> That is what professional programming is like. You don’t care about the goal to begin with, it doesn’t have any noticeable effect on the world once each Jira ticket moves over to the Done column, and you don’t have any ownership over the finished product. You just wait for the next Jira ticket.
Sure, there are jobs like this, but it's super weird to claim that all programming jobs are like this.
Just.. don't work those jobs! Find real jobs at real companies making real products for real people. Don't stay at a job where all your work ends up in a black hole of nothingness until you burn out. The burnout means you quit too late.
I'm not saying it's easy to find programming jobs that cure cancer, fix climate change or cause world peace, but it's really not that hard to find programming jobs where what you make is used by real people and if you make the thing you make better, these real people will tell you that they're happy that it's now better (and, immediately after, what else needs fixing). This can be all the way from super challenging computer sciency shit to line-of-business CRUD app coding at a small shop in a mid size provincial town for regional customers. It exists everywhere.
ps. Personal context: Articles like these mildly offend me because I run a company and we try very hard to make everybody's time at the company worth their while. The suggestion that business owners like me do not exist hits hard. In fact, we are many. There's plenty bosses and entrepreneurs and managers out there who realize that the more motivated and involved and happy team members are, the better their work will be. Also being the boss of stressed out burned-out programmers sounds like hell to me. I'd much rather run a team of enthusiastic self-starters! Incentives are, actually, pretty aligned (happy people = great results) and companies where they're not are just, in my humble opinion, badly run companies. Don't work there.