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.

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.

People who did programming for the love of programming was extremely common in the sortof hacker subculture that existed from 1990-2010is or so.

We hang out in different crowds.

You may need to find a place with a better culture.