A lot of people who entered the field in the past 6 or so years are here for the money, obviously.
Nothing wrong with that at all, but as someone with a long time programming and technology passion, it’s sad to see that change.
With a few more years under my belt I realized theres nothing wrong with doing good work and providing yourself/your family a decent living. Not everyone needs the passion in their field to become among the best or become a "10x"er to contribute. We all have different passions, but we all need to pay the bills.
Off-the-cuff, three groups:
1. There are people who are motivated by having a solid income, yet they take the professionalism seriously, and do skilled rock-solid work, 9-5. I'd be happy to work with these people.
2. There are other people who are motivated by having a solid or more-than-solid income, and (regardless of skill level), it's non-stop sprint performance art, gaming promotion metrics, resume-driven development, practicing Leetcode, and hopping at the next opportunity regardless of where that leaves the project and team.
3. Then there's those weirdos who are motivated by something about the work itself, and would be doing it even if it didn't pay well. Over the years, these people spend so much time and energy on the something, that they tend to develop more and stronger skills than the others. I'd be happy to work with these people, so long as they can also be professional (including rolling up sleeves for the non-fun parts), or amenable to learning to be professional.
Half-joke: The potential of group #3 is threatening to sharp-elbowed group #2, so group #2 neutralizes them via frat gatekeeping tactics (yeah-but-what-school-did-you-go-to snobbery, Leetcode shibboleth for nothing but whether you rehearsed Leetcode rituals, cliques, culture fit, etc.).
Startups might do well to have a mix of #3 and #1, and to stay far away from #2. But startups -- especially the last decade-plus of too many growth investment scams -- are often run by affluent people who grew up being taught #2 skills (for how you game your way into prestigious school, aggressively self-interested networking and promoting yourself, etc.).
The hardest part of any job I’ve had is doing the not so fun parts (meetings, keeping up with emails, solidly finishing work before moving on to something new)
0 autonomy, the only people who got recognition were those who self promoted on internal blogs, etc.
In the olden days, we used to throw it over to "Ops" and say, "your problem now."
And Junior developers have always been overwhelmed with the details and under pressure to deliver enough to keep their job. None of this is new! I'm a graybeard now, but I remember seniors having the same complaints back then. "Kids these days" never gets old.
I’m more of a solo full stack dev and don’t really have first hand experience building software at scale and the process it takes to manage a codebase the size of the Windows OS, but these are the kinds of issues I see regularly these days and wouldn’t in the past. I also use macOS daily for almost as long and the Apple software has really tanked in terms of quality, I hit bugs and unexpected errors regularly. I generally don’t use their software (Safari, Mail, etc) when I can avoid it. Also have to admit lack of features is a big issue for me on their software.