Literally all other personality features are irrelevant, hence definitely not “people like me”.
If someone has consistently chosen to favor cash over anything else, that's a different story, but if someone chose an industry or type of career with money as the deciding factor I don't think that is terribly important. People need and want money.
If I don't know what to do and have no guidance, how am I to decide? I'll look at difficulty, social benefits, moral impact and economic benefits. A 20 year old won't necessarily understand how to parse difficulty, social benefits or moral impact but will absolutely be able to understand basic economic benefits, so I think it's appropriate to use that as a method for choosing a career direction and I wouldn't object to hiring them.
Why would you assume that self-trained developers are intrinsically interested in programming?
Not everyone will do side projects - and that's fine - but passionate engineers will have something to get excited about without needing to think about it.
I do think passion in a more abstract sense is a strong signal thorough. Such as passion for learning new things, solving complex problems, investment in collective outcomes, etc
I went to university because I had an interest specifically in games, media and HCI. I could talk about my interest in those things fairly easily. Yet the far majority of jobs in my area are oriented around web development in its most basic, CRUD form. More often than not, I can almost detect a hint of snobbism from the other party's side whenever I lightly hint at the fact I don't really care for web development in my free time, but recognize overlap between various fields.
In extreme cases, I see the above on stack level as well, which is even worse. As if preference in stack defines who should work where, when a few stack combinations heavily dominate the market.
Great question, and I'm not sure that I would make that assumption. I try to assess the total picture of motivation. I know people work in order to get money.
Self-taught people may also be truly talented and interested, but it may just well be that they studied for a few months and now claim to "know programming" exactly because they noticed the profession pays very well (I know someone exactly in that situation right now, and she's already looking for some other path after just 2 years in it as clearly she has zero aptitude).
Students will often gravitate to majors that have some overlap between "This is pretty interesting" and "I can probably make a reasonable living doing this." Outside of the arts, programming is rather unusual in that some have an expectation that this is something that you've loved since you were 6. (And, again, CS only overlaps to some degree anyway.)
edit: and to make an unfair generalization, pay is the most predictable and intelligible motivation for an employee. An activist can be motivated by doing good through their organization, but an employee who isn't motivated by their pay is also certainly not motivated by helping their employers get wealthier. So their motivations are weird, not straightforward.