This is how employers see the world:

- giving a shit doesn't matter

- creativity doesn't matter

- how hard you work doesn't matter

- self educating doesn't matter

- energy and enthusiasm don't matter

- having built stuff on your own doesn't matter

What matters:

- can you implement bubble sort?

- can you implement a red/black tree?

- can you do this coding test?

Look, employees don't need to be obsessed workaholics, but being really interested in your job and motivated and willing to do great work matters, and employers, for the most part, ignore these factors and focus on technical skills. And worse, in many cases their technical assessments are misguided anyway and don't really give insight into how good someone is as a software developer.