breakthroughs to bring to the table.

One thing that I often see when I look at these companies is that we’ve reached a point where we don’t really need everyone to work 40+ per week.

But, the people with money are willing to spend a mint to make sure that the most capable are working 50-60+ and that it looks like we are at full employment.

It’s not any one person, it systemic. But it’s a whole farse where programmers are so efficient that rich people are using them to suck value out of the economy in a way that returns very little value.

On the other hand there’s systems control programming and stuff that interacts with the physical world that returns incredible value, but there really aren’t enough of those jobs for the programmers we have and they don’t rent to pay big tech salaries.