>Are there younger engineers, new to the career, for whom programming is not merely a job but something they can imagine doing in their spare time?
Yes, absolutely!
Yes, absolutely!
A few students of mine would show me little games they were working on, or websites they were building. Sure, they might be doing this a bit for resume-fuel, but it was abundantly obvious to me that they were doing these things largely because they thought it was cool.
And you know what? It is cool! I tried my best to encourage them to keep at it.
I definitely do not think these will benefit my resume in any way.
It didn't occur to me that I was old until your comment. Thanks!
Perhaps at some point there will be very few older than you and perhaps then the sliding window will be offset accordingly, but at least for me (almost, almost 40) I'm still well within the "define young" range from my own point of view.
I'm in the same boat and I definitely still feel young. I mean, I'm fundamentally unchanged from when I was 16, and still like the same stuff like video games, computers, and so on. I have also always looked kinda young, which probably allowed me to propagate my youth until very recently. The biggest change I've noticed is not anything internal to me but how other people act around me; they talk to me like I'm an adult (which can be either good or bad depending on the situation), and the cashiers at the stores have stopped asking for an ID when I buy liquor (before 30 they still did!). Also, people don't give unsolicited advice as much as they used to; I suppose they think I know what I'm doing or don't care. This is definitely bad, because my modus operandi for life has always been to try weird stuff my own way and count on other people to stop me if I'm doing something completely stupid.
There's honestly nothing wrong with that. It's perfectly valid to do something purely for the pay (so long as what you're doing is ethical, obviously). I suspect there are plenty of young people who see the bloated salaries that software engineers get and decide to learn programming for purely economic reasons.
This probably contrasts somewhat to the 80's and 90's, where it was substantially more difficult to "get into" computers, and as a result there was a strong selection bias towards really passionate people.
There are the circles in which the nerds cluster who are really in the tunnel about whatever subject it is, here it's programming or CS in general. They do it for fun, they come home and sit at the computer all evening and half the night. Occasionally they do the homework assignments, and if those are interesting, they nerd out about them endlessly. And they are really good at it. They don't really go to parties and are a tad (or a lot) anti-social. But they don't care. Typical minor subjects are math or physics. It's beautiful.
Then there are the circles of the in-it-for-the-moneys. They do homework assignments because they have to, they go to classes because they have to, they read business news, go to parties, feel important and have dollar signs in their eyes every time they think about graduating and finally making big bucks. If lucky then they get help by some of the nerds (see above). But they actually detest the nerds, just as the nerds detest them.
There are more circles and I don't want to deep-dive here, but I actually this also reflects at the workplace 10-20 years later. It's easy to see from which of those two groups the high-performing ICs (some of them a bit socially awkward) come, and from which their managers, and why there is tension between those.
It’s important not to internalize the fear response of having to shoot down everything that makes you feel threatened.