There is a significant cohort of professional coders who enjoy the comfortable lifestyle who write very bad code. In fact, I'd venture to say there are far more of those than people who don't much enjoy the work but still do it well because they have other priorities and responsibilities in life that make it necessary to maintain a strong work ethic.
It's amazing how many people in tech can't imagine that the same people that can grind med school or IB or big4 accounting or white-shoe law somehow can't grind the same way in tech. Newsflash: the majority of people in FAANG are grinders not "passion coders".
Personally I hate this job but I'm very good at it and it was either law school with my 98% LSAT or tech. I picked tech because reading and writing briefs all day seemed somehow worse.
Who else would go to bat? Everyone can immediately tell who the grinders are, but you have to hire sometimes anyway.
i work on compilers+hardware so that's the backdrop here.
here's a real hypothetical for you (ie it happened but i'm not going to use specifics): our internal proprietary compiler is spitting out incorrect atomics instructions that deadlock our internal proprietary multi-core DNN accelerator. this incorrect code is downstream of a big, lucrative, customer's (you know which one) LLM model.
now the question: is it the "passion coder" that will solve this or the grinder?
Also in day-to-day work you don't really research the best solution for non-critical systems and instead implement the first solution that comes to mind. It will mostly never be touched once it is in production.
Over time seeing systems you implemented working is the largest reward for me. You have forgotten how they work anyway, so bad code is less of an issue then. And if you do look it up again, you might be angry about your stupid past self. Meh, at least it means you know better now.
IMO this is the natural mood of all industries. We don't seriously expect that accountants love doing tedious work over Excel? Telling people to fall in love with work is not a healthy attitude. Only a small subset of people in any profession can fall in love with work. Everyone else must make their lives outside of work.
I really hope this is true again later this year or next year but every junior developer I know has been unable to find any employment. From my network of people that have lost jobs over the last 6 months:
20+ years experience: found a job the same month 5 to 20 years experience: found a job within 4 months 0 to 5 years experience: have not been able to find an entry level position
Of course, this is anecdotal and my sample size is only my network. But I've also seen a lot of people sharing similar experiences here on HN, Reddit, and Blind.
Seniors' resume-driven-development is (even if unintentionally) making it much harder for any newcomers to break into the field.
I see this sentiment all of the time and it just doesn't register. What new "frameworks" have you had to learn in the past 10 years beyond React, Typescript, and maybe next?
The people that don't enjoy coding can still force themselves to do it... But they will find it lack luster. They are doing something they don't like, aren't too good at, for less money, at a job that took forever to find, etc etc. They won't have the same experience.
There are enough people that enjoy coding to tell everyone else "yeah this fucking rocks", and that certainly draws people in, but a lot of people will be disappointed with it.