Its been a while since my undergrad (>10 yrs) but many of my peers were majoring in CS or EE/CE because of the money, at the time I thought it was a bit depressing as well.

With a few more years under my belt I realized theres nothing wrong with doing good work and providing yourself/your family a decent living. Not everyone needs the passion in their field to become among the best or become a "10x"er to contribute. We all have different passions, but we all need to pay the bills.

Yeah, I think that the quality of work (skill + conscientiousness), and the motivation for doing the work, are two separate things.

Off-the-cuff, three groups:

1. There are people who are motivated by having a solid income, yet they take the professionalism seriously, and do skilled rock-solid work, 9-5. I'd be happy to work with these people.

2. There are other people who are motivated by having a solid or more-than-solid income, and (regardless of skill level), it's non-stop sprint performance art, gaming promotion metrics, resume-driven development, practicing Leetcode, and hopping at the next opportunity regardless of where that leaves the project and team.

3. Then there's those weirdos who are motivated by something about the work itself, and would be doing it even if it didn't pay well. Over the years, these people spend so much time and energy on the something, that they tend to develop more and stronger skills than the others. I'd be happy to work with these people, so long as they can also be professional (including rolling up sleeves for the non-fun parts), or amenable to learning to be professional.

Half-joke: The potential of group #3 is threatening to sharp-elbowed group #2, so group #2 neutralizes them via frat gatekeeping tactics (yeah-but-what-school-did-you-go-to snobbery, Leetcode shibboleth for nothing but whether you rehearsed Leetcode rituals, cliques, culture fit, etc.).

Startups might do well to have a mix of #3 and #1, and to stay far away from #2. But startups -- especially the last decade-plus of too many growth investment scams -- are often run by affluent people who grew up being taught #2 skills (for how you game your way into prestigious school, aggressively self-interested networking and promoting yourself, etc.).

#3 is the old school hacker, "a high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die" :-)

Blend of #1 & #3 here. Without the pay, I don't think I'd muster the patience for dealing with all the non-programming BS that comes with the job. So I'd have found something else with decent pay, and preferably not an office job. Sometimes I wish I'd taken that other path. I have responsibilities outside work, so I'm rarely putting in more than 40 hours. Prior to family commitments, I had side projects and did enough coding outside work. I still miss working on hobby video game projects. But I do take the professionalism seriously and will do the dirty work that has to be done, even if means cozying up to group #2 to make things happen for the sake of the project.

I’m in group 3 for sure.

The hardest part of any job I’ve had is doing the not so fun parts (meetings, keeping up with emails, solidly finishing work before moving on to something new)

You're on the nominally right Web site. #1 is engineers, #2 is cancer, and #3 is hackers (possibly also engineers). :)

The problem being that interviews are often more likely to favor 2 over 1.

As I progressed, I've learned I am more valuable for the company working on things I am interested in. Delegate the boring stuff to people that don't care. If it is critical to get it done right, do it yourself.

This wasn’t possible for me at my last job at all.

0 autonomy, the only people who got recognition were those who self promoted on internal blogs, etc.

I would definitely do this job even if it paid half as well. Nothing else is nearly as interesting to me, and I’ve tried quite a range.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with enjoying the high pay, no – I definitely do. But yeah, it’s upsetting to find out how few people care. Even moreso when they double down and say that you shouldn’t care either, because it’s been abstracted away, blah blah blah. Who do you think is going to continue creating these abstractions for you?

I get the pragmatism argument, but I would like to think certain professions should hold themselves to a higher standard. Doctors, lawyers, and engineers have a duty to society IMO that runs counter to a “just mail it in to cash a paycheck” mentality. I guess it comes down to whether you consider software developers to be that same kind of engineer. Certainly I don’t want safety critical software engineers to have that cavalier attitude (although I’ve seen it).

...Someone else who thinks of actual web applications as an abstraction.

In the olden days, we used to throw it over to "Ops" and say, "your problem now."

And Junior developers have always been overwhelmed with the details and under pressure to deliver enough to keep their job. None of this is new! I'm a graybeard now, but I remember seniors having the same complaints back then. "Kids these days" never gets old.

I get what you’re saying, but at the same time I feel like I encounter the real world results of this erosion constantly. While we have more software than ever, it all just kind of feels janky these days. I encounter errors in places I never had before, doing simple things. The other day I was doing a simple copy and paste operation (it was some basic csv formatted text from vs code to excel iirc) and I encountered a Windows (not excel or vs code) error prompt that my clipboard data had been lost in the time it took me to Alt+Tab and Ctrl+v, something I’ve been doing ~daily for 3 decades without any issues.

I’m more of a solo full stack dev and don’t really have first hand experience building software at scale and the process it takes to manage a codebase the size of the Windows OS, but these are the kinds of issues I see regularly these days and wouldn’t in the past. I also use macOS daily for almost as long and the Apple software has really tanked in terms of quality, I hit bugs and unexpected errors regularly. I generally don’t use their software (Safari, Mail, etc) when I can avoid it. Also have to admit lack of features is a big issue for me on their software.

Maybe a lack of learned healthy shame from people joining the industry during the covid hiring spree.