Edit: to clarify, by nine-to-fiver I mean someone who is just punching the clock in order to make a living but does not care much about what they are doing. I don't really care what hours you work if you're really into it when you do.
I love writing software, but that does not mean I don't love other things. Years ago I lived and breathed software. That's not the case anymore. I'd much rather help my daughter with her homework than read about the latest uber nifty JavaScript transpiler that will change my life and make everything awesome with unicorns and whatnot.
Our field churns the same ideas over and over. After a few years things get old really fast.
But there's what I said in another comment in this thread: I love writing reliable, correct, secure, well-documented software. Focus on those and my passion comes out. But come 5-ish o'clock and you bet I'm leaving the office to pick up my daughter from school and spend some time talking with her about her day and what she learned and whatnot. And then my wife will come home, we'll have dinner and we'll spend some time talking about our days and watching TV. Without those things I might as well not have a life.
I don't like it when there's an expectation that I'll be available to work 24/7. I don't want people expecting me to be on social media promoting my work or things related to it. I'll disappoint anyone who expected me to think of work as my life's mission or anything like that (unless I'm using my skills to help find a cure to a serious disease, or realistically help solving the problem of poverty in the world - that would change the game).
I have a number of interests in my life that are completely unrelated to work. Those are the things that I live for. Working is a means to bring in some cash that enables me to enjoy other things in life.
Because you work mainly for the money is why I would not want to work with you. Not because you like other things.
You could prove your point and offer your employer to work without your salary / equity. Would you?
To satisfy a political agenda?
Because you're a child looking for fun? (And will create yet another cookie-cutter framework named something childish.)
To satisfy a need for validation because you aren't an adult?
To make great products? (so someone else can make money.)
Because it's new and shiny and trendy and you need to keep up with the Jones's?
Why is an experienced coder so much more efficient than an inexperienced coder? Because they have learned many infrastructures, frameworks, and algorithms, have learned through experience not to make certain mistakes like over-complicating a problem or seeking clarity to a problem prior to coding it and thus understand the cost of requirements, and have picked up good design habitations like divide and conquer, coding without making assumptions, or multi-tiered architectures.
Most Managers don't understand the foundation of good software and great IT infrastructure are solid requirements. That requires a solid investment, like a building foundation, in analyzing the business; great managers know enough about a particular business that they can spot the mistakes analysts make in building requirements and vet them so they don't change in major ways. Do colleges teach any of this? No.
When Changing requirements meets improper planning and tight project budgets (which may be tight because the company is in trouble, or may be tight because the Project Manager is incompetent), it means over-working staff to hit those changes which produces cognitive pollution. That pollutes the code base with too many assumptions, and pollutes the staff's minds with bad habitations and expectations. Eventually like any pollution, it builds up until it becomes terminal; developers quit, the cost of making any change becomes terminal for the code base, and so forth. We've all seen it. More importantly you take a developer who's worked a 9-5, then spend 2 hours a night for the last 10 years learning advanced mathematics, or low-level compiler design, or other things that really create good habits and techniques, and you literally cannot introduce them to that environment because the environment won't be able to value them; it can't see through the pollution.
The tautology simply is the overtime exemption. If you don't have staff clocking in and out, there's not a chance in hell of you ever figuring out how much time it takes to do any project, which in turn, feeds the tautology. Very simple question to ask at an interview "Do you track the hours of your software developers?" "Well no." "Why would I want to work at a company, overtime-exempt no less, when the management has no idea how to estimate the hours consumed for a project?". We get into concepts like "We practice scrum and estimate the story points based upon"; you sound like a 5-year old when you start talking that kind of jargon.
The pollution sloshes around in the talent pool, and companies end up with poisoned projects because of it.
I once believed the usual propaganda about "passion" and "work hard, play hard". But I was so miserable at my job that I actually wanted to quit software engineering for good. Fast forward 5 years and I now have a 9 to 5 job (8 to 4 actually, which is even better for me). I can assure you that the main difference is that my current job is emotionally manageable and, more important, sustainable. Which is good both for me and for my employer. Meanwhile, I've seen lots of burnout on people who continued to believe the propaganda. Which is, again, bad both for them and their employers.
Forgetting about my job duties and considering myself unemployed from 4PM to 8AM has done wonders for both my mental health and my output at work. It's a win-win situation.
What I find concerning are people who write mediocre code 9 to 5 but don't do anything to improve their skills on their own time.
The point is to imagine what your life would be like if you didn't have to work for money. Imagine if you could work on startup ideas and software projects simply because you were passionate about solving a problem or creating something, and not because of the money. And it doesn't even have to be something useful, or something that people will pay for. You can work on literally anything you love doing, and you can find people who feel the same way.
That's the opposite of a "nine-to-fiver" who is primarily there for the money, although they might also enjoy the work.
Of course, you can be passionate about working on something while maintaining a healthy work/life balance. That's not really what people mean when they say "nine-to-fiver".
I've been in this position, and I've concluded: if you really have no financial constraints, you'd be daft to spend your time working on a startup, or solving the dull, pedestrian problems that are of such utilitarian concern to society.
If you're creative, why wouldn't you just be an artist and make things that are personally and intensely meaningful to you (but only to you)?
If you're an engineer, why wouldn't you just spend your time inventing new esoteric programming languages to implement Conway's game of life, rather than the drudgery of, say, making and debugging a robust automated toll booth, that could save society millions of dollars? That only makes sense if you're anticipating an eventual return to the monetized (wage) economy.
Or - start a family and invest your full time into raising and educating your own children - probably the most rational choice, with the least value to the rest of society.
Making a robust automated toll booth sounds a lot more appealing to me than making yet another programming language.
I'm with you - the catch is, how do you know what are the actual important problems, except by how people allocate money?
We could each list a thousand problems that ought to be solved, but we can only work on one thing at a time. Thus we use a scarce resource (money) to communicate our actual priorities.
> ... the catch is, how do you know what are the actual important problems, except by how people allocate money?
Attention is another scarce good that has value. Many open source projects have value because they are solving a problem many people have. The original authors knew they were on to someone because people laid attention to the solution.
That seems like a strange way to describe preparing the next generation. :D
Don't most people consider raising and educating their children to be one of the most valuable things to be done for society? eg having more knowledgeable/skilled/clueful young is better "for everyone" (as a generalisation) than not
In fact people generally don't recognize this value. If I thought to myself, "That's a fair division of labor - I'll do the work, and instead of raising my own kids I'll support this guy's family" - my own genes would be removed from the pool pretty quickly (unless group selection pressure were so intense that this was the only way we could out-compete the neighboring villages).
On the other hand - if you were willing to raise my kids alongside your own (as a teacher or babysitter), there's a much better chance I'd see that as a fair exchange of value.
I am arguing against the idea that we don't need money to create incentives.
I also have other things I love to do.
Like you said, there's nothing inherently wrong with people who have other priorities or aren't passionate about their job. There are plenty of positions that they'd be a good fit for.
But it's equally true that if you're really passionate about your work (to the point where it's your top priority in life) you want to work with a team that is equally motivated. There's nothing wrong with that. A top professional soccer player would be unhappy if they were asked to work with a team of amateur high school players.