Brogrammers are in it for the love of money. Programmers are in it for the love of programming.
There is an emerging coterie of people whose entire approach to software startups is to vibecode an MVP, raise enough seed to hire a real programmer (or get one interested enough to become their "cofounder") and move on to the next MVP. To them, doing one company at a time in the era of LLMs is a sucker's game.
For most people it's a job, and that's ok.
That's surprising to me. It's been a majority of people I've worked with. I guess perhaps it depends heavily on where you work.
For context: my current company with ~400 employees (not just engineering) is the largest company I've ever worked at.
We hang out in different crowds.
You may need to find a place with a better culture.
While there had long been perfuctory white collar programmer analysts filling the ranks at some dry divisions at IBM, it used to be way more common to have a software engineering department full of Asimov-steeped Omni-reading nerds who had genuinely passionate interest in the field that had taken hold even before they started working in it.
But later the career increasingly came to be treated more like law, medicine, or finance and you started to see those rooms fill with people that were often generally bright but not really "called" to the field in the same aay.
People who did programming for the love of programming was extremely common in the sortof hacker subculture that existed from 1990-2010is or so.
autistic guy that rejects your PRs because you used tabs instead of spaces: pro