A few very successful companies made unimaginable amounts of money early on and established de facto monopolies or close to them. As a result they now continue

A few very successful companies made unimaginable amounts of money early on and established de facto monopolies or close to them. As a result they now continue to make unimaginable amounts of money almost independent of their performance from a user's perspective. That means they can also now spend unimaginable amounts of money hiring people, which distorts the natural relationships between performance and pay for people working in software development. Many people have come into this industry who are relatively young and inexperienced and don't really know what they're doing at all, yet expect to earn many times the average wage for someone in their demographic on day one and then to increase their income still further as they rapidly job-hop. Neither those people nor most of their peers or even most of their management teams have ever had to bootstrap a software product where the continued success of their employer depended on making something that users actually wanted to use and customers actually wanted to pay for. Many of them never work on the same software product for more than a year or two so they aren't evaluated on the long-term benefits of any work they do either. Instead the path to career success often involves high visibility, short-term projects. That brings to mind the old joke that something must always be done and this is something so we're doing it. Or some less flattering comments on modern corporate management and focussing on the next quarterly statement because that's what your astronomically large bonus depends on as CxO. In short, the reason user satisfaction is often a secondary concern if it's a concern at all in modern software is that a lot of the tech firms seen as highly successful and desirable places to work made stupidly large amounts of money early on and now the incentives for both the tech firms and their employees are heavily distorted because normal financial incentives just don't apply in this crazy little corner of the world.