I used to agree with you but now I'm not so sure. My uncle works in health care and had the same experience as me. He hated his old job, switched to a new one

I used to agree with you but now I'm not so sure. My uncle works in health care and had the same experience as me. He hated his old job, switched to a new one - is performing the same work, same hours, but the change in practice environment (better co-workers and more flexible scheduling) improved his attitude similar to mine, and now he's happy to keep working for another decade or so. It wasn't the hours he hated but certain toxic environmental factors (inflexible scheduling, overhead and bureaucracy). I have heard similar things from folks in other industries. Look at taxi drivers. From what I hear, it really sucked to work for medallion owners - you paid a flat weekly rate, and felt like you had to work 7 days a week or were losing money - and if you took a few weeks off (without paying the rate), you lost your grandfathered position in line. You worked for 12 hour shifts. Now with Uber, you can clock in and clock out whenever you want. No boss yelling at you because he is having a bad day and wants to roll the shit down hill. Same amount of work, same amount of money, but much happier drivers from what I can tell due to that autonomy and flexibility. Software is an awesome field with a lot of benefits that others don't enjoy but my sense is that there are a lot of fields within which you could increase quality of work life happiness by increasing autonomy and flexibility. Increased autonomy and flexibility, enabled by technology, if not a free lunch, might at least be a very, very cheap one. Whether large employers have an incentive to explore this or not (before some technology disruption forces them to) is another question.