I love that you're fighting the good fight, but to these people who run things, code is in fact a commodity and so is the person producing it. From the owner's perspective you buy coders low, you maximize their output and sell it high, accumulate the difference, and repeat. If you're a more liberal owner, you buy them free lunches and build up a "culture", let them wear sandals, send them to conferences, tell them they're not little units to be counted, but at the end of the day these pretty lies are just costs -- costs, which may or may not yield profit over the long run.

As a coder, and somebody who loves the craft and identifies strongly with it, I "disagree" with this relationship ( as much as that is possible, since nobody asked me to vote on it or anything ) and I think it is dehumanizing. But wishing it away or romanticizing what we do, avoiding the fact that we are commodities just like every other worker in a corporate enterprise is just a terrible strategy for overcoming it.

I like what the guys at http://www.bettermeans.com are doing with the open enterprise governance model. I don't want human activity to continue the process of commodification, and this is a big step taken to change course.