This makes me wonder if finding a low-key, sane culture is the key to sustainability in the industry, and avoiding burn out. They are exceedingly rar

This makes me wonder if finding a low-key, sane culture is the key to sustainability in the industry, and avoiding burn out. They are exceedingly rare. The only way these can really exist is within a small bootstrapped (self-funded) venture or perhaps within an open source project that has both autonomy and outside funding. The paradoxical nature of commercial software development is that the entire fucking industry is a contradictory anti-pattern. What most of us would consider "good engineering" (elegant, maintainable code that is correct, maintainable, and relatively resistant to bit rot) is explicitly at odds with nearly every commercial software development situation. Management wants you to be visibly "working" at all times, cranking out tasks/stories/code/whatever. So you are explicitly discouraged from writing code that "just works" and doesn't need constant heroic fixing. If you get it right the first time, and kick back and relax, they'll think you're a lazy piece of crap. Even if you work for a place that "gets it" from an engineering perspective, they are almost always going to look at your relatively high salary and want you to constantly produce new things. And once you have multiple levels of management, you can absolutely forget about them "getting it" -- a manager two levels above you can't be intimately involved enough in your code to understand when you are writing shit code and when you are writing true 10x code that will save countless hours of headaches in the future.