I have this sense that the world of tech needs the pendulum to swing back a bit towards geeky hacker types who are in it for the love of building cool things, tinkering, exploring and all that. There is a bit too much of the "bro" side of things - hustlebros and techbros and VC bros and that culture.
I think tech workers, whether it's the passionate geeks or materialistic frat bros, need to understand that a decent chunk of people just want a regular/safe office job that's more exciting and stimulating than spreadsheets and powerpoint slides.
They don't want to engage in intellectual/nerdy pissing contests, nor do they want to jump through a million burning hoops to increase their total compensation. They want to show up 9 o'clock, do their work, and leave around 5 - and that's that.
No hacky side projects. No late evenings reading up on shiny new tools, no grinding leetcode and prepping for interviews, no hustles.
(You'll find the geeky hackers at startups, open-source projects, etc.)
Give it another two years of high interest rates washing people out into non-tech sales, finance, trades, whatever... but there are plenty out there, the bros are just far louder.
That sort of environment is an artifact of a new technical domain, not unique to programming or because of any characteristics unique to it.
At different times for example it was typical for a doctor, architect, or pilot to be an informally educated enthusiast. As programming has matured into a broadly relevant and economically important domain, the dynamics of who does it and how they learn it change, as it also did in those other fields.
You can lament the change but it's never coming back.
You can be a professional software developer without all the 'bro' stuff.
And there's certainly still space for people who are curious and intrinsically motivated if you think about the whole pie growing rather than just being cut up differently.
To build a successful company, you need both, clearly, but it's a balance. And not everything needs to be a successful company. Some things are just for the fun of it. And sometimes those things turn into companies in unexpected ways.
Where are my people at these days?