A lot, most of the people actually who got into software for the past decade or so seem to have been motivated by money. They'd just as easily became doctors or lawyers. And it shows, a lot of software now is just some grey corporate kafkaesque mess.

FWIW this happened during the dot com boom and a lot of them scurried off during the dot com bust. The amount of US salary one can pull with no formal education needed is the driver for this cycle.

My preference in hiring is people that are drawn to computing naturally, they will be there for the long haul.

The people responsible for all the packages on npm, pip, cargo, Conan really really love writing lots of lines of code to solve every imaginable tiny problem. So they are out there.

I got into programming before the past decade and initially it was the lure of a good career i.e. money. But when attended my first class, I instantly knew that this was it. Sometimes the path isn't pretty but it can lead to beautiful places.

I'm not sure it's just the money. You can still do those other things and make good money.

I think a lot of people are drawn into the industry these days from various online communities because you can enforce your particular viewpoint of social order in a small niche and basically be mini-tyrants. This is very western-world specific, but looking at the "communities" around Ruby, Node, Rust, Nix, etc, it looks fairly clear.

I put communities in quotes because I'm referring to those communities within the community that tend to label themselves as the whole community, write petitions to remove undesirables, etc.

The ability to create a space entirely of likeminded individuals that purges undesirables is highly attractive to certain kinds of people. Saw this happening on forums and bbs first decades ago and now it's the governance body of everything.

It's happened in tabletop gaming too -- one local game group I was a part of got co-opted by a guy just through starting a discord and hosting events. Suddenly a very apolitical community started being dominated by tankie politics and banning of members for wrongthink. We were just trying to game with some minis up till then. I got fed up and quit once the guy running the discord started ranting about how everyone in America should be forcibly relocated to cities and reeducated in more progressive values. I'm just trying to point plastic lasers at people and roll dice, my guy.

Sure, but that's their problem. If you choose to fill your life with an activity you know you won't enjoy then, well, that's your choice.