They are better than average technically, but their social skills fail them. Which in a paid employment situation carries a lot of weight.
I feel sorry for these guys
Just don't get yourself in such a situation and you'll do fine :)
I've only been an employee at the start of my adult life for 3 years at a small software outsourcing agency. Been gaining a steady 20x the median salary for my city for the past 12 years since I've abandoned "employment". Can't say I'm particulary smart. I'm closer to Dumb and Dumber than Rainman. I just ignore opinions of other people or entities and go my own way.
Nonsense. John Carmack is the most obvious counterexample. But pretty much anyone that works in gaming.
While the stories of resentment of specific employers abound — your general thesis is nonsense.
The intersection of the sets of developers who:
A) make it to their 40s and are still IC's
B) still work > 40hrs/wk on a startup for little-to-no-pay
C) are still happy and enjoying themselves
Is small. It's not empty though!
But I do think there are many people who think this is the ideal way to live or something they ought to strive for. And the set of people who try and realize later in life that was not what they should have been working towards do tend to burnout and have regrets.
It happens a lot to people who want to be famous. They don't think about what they would have to give up to get it: some measure of your health in later life (hello carpal tunnel, frequent recurring hemorrhoids, type-2 diabetes, heart disease, poor vision, etc), friends and relationships (read enough biographies and loneliness is a recurring theme) -- things they might take for granted. There are stories from people who did make it and became famous and wish they hadn't. There are more of those than the, "I wouldn't have given this up for the world," types I think.
Grass is always greener on the other side, as they say.
Update: also, Carmack hasn't been working at a startup since he took the golden parachute out of Id and could afford to build rockets as a hobby.
It stands for, Individual Contributor, and means "a programmer whose only responsibility is to contribute to the code."
Game dev is packed full of young people and regret, burnout, resentment, and depression are perennial reasons that people state when they leave the industry in their late twenties and early thirties. Game dev is the canonical example supporting this thesis.
Yes, there are certainly exceptions, but as a broad comment, it aligns very strongly with what I've seen among many many programmers both in games and out. It's very hard to make the kind of sacrifices that lead one to spend insane hours programming. Some people do that because they just straight up love it so much. But most also have mixed with that some other harmful psychological motivations: a need to prove themselves, compulsive perfectionism, escapism, feeling that they are only worth as much as they produce, etc. If you just give into those instead of addressing them, the end result is often, well, deep regret, burnout, resentment, and depression.