Young people get told that building tech and software is a creative endeavour where they can apply their innate passion. Certain kinds of minds get attracted to work that is based on symbols and abstraction and repetitive activities. Years pass and the shareholders get fat.
The truth is that software development is almost entirely an economic activity, and an extractive one at that. The working environment is certainly better than mining gold or bauxite, but almost all of us are hacking code out of the code-face merely to enrich other people: the people with the corner offices, and the people above them with the yachts. Those people don't care about what we do, or our pretentiona about it being an art or a craft, or what we think is important. And in fact they mostly think we're losers for wasting our time doing it [1]. Some of these people have pretty much told me this to my face.
Other posters here are correct that the underlying error is looking for meaning in (corporate) work. But people need meaning, and we have to expend so much of our only lives working, that there can be few alternatives. I don't have any answers to that.
[1] https://ribbonfarm.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/20...