Folks:
Please don't ever assume Intel software is the only place where there is misery. Far from it.
Ever since I left, I have heard many people with very similar complaints about many other new software companies.
It seems to me that whenever something is new software related, I am seeing more misery.
However, if it's non-new software (Fortran, Cobol, Lisp, good old Punchcard Programming); just about anything that is 'hands on' I see much less misery and griping.
There is one thing about new software that I did not realize until after I left. Much of software is 'hands off'. You're shackled to a monitor/keyboard/laptop/tablet and program to write multithreaded/complex network/embedded programs. It could be applications, operating system,. It's still software. With O/S getting more sophisticated, , we are becoming less of a hands-on software developers and more of an abstract architect/system engineers that are paid ridiculously $200k salaries, and we are operating more blind than we are in the past.
I remember days of early software. We were very much hands on. We were in a lab all the time creating our 500 lines of code on punchcards...and if there any syntax error or logic errors, we would be very hands on and spend the next week redoing everything by hand.. Compilation takes hours, sometimes days, rather than seconds..And those computers had a whopping 32kb of memory. It's hard to have a pesky memory leak problem when you only have 32kb to worry about!!! .And during that time, we could enjoy get fat by enjoying our nice cups of coffee and doughnuts for the entire of the week while our code compiled on machines that would occupy a floor of server racks today!!! Today, we can only get fat by enjoying out nice cups of coffee and doughnuts that must be gulped down in between make and gcc runs triggered by continuous integration, between each sprint.
Right now, I am doing old Atari 2600 and Commodore 64 equipment repairs. It's very much hands on and I am finding myself enjoying it far more than what I did in the current tech environment. I no longer have to deal with over engineered software things such as mutexes and semaphores, and complex network programing to send bits over the air. I have also met other burnt out old fart, outdated skilled "software guys" that while still insist in the 21st century Cobol and Fortran is still the best programming environment ever, nevertheless have jumped from these modern software to playing with 'ancient software' of flipping bits using punchcards and ticker tapes and loving the change.
So, lets not blame Intel software or think it's the worst. This is far from the truth. It's just the nature of the beast. Punchcards and ticker tapes!!!!