I don't think we are too negative as an industry. We are exactly as negative as we need to be. We say everything is horrible, because everything actually is horrible and broken and held together with baling wire and duct tape. We always seem to be complaining because, despite what we may believe, we are not in control. We are not now a meritocracy, and we never have been. We dedicate our lives to continuous self-improvement and refining the skills of our craft.
But we are still subservient to people who have chosen to study human interactions and business organization. And they follow business fads. They mandate Waterfall or Scrum because other people use it, and they believe incorrect decisiveness is better than endless vacillating trials and experimentation for a piddling, measly, single-digit-percentage gain in efficiency. We want to feel pride in our work, but someone else also wants it to make money. We want to build bridges that last centuries, but those paying us just want to cross an inconvenient obstacle and never look back. We want to avoid reinventing the wheel. Those paying us would rather pay us to do that than buy someone else's crappy wheel. Hell, sometimes we even build wheels to give away to anyone who wants one, and we still have to reinvent them.
Everything is horrible. We are always complaining about it, and always trying to fix things. But none of us have money, aside from those few who won a startup lottery. The people who have the money call the shots, and people with money only listen to people who have money. So they make Cargo Cult copy environments from our startup lottery winners, with zero understanding about the true source of their success. We often don't even understand it ourselves.
To a person that measures worth by profits, there is a natural inclination to discount the sheer luck of being in the right place, at the right time, with the right tool. And even if there is someone out there holding conductive rods and a giant capacitor bank, lightning could still strike the guy with a shovel.
Essentially, we have a lot of useful knowledge and skills, but still no respect. People listen to what physicians say, even if they tell us that magic beans can make us lose weight. People listen to what lawyers say, even if they tell us to just slip this neck brace on before going into the courthouse. People listen to what engineers say, even when they crash spacecraft into planets because they forgot to label their distances with units. Very few people listen to what a software professional says. They are literally surrounded by our work, which is often done so well that they don't even notice it is there, but when we speak, it sounds to them like Charlie Brown's teacher: "wah wah whaaa ma waa na nah ba".
And to be honest, a lot of that is our fault. We learned to communicate effectively with perfectly logical yet absolutely moronic machines rather than emotional and intelligent humans. What we desperately need is the prestige and charisma to establish professional boundaries in such a way that the people paying us don't cross them, and so that the quislings among us won't support those breaches just because its the only way for them to get promoted.
We need a cartel, folks. I know that most of us, myself included, find the idea repugnant, but the current arrangement is not working for us.