Employees want things like work/life balance, meaning and fulfillment, a sense of progression and variety, respect, and good coworkers in addition to the basics like a decent income, good health insurance, and 401(k) matching.

Employers, in addition to getting the work at hand done well and on time, want predictability (a sprint velocity, story cycle time, and other metrics used to forecast feature delivery; job descriptions and promotion paths), threading the needle between disagreeing where needed and antagonizing people, getting some larger return on their investment on the employee (more work, more career growth).

None of these things are specific to software engineering, though.

There are some long-time phenomena and some trends that have accelerated in recent years, though, that can increase burnout or just that sense of "doing the same thing over and over again."

In recent years, layoffs and the subsequent slowed pace of hiring in combination with offshoring and outsourcing and an influx of people studying computer science have meant more competition for jobs. Economic factors have had companies focusing on "efficiency." Those factors have resulted in long, burdensome interview processes; stagnant or downward compensation trends; down-leveling; and a lot of the other things people have been complaining about in tech forums in recent years.

Employees are being expected to increase their productivity with large language models—whether it's the code LLMs generate is always as good as what a senior engineer would write by hand or not.

Lastly, career progression can be a precarious thing in tech. Obviously, down markets can set people back, but there's also a lot of technology churn in the industry, and the average company doesn't see the advantage of hiring someone with twenty years of experience over seven. They don't care about the candidate's experience in Delphi twenty years ago. It's a matter of whether soft and meta skills that tend to develop with experience—judgment, for example—matter much to the hiring team. This isn't always the case, but it is in many places.