There's a lot of meaningful tech work out there that pays way less than Google. Why don't the Googlers bored from idling take it?
Not judging people who take well paying jobs at unethical companies, but they should at least stop moaning about it. Some people I know would suck d*ck behind a Wendy's to get paid FAANG money and be bored for 8h/day instead of do backbreaking work for peanuts.
I'd like to see some empirical data for that. I don't see how that squares with the numbers of people working for FAANG money vs the numbers working in all of the rest of the tech jobs in the US and world. If I were to take your statement literally, then all the companies paying FAANG money would have tens of millions of employees, when in fact their total headcount is ~2 million out of the ~12 million working in tech in the US.
It makes your question not worrg answering.
Be better.
I used to believe this but after my most recent position I no longer do. A lot of the developers there didn't code outside of work hours, or if they did it was just using the same technologies as the day to day.
When asked what tools we could use to filter for higher quality candidates in open roles I responded:
> Ask them to show you a personal project they're proud of, that will tell if they have any passion for the job.
Maybe it was just the company not being very attractive to talented coders, but after some time of candidates having nothing to show the company gave up and outsourced. There are simply a lot of uninspired developers who are just in it for the money now.
Maybe some kind of confirmation bias / no true scotsman argument, but if I got that question during an interview my response would be something like
> Which one would you like to hear about first?
Or it could be that they really do like making software but they have other hobbies they enjoy much more.
Personally I am happy that the industry is maturing to the point where people can just enter it as a career and not a ~~passion~~
This mentality that software devs should have loaded up github repos with side projects and live & breath code all the time is super toxic for the industry.
By the way there are plenty of talented coders who only code at work.
And there are likely plenty of hacks who code all the time, but never learned how to code well, or work with a team or understand how to scale a project or any host of other skills that are necessary for building commercial products.
Laziness is the natural response to the work you're doing not mattering. If you find yourself imposing artificial deadlines as motivation then maybe what you're doing isn't all that important.