I don’t want to be a software developer anymore

Great observation. Did you ever have any of those "old programmers" offer you any advice in this respect?

I've been surprised at how often I have an important insight about a business, and my clients/managers feel uncomfortable with my insight. The most common reaction I get is "We need to stay focused on ideas that deliver real business value." But I can think of examples where that response couldn't possibly be an honest response, since the top leadership felt the company was in crisis, and they were trying to brainstorm new ideas for moving forward.

I was present for cases where software developers push for a new way of doing things, and the top management pushes for the status quo -- and this happens even when the top leadership feels the company is in crisis and the status quo is untenable.

The most rational explanation for this behavior is that the top leadership is worried that a new idea will take too much time, or cost too much money. The tech team might say "We have this brilliant idea, and it will take 3 months to implement" but the top leadership is worried that it will really take 6 months to implement. But this is really the same as saying that the company doesn't have the right leadership. If the status quo is untenable and the leadership lack the skills to properly evaluate alternative strategies, then new leadership is needed. But it is obviously difficult to get the top management to agree to this. I say "obviously" though in some sense it is surprising how many leaders would rather cling to power, and oversee a spectacular failure, than step aside and let someone else save the situation.

Why does top leadership drive the software developers so hard? There are several reasons. Fear of failure. Fear of unknown risks. Fear of uncontrolled costs. Fear of unexpected expenses. Fear of having to rely on something that one doesn't understand. Demanding long hours, and implementing rituals such as Agile or Scrum, are seen as ways of reducing risk. And then of course, there is the simple fact that the top leadership can do this -- the USA has weak labor unions, the tech industry has almost no labor unions, therefore the government allows harsher working conditions than what you find in France or Germany or Sweden.

The gender pay gap number that is always reported is actually just an aggregate mean of salary across the population, NOT a difference between people employed in the same job. For people employed in the same job the difference is a much smaller number. The main reason behind the reported number is that women on average work less hours in their life and take career breaks, and salary tends to go up with time worked. There are more reasons but this is the big chunk, women earn pretty close to men who work the same average number of hours.

So in summary, you might be able to save some percentage per-hour by hiring female developers but the number is much smaller than you'd imagine. You'd then have to offset that against the much higher difficulty of finding equally skilled female developers. There are just objectively less of them, and those that exist are at a premium because companies like Google are facing political pressure to have equal numbers of male and female developers.