I'm done with coding

Whether they are voting shares or not is irrelevant as he is still invested in the company.

As long as he is still invested in Microsoft he is still invested in surveillance capitalism, the very thing he is arguing against, and I am sure if he wants higher dividend payments, he would want the stock to go up.

Even if they are voting shares, he has no realistic meaningful power or say when a shareholder vote happens.

If I hated the company I worked with for over 10 years why would I still have shares in the company, I wouldn't want anything to do with it, this includes selling shares and wanting Microsoft's share price to go down.

This cynicism is also entirely unwarranted, especially when your own personal example is, frankly, far more childish than anything in the OP. A company actively harming society through surveillance projects is a societal/ethics concern with the company essentially being a malicious actor. A company not properly securing their (presumably-internal) NFS is, at worst, a flaw/misconfiguration that was obviously not high priority.

The audacity of making some IT department's lives harder, people who are trying to tick a box, sends up so many red flags -- you can laugh about the inefficiencies in private with your mates, you can quit like the OP to find more efficient places to work, but you don't hold up other people trying to get that "god damn retirement money."

Don't compare your 20 years of technical tiffs with someone's desire to do what's right for their people.

So I'm gonna say it like this, to get the vibe across:

It's pretty easy to run some Internet businesses and equal your software eng salary, as the owner of those businesses.

Not in year one, but if your goal is to hit ~40k in the first year and then scale up over a couple years, you can do it.

Also it is vastly easier if you have the capital to jump to the front of the line and skip the horrible 1 year of waiting for traffic/users to come, and just buy a business. Then you're in business from day one and can complete this more quickly and less stressfully. Elon did it with Tesla and he's now the world's richest man; learn from his example.

It's funny that this ends up being a kind of "secret knowledge" because it falls between the cracks of tech and corporate incentives. Big companies won't teach you this, because lol why would they teach you how to screw them and quit. VC's won't (exactly) teach you this, because while they are generically supportive of entrepreneurship and while it is easier to earn less money than more money (obviously), they want you to go straight for the billion dollar ideas and discourage small money thinking. Which leads to this outcome of like 100 engineers trying and only 5 making it through the gauntlet and becoming rich, rather than >90 making it if only the incentives were different.

Incidentally I recently bought a business and, after spending a lot of time in the nitty gritty "weeds" of making an Internet $10 as opposed to "zero to one" thinking, this is all coming into focus. But as I said, it's a kind of secret knowledge, which you have to piece together from YouTube, newsletters, and doing the effort - that last part of which is like 80% of the real learning. In my case I bought something and then learned on the job; fortunately the profits did not suffer.

So I'm here to tell you this is doable; it's definitely doable. If you're a software engineer of average intelligence for a software engineer, you can do it. Figuring it out isn't easy, but it's very far from impossible.

In the past, when I finally managed to actually start coding I would eventually get in the zone and be productive. Now with this AI stuff, the constant back and forth, the constant waiting for the output to complete, it does prevent me from getting into the zone.