Read some of the comments in this past thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27821392 to understand this better. I've also been working at this for well over 10 years and I do agree that overall this profession is draining. I often need 'hard resets' between jobs, it's hard to compartmentalize work and regular life when you brain is constantly thinking about 'the system'. I have experienced burnout a bunch of times. It's not pretty. Add the new trends of making devs do oncall because frankly everything is online, tech interviews becoming the coding Olympics, the incentive structure in an organization making people cut corners or backstab coworkers to get ahead, it's not hard to understand how someone would consider the profession draining. This is from the perspective of someone who worked both in small and big corps on the west coast.
Comfort doesn't have a lot to do with burnout or job satisfaction unless you're coming from a blue collar mostly manual job.
> many of us got into simply because it was a fun and engaging thing to do
That's one of the problems. For a lot of folks, it was exactly that 'was a fun and engaging thing to do' and then you get do it in the context of office politics, tight deadlines, need to sacrifice professional ethics and ship something half-assed because that's what the business needs, etc.. These things, repeatedly chip away at your happiness. Would you be more unhappy without the ergonomic equipment and all of that? Most likely yes. But ping-pong tables and the unlimited vacation (which is at the discretion of your manager anyway) doesn't always compensate for shit work or the nervous breakdown from having to sit on an incident bridge for 4 hours...
I need to admit, I love my job and I love this profession. But I do understand when people say it's draining.
Oncall is somewhat unique, and that can be tough, but if it's particularly rough and there is nothing you can do to improve it that's a good sign to find another company (or perhaps another specialization within programming) because it doesn't need to be that way. Incident response is mostly a self-imposed stress, and I've found it to be something that you can learn to manage better and not let it affect you so much, by being prepared with good playbooks, as well as accepting that it's not the end of the world and that all you can do is try your best.
I'm not denying that life itself can be draining. Working any type of office job can be draining. I just don't see how programming is particularly more draining than all the other jobs people do.
Comfort doesn't have a lot to do with burnout or job satisfaction unless you're coming from a blue collar mostly manual job.
> many of us got into simply because it was a fun and engaging thing to do
That's one of the problems. For a lot of folks, it was exactly that 'was a fun and engaging thing to do' and then you get do it in the context of office politics, tight deadlines, need to sacrifice professional ethics and ship something half-assed because that's what the business needs, etc.. These things, repeatedly chip away at your happiness. Would you be more unhappy without the ergonomic equipment and all of that? Most likely yes. But ping-pong tables and the unlimited vacation (which is at the discretion of your manager anyway) doesn't always compensate for shit work or the nervous breakdown from having to sit on an incident bridge for 4 hours...
I need to admit, I love my job and I love this profession. But I do understand when people say it's draining.