New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Honestly did programming jobs always sucked so hard?

Ask HN: Honestly did programming jobs always sucked so hard?
3 by lifeplusplus | 2 comments on Hacker News.
I know that's a loaded question, I need to know. I've been a dev for 7ish year. At one point I was REAALLY into it, I wanted to freaking master it. Conceive the best code architecture, learn from experts, and do everything to write code that would be efficient and so great that next person would just send me gift cards out of gratitude. To code, was to write poetry but such that it was remarkably accessible. Breaking complex problems into stupidly simple poetry felt like an art. But even during that phase I realized real world isn't gonna be me writing everything from scratch but I was ok with that compromise as long as I got some time to do great things and got paid. Now I feel completely disillusioned with the field, I need to know if it's due to field becoming completely trash or me misjudging what 9-5 was gonna be like. At first I said to myself, I'm jr so it'll get better. I'm lead now, it didn't get better. Avg day: Get ticket written by dispassionate PM about something irrelevant and outdated base, write 30 tests, debug it for days, push changes, get handed another equally useless set of tickets. Repeat for a year, get promotion or find new job, then repeat again. Why are there so many PMs? Why agile/scrum is even a thing? What's with infinite tests? Why so much code is being written to do so little? If you have been a dev for 12+ years, please tell me am I right in thinking that programming as a job has become very labrious and boring, processes driven and needlessly complex?