If you are a programmer who doesn't care about your user, you are a terrible programmer - period.
Care about the user, programmers. Not the manager, not your fellow work competitors. The USER.
Without a USER, nothing you do has value - at all.
(Note: your manager and your fellow work competitors can be users too. Don't overlook that fact! Hopefully they care enough about the users, too, that they are willing to wear the user hat during your product development cycle. Even managers wearing users hats are users. I hope you still care even then!)
You are right in the sense that thinking from the perspective of the user is a good professional skill to have.
In practice though, you a very privileged if you get to work on any software that is not user-hostile per design. In the end of the day, programmer don't make the decisions.
If you care about the user but management prevents you from acting on it, you are hurting yourself for no reason, like agonizing over all the bad news across the nation and world. Your shoulders can't carry the whole world
Care about the user, programmers. Not the manager, not your fellow work competitors. The USER.
Without a USER, nothing you do has value - at all.
(Note: your manager and your fellow work competitors can be users too. Don't overlook that fact! Hopefully they care enough about the users, too, that they are willing to wear the user hat during your product development cycle. Even managers wearing users hats are users. I hope you still care even then!)