Sure, but this is just my opinion.

Part of it is what diarrhea said in a sibling response: Having minimal meaningful human interaction. Scrum meetings with your owners and such don't really count. If anything, those are worse than not having social interactions, lol. We're cloistered plumbers working in the dark crevices of systems most people don't want to touch or know about, and it's pretty much always a conversation killer to tell regular people outside of tech bubbles that you're a programmer.

But more than that, often our work is itself devoid of purpose or meaning. We make ad tech and crypto and marketing pages for these big soulless corporations that only enrich a few shareholders, often at the expense of everyone else and sometimes society and democracy itself. I don't think Meta, Twitter, etc. are a net good for humanity. Maaaaaybe Netflix and Google are arguably less evil to some degree, but even that's debatable. And that's just the products and services they make, not even counting the knock-on effects of tech bubbles killing livability across the USA, for example.

My first tech experience was as an intern, and the anti-spam startup I worked for in the early 2000s decided to sell their tech to the Chinese government to censor dissidents instead. I noped the heck out of there and tried to stay away from evil tech since then, instead working for small solar businesses and nonprofits. But even then, I'm under no illusion that I'm any sort of rebel, rather, just someone living on the fringes and feeding off the leftovers. All my work is still directly developed by Google (Analytics, GCP, etc.), Meta (React and FB ads), AWS, etc. -- the same companies that make their billions exploiting people.

At the end of the day I think it's just run-of-the-mill capitalism, not that dissimilar from bankers, railroad barons, newspaper owners, mine owners, whatever... profit-driven and rent-seeking overlords that always put their own interests ahead of society's.

It's a very different world than people who work in civil service, or as a professor or a rural teacher, or a nurse, or a dentist, or even a civil engineering, etc.

Not only is it often a lonely and asocial job, it's also often an anti-social job that actively makes society worse in order to enrich a few people.

I know it's not a popular opinion since this is a community of startup entrepreneurs, after all, but it's the hacker side of things that interested me at first. Big tech killed little tech, and I think it's also making our lives worse, offering more convenience at the expense of community. I often miss the pre-smartphone, pre-Amazon era when you'd still have to go out and interact with people and get to know them, instead of just WFH and getting everything delivered, for example. I often yearn of moving to less capitalist societies whose cities and towns are more walkable, more local, and generally more intimate.

After twenty years of doing dev work, I feel like my impact on the world has been exactly zero, or maybe slightly negative, lol, and I can't wait to find another career. (Working on going back to school).

But again, that's just me. Maybe someone like Sam Altman can look back in two decades and think "wow, we really changed the future of humanity for the better, huh?" Or not. We'll see, lol.