You're probably overestimating peoples' reactions to you leaving. Business owners manage to simultaneously believe the business is beyond their control and yet hanging on their every word. They can't both be true, right? If you left tomorrow, odds are a successful business continues, and it will be one which wouldn't have existed but for you.

That said: what stops you from having an all-hands meeting and saying "Is this REALLY what we want?" If it isn't, it is your business. Change it. Client needs to be able to text you at 8 PM? Client will be assisted in finding a more appropriate service provider. Employee feels that nobody can go home at 6? Employee gets told by his boss "Go home. It will be here tomorrow. There are companies that pull all-nighters every day. This is not one of them."

Also: raise your rates.

I remember reading the tobacco industry was actually secretly grateful when the EU banned them from advertising.

As I remember it, they were in a stale-mate. The market was pretty much divided up. Most people were loyal to their brand and that was that. Despite that, they were spending a massive amount of money on advertising even though their market shares remained unchanged.

The reason was that if one of them stopped funnelling massive amounts of cash into advertising, they would lose a big chunk of their market share to the others. So they were all paying mostly to maintain the status quo.

With the ban on advertising, the amount of money saved greatly outweighed the revenue lost as others couldn't advertise either so it really only affected new smokers rather than convince current smokers to switch brands.

I see a similar thing happening in my line of work. In our niche of e-commerce every player of importance works with the same online marketing networks and paying rather a lot per sale or click.

There's a whole lot of sites out there which basically exist to infest organic search results, send traffic to us and our competitors and collect their referral fee from the advertising network. They add no value[1]. Without them, the customer would have been similarly divided amongst the competition as well without having to pay for it. Yet, if we stop paying them, we'll lose a lot of business as our competitors will continue to do so.

Disclaimer: this is all as I understand it and in no way my employers opinion or persepctive ;)

1) Some do, by providing extra information or ranking the shops by what's best for the consumer (price, reviews) rather than the most cash-per-click.

Switching jobs works well when developers are in their 20's. But I've found in the 30's that a number of factors combine to make it much less attractive:

1) Each jump becomes less and less. There's an invisible salary cap for software engineers. By the time a software engineer is in their 30's, they've jumped a few times and are already close to the maximum.

2) There are costs associated with switching jobs. There's a risk that the new job could be far worse (team, boss, culture, etc.). And you start at zero reputation and connections at a new company. The lack of reputation often means less flexibility and influence since the others at the company don't trust you yet. The rewards are greater than the costs in the 20's, but usually not in the 30's.

3) It also happens to be the time when many get married and have babies. This increases the risk factor.

4) For total compensation there seems to be two tiers of companies, the top tech (google, facebook, amazon, etc.) and everyone else. I've noticed the big difference is not the base salary (top tech only pays a few % more). The really big difference is cash bonus + stock (RSU).

5) Unfortunately, the interview skills required to get into the top tech companies is biased against older software engineers. For an engineer in their 30's college is a long time ago. They could spend time getting algorithm books and studying, but there's less free time at this stage in life. So the only big jump that's worth it financially (top tech company) is very difficult to do.

It's not so much about expecting things to be private, but more of expecting things not to end up in databases, virtually forever.

As programmers, we tend to view the world in a very "black and white" fashion, similar to our security model: If it's public, there is no expectation of privacy.

But the world is not like this ... shouldn't be like this. While there should be both technical and legal mechanisms in place to prevent privacy abuses, it does not mean that, if they're not there, we should simply expect governments to do as they please, log everything, put us in all sorts of databases, make those databases accessible to all sorts of people, etc.