While I would much rather write code in our modern environment and with modern tools, I think programming as a profession is getting more unpleasant due to much

While I would much rather write code in our modern environment and with modern tools, I think programming as a profession is getting more unpleasant due to much higher expectations and lower development budgets, and because a software developer's time is increasingly taken up by (usually necessary) non-programming tasks. I suppose that's one reason why creating a startup is so attractive to software developers; it's a means by which productivity improvements work for them by allowing them keep more of the wealth they create, instead of against them by setting a higher and higher productivity bar that must be met each year just to keep the same job.