I’m motivated to get up everyday for the same reason most people are - money.
I bet you’re looking for people with “passion” and who are willing to consistently put in more than 40 hours a week aren’t you? Out of all the millions of things I can do and have done in my free time over my career (including a working hobby as a part time fitness instructor back in my younger days an avid runner and a weightlifter) spending more time sitting at a computer outside of work isn’t one of them.
And the obscure language would hardly ever outweigh the need to recruit developers easily.
Where have you seen that?
> I’m motivated to get up everyday for the same reason most people are - money.
You are quite mistaken. Once they have enough to exist comfortably, people tend to seek meaning not money. The emergence of OSS ecosystem is the best example -- a lot of it, including the most popular OS in the world, came about as hobby projects people did in their spare time. If you're a software engineer, I bet you use products of their passion a lot in your money-making activities.
> I bet you’re looking for people with “passion” and who are willing to consistently put in more than 40 hours a week aren’t you?
Again, all else equal, if I need to make a decision as to who would be a better, more capable employee in absence of other information, the one who managed to be productive in an obscure language would be higher on my list. Just that. Everything else, making people work overtime, etc., is your addition.
Look at a list of who the largest contributors are to Linux.
https://news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-contribution/
Most of the contributors are getting paid to do so.
Do you really think most of the 2.7 million developers in the US are contributing to open source?
Regarding how many in the US contribute, I don't know the stats... Could probably be more if work-life balance/employment security was better.
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...
Companies pay employees to add business value. Not to get into their own flights of fancy to do things the hard way. As you mature, you learn only to focus on things that “make the beer taste better”.
I have yet to see an argument by any of the proponents of “obscure” languages where their choice adds business value.
And the “hard problems” that are being solved by the large companies at a scale that has never been solved are doing so by using mainstream languages.
I’ve never seen a report of a job interview where they asked you to reverse a binary tree in Erlang.
The vast majority of problems that developers are being asked to solve are not that hard technically. They are business problems.