That's often how jobs work. I happen to like my job, but let's not pretend like everyone is going to make sufficient money following their most passionate interests.
That might be true, but I never met a ME/EE major who wasn’t passionate about their craft. Not once.
Anecdotal in my experience, but that also used to be the case for most CS majors back when I graduated... but that was well before the rise of the FAANGs.
I'm yet to meet anyone even remotely associated with tech ( let's call it all IT) that is good and only cares about money. Debugging code at for 8 hours straight is most people's hell on earth but some people love it and that love doesn't come through paycheck alone.
I also happen to really enjoy computers, systems, etc. I enjoyed most of the jobs I've had, but the reason why I was there doing the job, as opposed to being at home nerding out for my benefit alone, was always the need to pay bills.
Everyone perceives the world differently. For example, I like to look for mistakes and I spot them (in a text while editing), but I have a friend who’s hopeless at that. On the other hand, he’s good at seeing projects through to the end, which is something I’m not good at.
So it really is good to find people who are a good fit for a specific position - and who, in the worst-case scenario, would do the work even for free or without anyone supervising them.
The question is whether the younger generation has grown up with the motto “money first and at any cost”… Not everyone, of course, but when I see how everything everywhere is reduced just to monetary value, it makes me feel a little down sometimes.
To be fair, my perfect job is third level teaching, but that wouldn't support me buying a house where I live, so I'm a data scientist (which I also enjoy).
Housing in particular is a driver of people optimizing for cash.
Based on their actions, virtually all successful high level executives in tech only care about money and they don't care about making good products, etc.
If people are unable to find joy in their paid work even after some time, they should consider doing something else.
For sure, sufficient money is important part of this equation.
But I strongly believe that if you find (your sort of) fun in what you do then you become faster and more efficient at it.
Edit: Cleaning, nursing etc.
Yes there are professions that almost no one wants to do. But that doesn’t mean that these people do it just for money.. this is prejudice that if you don’t like it and don’t have fun that other people are the same. No, they aren’t.
It is a prejudice. You have to ask them. Ask nurses why they do what they do. Ask house cleaning stuff why they do it. For sure, a lot of people stay in their jobs because they don’t have any opportunity. But if you go deep enough you find out that a lot of them found some sort of fun while doing their cleaning-public-toilet-sort-of-job. (I have done my research so I know what I am talking about.)
The real test for your theory is what people do when they're not getting paid. I have never in my life heard of a large forum/subreddit/WhatsApp group for cleaning toilets. There are no toilet cleaning meetups.
Anecdotal in my experience, but that also used to be the case for most CS majors back when I graduated... but that was well before the rise of the FAANGs.