[tombert]

In a bit of fairness, I know a lot of very competent engineers who do not code for fun at all. Programming is purely a job for them, and then they go home and hack on nothing.

There's honestly nothing wrong with that. It's perfectly valid to do something purely for the pay (so long as what you're doing is ethical, obviously). I suspect there are plenty of young people who see the bloated salaries that software engineers get and decide to learn programming for purely economic reasons.

This probably contrasts somewhat to the 80's and 90's, where it was substantially more difficult to "get into" computers, and as a result there was a strong selection bias towards really passionate people.

[digging]

I struggle a lot with my hobbies because I do almost no coding or learning about code in my free time, at least not directly. I think I could be a great(ish) programmer if I did programming as a hobby, but there's just so many other interesting and worthwhile things to do. I get a lot of FOMO from people who code as a hobby, and I think it doesn't help that they don't seem to get FOMO about my hobbies. But I know I will always feel something is missing if I don't spend time marveling at the natural world and creating art, so I guess I'm stuck.

[dolmen]

As someone who studied programming in the 90's, I can tell you that I was surprised about how many students were not passionated like myself. And this was already before the wave of scientist coming from other fields (physics, chemistry, biology) to computing in early 2000s.

[thebigwinning]

In the 80s and 90s CS was often seen as a fallback if you couldn't do well in EE.