Programmers commonly express all of those and more on this website and it isn't considered unusual or even particularly demanding. It is treated as a truism that you can't possibly expect a programmer to tell you how long a project will take, for example.

This has nothing to do with people wanting "minimum discomfort". It is about crazy and obviously unrealistic expectations of work structure, where people are never expected to ever do anything, being promoted as some kind of baseline work environment.

There will never be a serious business that does those things. It is impossible to run a business if you pay staff but:

- cannot evaluate their quality before hiring them - cannot measure their work - cannot get an estimate out of them - cannot set them deadlines - cannot talk to them - cannot get them into the office - cannot talk to them in groups - cannot evaluate them over time - cannot lay then off

etc.

It is different from other occupations because nobody outside the HN/reddit bubble thinks any of this let alone all of it.

If you worked as a plumber and expected never to have to turn up on site, never to attend a site meeting, never to have to give an estimate of time or cost, never to have your work measured and evaluated, never to have to justify yourself in a performance evaluation, etc. you would be laughed out of the room.

A better comparison is probably professional services jobs: mostly done in offices with computers by university-educated people these days, like programming. I can't say I have met any that think they shouldn't have to give estimates or have meetings.