They believed themselves capable of great things, so they rationalized that their current jobs must be satisfying already.
I believe exactly the opposite...
We believe we are capable of great things because we are so used to looking good by delivering great software in environments where there isn't any.
Then we see all the cool things others are doing right out in the open and wonder why we spend all day on fixing bugs on horrible enterprise software, sitting in meetings, and taking direction from idiots.
Being the one-eyed man in the land of the blind may make you look good, but it is hardly "satisfying".
A significant amount of software stinks. The enterprise vendors are almost magical in their ability to extract dollars from their customer base.
I believe that many of the one-eyed men are starting to wake up to the power of the tools in front of them and ponder how they can deliver significantly more value in small startups than they do "fixing bugs on horrible enterprise software."
While great is perhaps too strong an adjective, we are capable of great things because we deliver great software in environments where there isn't any. Who else is doing it?
There is probably a huge shake-out coming in the average programmer's world. The big vendors seem increasing irrelevant except for their stranglehold on sales channels. Once we hack that (and some on this forum have or are well on their way) . . .
I've come to think that the state of Enterprise software is the direct result of large corporate structure.
Every single success story of swapping out a horrible enterprise piece with a Really Good replacement seems to have, as an integral part of its legend, the skillful subversion of the corporation's natural tendencies until deployment -- and an epilogue that notes political bad feelings remain, despite the results.
It truly seems that Good Software is only something that can happen despite corporate structure and never, ever because of it.
I suppose it shouldn't have been a surprise. I think we've all come to accept that individual efficiency is inversely related to company size (beyond some critical threshold). And when you look at why, you start seeing an awful lot of cross-over with the root causes of corporate software project failures. (political nonsense, perverted incentives, cog interchangeability concerns, liability concerns, etc)
I believe exactly the opposite...
We believe we are capable of great things because we are so used to looking good by delivering great software in environments where there isn't any.
Then we see all the cool things others are doing right out in the open and wonder why we spend all day on fixing bugs on horrible enterprise software, sitting in meetings, and taking direction from idiots.
Being the one-eyed man in the land of the blind may make you look good, but it is hardly "satisfying".