I think the compensation given to software developers by companies that view software as their product has drawn many of the skilled software developers away from jobs that would have once grabbed them because of the fun factor. Companies that make things that contain software are not in markets prepared to pay 2 and 3 times what they were for software. What you are left with is people who are willing to accept that fun factor as the difference in TC, and people who couldn't get jobs that paid more. These are the people we have making most of our safety critical systems. Go look at software developer compensation at X vs spaceX. That is the market at work. Fun does count as TC, but you also end up with people who aren't good developers pivoting to engineer new processes and tools in these domains. They latch on to whatever fad full stack is just getting over a case of, and try to apply it to train firmware. It wouldn't surprise me to find out they are all about scrumfall and have 10x more text in jira than git. And they have restful apis, or service oriented architecture in a safety critical embedded system.