How do you know that they "continue to be the rule rather than the exception"? Have you done a statistically valid survey of programmers working or seeking work

How do you know that they "continue to be the rule rather than the exception"? Have you done a statistically valid survey of programmers working or seeking work and what their working conditions are? If you are forming an opinion based on articles that come to your attention, then you are getting a highly biased view of the world. Nobody writes articles about how their programming job is great, everything is fine, and they're treated with respect and paid well. If anybody did, they wouldn't be upvoted or shared on news-sharing sites. Due to this, you'll basically never see or hear about people who are happy and doing well. Only stories about things that seem outrageous get written and shared. There are probably hundreds of thousands of people working as full-time programmers in the US alone. It only takes maybe like 5 stories a year making it into your reading to shape an opinion. But one-sided stories from 5/100,000 = 0.005% of the population don't reflect reality. Have any of these stories even been investigated to see what other people involved in the situation think? It's fairly common for horror stories to be exaggerated and to leave out equally poor behavior by the author. Some may be entirely made up in an attempt to get karma or fame or to trash somebody they have a grudge against for some other reason. Not in every case for sure, but it's common enough that you shouldn't just take such stories at face-value. If the vast majority of working programmers on here tell you that it's a seller's market and treatment and pay is generally very good, that's a lot more likely to reflect reality than a trickle of one-sided horror stories that go viral. Just in my personal experience, I've worked with hundreds of other professional programmers, and never seen anyone be mistreated in such severe ways. Everyone I know has been quite comfortable with quitting for reasons like not liking the culture enough or not getting big enough raises fast enough, and everyone who has will have another offer for work in hand already before they actually quit.