The core problem is probably the servant attitude: "I will do my best, and hope that my master will notice! And if he doesn't, then I will work even harder to show what a good servant I am!"
No. They're not servants, they're craftsmen, and foolishly expect to be judged and rewarded base on the quality of their craft.
They won’t fall into “love of the craft” delusions when “the craft” doesn’t love them back.
More than anyone in a corporation, they refuse to serve, particularly where it really counts, like lying for the boss.
They don't know what service is. Service to a predator is helping him predate and protecting him from other predators, not producing value for the organization as a whole. Producing value for the organization! Ha! What kind or moron cares about that?
A famous book, Moral Mazes, came out of an anthropologist doing field work with the corporate manager savages, to see what they're like.
La Wik
The very ambiguity of their work and its assessment leads to the feeling on the part of the managers Jackall interviewed that "instead of ability, talent, and dedicated service to an organization, politics, adroit talk, luck, connections, and self-promotion are the real sorters of people into sheep and goats" (Moral Mazes, page 1).
and it creates subtle measures of prestige and an elaborate status hierarchy that, in addition to fostering an intense competition for status, also makes the rules, procedures, social contexts, and protocol of an organization paramount psychological and behavioral guides." (Moral Mazes, page 4).
Basically, a corporation is a royal court, where everyone who knows what they're doing is looking up to see how they're pleasing their Master, looking to please other potential Masters, and looking after their own power and status, while the morons "get work done".
programmers lower their status as a group.
While the programmers compete against each other based on craft, the predators look after the status and power of their group.
This reminds me of an article I read once and probably couldn't google now; about how "being a professional" means different things for different professions (radically different, from the status point of view).
The examples used were lawyers and teachers. Both professions have people who try to present themselves as professionals, but they do it differently. When a lawyer says "I am a professional", they mean they do they work well and they demand appropriate compensation. When a teacher says "I am a professional", they mean t...
Here is an interesting blog post about a guy who did a resume experiment between two positions which he argues are by experience identical, but occupy different "social status" positions in tech: A software engineer and a data manager.
The author concludes that positions that are labeled as code-monkey-like are low status, while positions that are labeled as managerial are high status. Even if they are "essentially" doing the same sort of work.
Not sure about this methodology, but it's food for thought.