It sounds like this person has a hobby that they want to get paid to do.
Which is fine, if you can find a way to make it happen.
But for the majority of us, work means work. It's not always aligned with your own interests, it can feel like drudgery, and we accept the uncomfortable reality that our labor is probably making somebody else richer than it's making us.
I'm a fan of cooperatives, where at least you know that you have part ownership over your endeavors. But even then, you often need to work to satisfy clients and customers, rather than to satisfy your own interests.
Ultimately, I've learned to separate my hobby interest in programming and my work. I accept that work will always feel like work, but a few things (like good coworkers) can make a big difference. I try to make the experience tolerable for myself and my coworkers, and then I do what I really love on the side.
My interpretation was slightly different than yours. I read it as if they have no issue going to work and being paid to be a developer. However, they didn’t want to feel like they needed to constantly be leveling up and working towards the next rung on the ladder. Many companies have written or unwritten rules about leveling up or being pushed out and they screen for people hungry to grow. The author doesn’t seem interested in that trajectory.
I suppose in other industries this isn’t always expected. For example, you can easily be a mid-level accountant for your entire career without the company or industry expecting you to be on track to be their next CFO.
Maybe the author should be looking at medium/big non-tech companies that have been around a long time, have aging codebases, and aren’t innovating in the same way as as big tech or startup. I suspect they might find developers who have been there for many years and are pretty complacent.
I find the author's paragraph about small companies weird: other pages on their site indicate they are at a small 60 person professional services company. Their boss probably doesn't have a yacht. My boss doesn't at a large corporation, and I'm pretty sure his boss and his boss don't either.
Their resume indicates they have 1 year of experience. The unwritten rules about leveling up I think generally amount to reaching a first level "senior" (~5 YoE) where you can be expected to do things like figure out how to do a task and coordinate with others on your own instead of needing a mentor/lead to guide you all the time. Like it's more learning how to work with some technical stuff thrown in. I've been pretty direct with my managers throughout my 30s that I've got other priorities in life now (kids), and I'm not looking to grow and be more ambitious and all that, and I haven't found that to be an issue. Your manager is a person (for now. Good luck to gen alpha). They get it. Caveat: you still need to care, understand what you're doing at work, and do a good job. Don't phone it in, but you don't need to be chasing promotions either once you have some basic competence. I still get good performance reviews. We just have an understanding that I'm not looking at "the next step" or working toward any career goal.
Maybe the author's problem is that their workplace is basically a small body shop and isn't helping them grow? I don't know; never heard of them. They may want to find a more product development oriented company/team (so not just short term projects/contracts), perhaps like you say medium or large so there's more room for mentorship.
I see one of the projects was working on some thing used by a bunch of bike shops. That sounds like serving a direct need some small business had? One way to be both happier and better in your work is to understand why you're doing it. Why did a customer spend a not insignificant amount of money to have this thing developed? Why would someone spend their money to pay you to help them? Try to always have a good understanding of that wherever you are.
There are tons of devs in same bracket, just not the most vocal ones. I could be described as one of them. In most corporations big enough, this is the only way to keep doing development instead of management, unless they have the grow-or-get-fired mentality.
As soon as I would step up one more level, I would be often responsible for team deliveries. Another step and team may not get bigger but various political pressures grow immensely, its much easier to get fired there, dealing with various types of sociopaths is semi-constant. While compensation not that much. And most work time would be spent on meetings and working in MS Office products, not that much development, hardly any creative work.
At the end its just an empty label that is up to you to consider for its worth, to join the rat race or not. Even with my lower position I've managed (rather successfully) teams when needed. I get cca same compensation as 2 levels above with less tenure at the company, way more than any peers and in highest paid region in Europe. I get 10 weeks of paid leave by company due to working on 90% contract. So what is there to strive for - much higher daily stress? Having after-work or weekend calls? Unpaid overtime/weekend work that come with higher positions, although required rarely? Work moving into boring endless calls and discussions, 0 creativity unless you consider churning out excel spreadsheet or powerpoints a creative endeavor? Hardly achievements, rather destructive failures.
No thank you, if I can make the choice. Quality of life, happiness and all that.
The vast majority of the world population, and the vast majority of all people throughout history have not made their choices of job based on the same criteria some of us who are more privileged do today such as wanting to work on something they value.
A job is and always has been a means to live for the majority of people on this Earth. Feigning a mentality of always wanting to grow is part of the act when it comes to corporate life. But even that in itself (corporate life) is a privilege compared to the grueling work most people throughout history have done.
As a person that likes programming but doesn't like some parts of the job it helps me to think about this:
"You are paid for the parts of the work you don't like".
The parts you like are the things you do after work for free as a hobby (think personal projects, playing with a new language, dabbling in microcontrollers...)
It is possible for a business to pay someone for the parts they don't like even when the parts they don't like do not contribute to profit or financial success in some way. This is not only demoralizing, it is usually boring, and usually not a good caraeer strategy because it is not sustainable.
I feel like "My Head Count" is more important than outcomes at many companies.
Shameless plug, but I just wrote up an article about very similar issues, seems like me and OP are also around the same age. For me this realization was really freeing - bashing my head against "the market" for years, fighting with inconsistent values and expectations. Since I have accepted programming to be a hobby and looking for vocations without all the corporate shingles I am so much happier.
This is true, however, I think that software engineering is an exception there. There are very few professions other than software development (maybe the arts?) where a growth mindset and tinkering on stuff in your free time seems to be mandatory. You don't see accountants or roofers skilling up in their free time. Furthermore, upskilling is less about pursuing one's interests than pursuing the interests of the market and I think this may be the issue for OP.
To gently push back, there are absolutely accountants and roofers who dedicate their free time upskilling or in adjacent hobbies. Many (perhaps most?) other fields have are conferences and journals, certifications, prestige jobs and grindhouse jobs, side hustles, and all the other trappings that feel unique to us. I'm not saying the distribution curve is the same, but it's easy to think this field is more unique than it really is.
And to the counterexample, the country is full of developers who just want to do their 40 hours and go home to their entirely unrelated life and hobbies. Incidentally, I have a friend who just got a job like this. He's the only developer in a regional materials company, and he loves being done with work at 5 (usually closer to 4) so he can go hang out with his kid.
Sounds like the author is experiencing disillusion with the working world. (Not surprised to see that happening soon after their graduation. I had a similar experience myself.)
Here’s a parable that seems to illustrate what it looks like to find fulfillment in one’s work.[1] It helped me see the world differently.
> Three bricklayers are asked: “What are you doing?” The first says, “I am laying bricks.” The second says, “I am building a church.” And the third says, “I am building the house of God.” The first bricklayer has a job. The second has a career. The third has a calling.
And the trick is - from the outside, each performs the same work. But how each person views their work determines how much fulfillment they derive from it (and whether they succeed at reaching their long term goals).
Rather than searching for some magical job that fulfills you in all the ways you're not now, I would suggest focusing on how to make your current job more fulfilling first. Craft your role around the pieces of the work that move you.
If you can’t do that, no new role will fill that yearning, that emptiness, for you. You’ll just be searching your whole life for something that doesn’t exist, until you eventually give up.
Sure, a new job might be more interesting to you and might fit you better - for a little while - but all jobs, no matter how exciting they sound, are still jobs. They still have sucky parts that drain you and disillusion you and will make you miserable if you let them. And you need to learn how to persevere through that to find something to pull you out of it.
What I’m saying is: it might not be a job problem… it might be a you problem.
Three software engineers are asked: "What are you doing?" The first says, "I am writing software." The second says, "I am building a yoga instruction application." And the third says, "I'm making the world a better place through canonical data models to communicate between endpoints."
What would the third brick layer say if in fact they were building a prison? Or something less positive? I don't really understand who is the one I'm supposed to emulate here.
OP provided details that make the analogy feel distant.
That's not just graduates. The main difference with the gen Z if OP is even one, is that they have a much longer future than those who already worked decades. Mature workers would just accept to do the remaining legs even if meaning keeps falling. The young have bigger stakes, projecting the trajectory leads to an absolute no go, for them.
> The young have bigger stakes, projecting the trajectory leads to an absolute no go, for them.
If you told the young graduate me where I would end up in 15 years, I wouldn't have believed it.
The young may have a long trajectory ahead of them, but they are absolutely bad at planning and predicting where they will end up (unless you have rich parents, which means you'll probably end up okay regardless)
> I graduated in July 2024 from Avans with a degree in Computer Science.
But I have to confess, I'm not sure I understand your comment if you wouldn't mind clarifying.
I wouldn't suggest people (like mature workers) just accept the misery and run out the clock. But I do think it is extremely important to be able to find the meaning in your work, rather than hoping there is a magical other job out there that otherwise fulfills you.
Ok, so OP doesn't like working to make their boss rich. "Start your own company," you might say. But after the honeymoon period wanes, you might find that "I don't like working for someone" turns into "I don't like having to find all these customers myself" or "I don't like having to spend all my time doing paperwork or talking to investors or wearing a million hats or..."
My point is that there will always be reasons to be miserable at any job, so you need to be able to find the pieces that are meaningful to you.
To stretch the analogy a bit to relationships... if OP is saying, "I don't like my relationship with my current partner" I'm saying, "Sure, you can find a new partner if that's what you want. And maybe you should. But just know, there is no magic partner out there that fulfills all of your needs. You're going to have a relationship with a real, human person, and your new partner will have things you love about them and things that drive you crazy, just like the last one. You need to know how to build a meaningful relationship and find fulfillment in it, otherwise, there is no magic partner that will fill that hole in you."
From OP:
> I want to work on personal projects that I find important and help out other projects, that's it. If rent wasn't an issue I'd be working full-time on open-source
That's going to have exciting parts and miserable parts just like their current role, so they will be quite disappointed after the honeymoon period wears off if they aren't able to find meaning in the drudgery. If OP is looking at this as their magical next partner, they will certainly be disappointed when they realize that their new partner snores and leaves the toilet seat up and leaves dirty dishes in the sink.
Ever seen the movie OfficeSpace? It's funny as hell partly because there's a lot of truth to it. Here's the interesting part it was released in 1999 and the dot-com bubble didn't burst until March 2000. It didn't do well when it was released, probably because everyone was busy snorting toxic positivity, but it endured longer than Enron.
I’ll put in a plug for nonprofits. In the U.S. there are thousands of them and they all need tech workers of some kind. Some have digital products like web applications and mobile apps. Some just have a Wordpress site and basic IT needs. In any case it is probably not going to be cutting edge tech.
But aligning with values might be easier since that is what a nonprofit is all about. It’s an organization that is going all-in on one particular specific set of values, to the exclusion of commercial goals like making profit for owners or shareholders.
Which means that they also don’t pay as well (nearly as well) as private big tech companies. If nothing else, working at a nonprofit will help you realize how important money vs mission is to you, in a very personal way. You’ll either say “I can live on this” or “this sucks, I can’t stand being underpaid.”
Note that not all nonprofits are charities. There are thousands of trade associations, chambers of commerce, economic development councils, etc. in the U.S. And of course all sorts of political committees and orgs across the spectrum.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote that an aspiring writer should take any writing job he or she can get. A hack job will at least keep the creative wheels turning. I think the same applies to software development jobs. Take one where you can learn something, hone your chops. Doesn't have to be your passion, because turning an abstract conception into working software is intrinsically satisfying to someone who appreciates that particular form of magic.
Do your own projects on the side and keep your antenna peeled for other opportunities more in line with your own life goals.
Yeah, it's a great idea. If nothing else, taking a job that is non-ideal will expose you to real people with real problem, even if the domain you all are working on is boring/sucky/whatever. Notice when people complain about stuff, try to see the patterns, ask probing questions what could have helped them, and eventually you'll discover patterns of problems that you could potentially solve by leaving and building your own thing.
* have their own niche so they don't have to fight for survival but don't have to aggressively expand either
if you know where to look.
The caveat is that they probably are not hiring many people right now, and the bar is not low at all (even though most employees are mediocre). In the current market, many people want to work at those companies.
My advice to anyone who wants to work at a place like this but who doesn't have connections is to try to find a good recruiting agency. An agency put me in a business like this, and the business hired me after 6 months.
It was one of the best places I've worked. People were kind, had families, and went home after their 40 hours. I stayed for 6 years before deciding to strike out on my own.
A mature company that makes something real, like a manufacturing business. A lot of stuff being made depends on a combination of hardware and software. The software side can't grow exponentially because the hardware can't, and because it doesn't experience the same level of investor interest as the "tech" industry. Yet it serves a useful purpose and often brings unexpected but interesting problems to solve.
I work at a company in the American Midwest that makes measurement equipment. A friend programs robots for a high tech factory. We're both musicians (and cyclists) and play in a band together.
It's written as if the person's feelings are an external force, descending upon them beyond their control. The feelings that emerge in their life are the feelings they have no choice but to feel.
I think it's the exact opposite: Nothing, not a single person or circumstance, no matter how they act (or don't act) upon me, can make me feel a certain way.
I choose how I feel. It's not always easy, but it's always true. I think the OP knows this subconsciously, as evidenced by the doubt in their very next sentence:
> I'm pretty sure there's no alternative
There are myriad alternatives, waiting to be chosen.
What other industries but tech do any of us bother to talk about finding jobs that align with our values? (Outside of avoiding illegal or immoral work.) I think we were incredibly fortunate before ZIRP went away that we had much greater opportunity to choose companies that appealed to us.
I think it’s in part due to the fact that we’re expected to expend effort in these jobs thinking “big picture” about the roadmap and planning.
If you’re at a job where you get handed jira tickets and crunch bugs, you can probably ignore the big picture purpose and purpose and just be a cog that pushes code.
But if your job keeps telling you to think about why and how to improve the product, you will immediately see your values butting up against management’s values. This is a recipe for disillusionment because it causes you to think about what you value and then you get sucker punched when you see decisions being made with a different set of values by a machine that disregards your own.
Normally when you plumb a building, you're probably not working on an application that performs sentiment analysis on call workers, or finding a way to become a middleman in financial transactions, or you're probably not aiding the intelligence agencies of a world power.
I think more than you think? I like to believe that pretty much any career can have moments of “I’m proud to be part of this organization.” And “I can’t be part of this anymore.”
We’re not special in that regard. Our challenge lies in the sheer breadth of options available to us; but even that’s not unique: managing non profits, janitors, HR professionals, and lawyers also can work with a breathtaking array of companies.
Really the only folks who don’t have that issue to the same extent are tradespeople: carpenters, electricians, plumbers; but even they can say no to a job for a person or company they don’t want to support.
I choose every single job according to my values. I'd easily pick jobs where I earn less solely due to the company operating on ethical grounds. I did that throughout both of my careers (retail & tech) and will continue to do so.
Easiest choice of my life. How can one live with themselves knowing you fuck over people?
Readit News
Which is fine, if you can find a way to make it happen.
But for the majority of us, work means work. It's not always aligned with your own interests, it can feel like drudgery, and we accept the uncomfortable reality that our labor is probably making somebody else richer than it's making us.
I'm a fan of cooperatives, where at least you know that you have part ownership over your endeavors. But even then, you often need to work to satisfy clients and customers, rather than to satisfy your own interests.
Ultimately, I've learned to separate my hobby interest in programming and my work. I accept that work will always feel like work, but a few things (like good coworkers) can make a big difference. I try to make the experience tolerable for myself and my coworkers, and then I do what I really love on the side.
I suppose in other industries this isn’t always expected. For example, you can easily be a mid-level accountant for your entire career without the company or industry expecting you to be on track to be their next CFO.
Maybe the author should be looking at medium/big non-tech companies that have been around a long time, have aging codebases, and aren’t innovating in the same way as as big tech or startup. I suspect they might find developers who have been there for many years and are pretty complacent.
Their resume indicates they have 1 year of experience. The unwritten rules about leveling up I think generally amount to reaching a first level "senior" (~5 YoE) where you can be expected to do things like figure out how to do a task and coordinate with others on your own instead of needing a mentor/lead to guide you all the time. Like it's more learning how to work with some technical stuff thrown in. I've been pretty direct with my managers throughout my 30s that I've got other priorities in life now (kids), and I'm not looking to grow and be more ambitious and all that, and I haven't found that to be an issue. Your manager is a person (for now. Good luck to gen alpha). They get it. Caveat: you still need to care, understand what you're doing at work, and do a good job. Don't phone it in, but you don't need to be chasing promotions either once you have some basic competence. I still get good performance reviews. We just have an understanding that I'm not looking at "the next step" or working toward any career goal.
Maybe the author's problem is that their workplace is basically a small body shop and isn't helping them grow? I don't know; never heard of them. They may want to find a more product development oriented company/team (so not just short term projects/contracts), perhaps like you say medium or large so there's more room for mentorship.
I see one of the projects was working on some thing used by a bunch of bike shops. That sounds like serving a direct need some small business had? One way to be both happier and better in your work is to understand why you're doing it. Why did a customer spend a not insignificant amount of money to have this thing developed? Why would someone spend their money to pay you to help them? Try to always have a good understanding of that wherever you are.
As soon as I would step up one more level, I would be often responsible for team deliveries. Another step and team may not get bigger but various political pressures grow immensely, its much easier to get fired there, dealing with various types of sociopaths is semi-constant. While compensation not that much. And most work time would be spent on meetings and working in MS Office products, not that much development, hardly any creative work.
At the end its just an empty label that is up to you to consider for its worth, to join the rat race or not. Even with my lower position I've managed (rather successfully) teams when needed. I get cca same compensation as 2 levels above with less tenure at the company, way more than any peers and in highest paid region in Europe. I get 10 weeks of paid leave by company due to working on 90% contract. So what is there to strive for - much higher daily stress? Having after-work or weekend calls? Unpaid overtime/weekend work that come with higher positions, although required rarely? Work moving into boring endless calls and discussions, 0 creativity unless you consider churning out excel spreadsheet or powerpoints a creative endeavor? Hardly achievements, rather destructive failures.
No thank you, if I can make the choice. Quality of life, happiness and all that.
A job is and always has been a means to live for the majority of people on this Earth. Feigning a mentality of always wanting to grow is part of the act when it comes to corporate life. But even that in itself (corporate life) is a privilege compared to the grueling work most people throughout history have done.
Working at crappy places because they pay more is a choice, not an inevitability.
"You are paid for the parts of the work you don't like".
The parts you like are the things you do after work for free as a hobby (think personal projects, playing with a new language, dabbling in microcontrollers...)
I feel like "My Head Count" is more important than outcomes at many companies.
https://abelbodis.hu/lovecode.html (The whole site is very much in progress)
This is true, however, I think that software engineering is an exception there. There are very few professions other than software development (maybe the arts?) where a growth mindset and tinkering on stuff in your free time seems to be mandatory. You don't see accountants or roofers skilling up in their free time. Furthermore, upskilling is less about pursuing one's interests than pursuing the interests of the market and I think this may be the issue for OP.
And to the counterexample, the country is full of developers who just want to do their 40 hours and go home to their entirely unrelated life and hobbies. Incidentally, I have a friend who just got a job like this. He's the only developer in a regional materials company, and he loves being done with work at 5 (usually closer to 4) so he can go hang out with his kid.
What's the hobby?
Here’s a parable that seems to illustrate what it looks like to find fulfillment in one’s work.[1] It helped me see the world differently.
> Three bricklayers are asked: “What are you doing?” The first says, “I am laying bricks.” The second says, “I am building a church.” And the third says, “I am building the house of God.” The first bricklayer has a job. The second has a career. The third has a calling.
And the trick is - from the outside, each performs the same work. But how each person views their work determines how much fulfillment they derive from it (and whether they succeed at reaching their long term goals).
Rather than searching for some magical job that fulfills you in all the ways you're not now, I would suggest focusing on how to make your current job more fulfilling first. Craft your role around the pieces of the work that move you.
If you can’t do that, no new role will fill that yearning, that emptiness, for you. You’ll just be searching your whole life for something that doesn’t exist, until you eventually give up.
Sure, a new job might be more interesting to you and might fit you better - for a little while - but all jobs, no matter how exciting they sound, are still jobs. They still have sucky parts that drain you and disillusion you and will make you miserable if you let them. And you need to learn how to persevere through that to find something to pull you out of it.
What I’m saying is: it might not be a job problem… it might be a you problem.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8663762-three-bricklayers-a...
Every VP building the most cancerous product will think they are making the world a better place. It's just a matter of perspective.
That's not just graduates. The main difference with the gen Z if OP is even one, is that they have a much longer future than those who already worked decades. Mature workers would just accept to do the remaining legs even if meaning keeps falling. The young have bigger stakes, projecting the trajectory leads to an absolute no go, for them.
If you told the young graduate me where I would end up in 15 years, I wouldn't have believed it.
The young may have a long trajectory ahead of them, but they are absolutely bad at planning and predicting where they will end up (unless you have rich parents, which means you'll probably end up okay regardless)
> I graduated in July 2024 from Avans with a degree in Computer Science.
But I have to confess, I'm not sure I understand your comment if you wouldn't mind clarifying.
I wouldn't suggest people (like mature workers) just accept the misery and run out the clock. But I do think it is extremely important to be able to find the meaning in your work, rather than hoping there is a magical other job out there that otherwise fulfills you.
Ok, so OP doesn't like working to make their boss rich. "Start your own company," you might say. But after the honeymoon period wanes, you might find that "I don't like working for someone" turns into "I don't like having to find all these customers myself" or "I don't like having to spend all my time doing paperwork or talking to investors or wearing a million hats or..."
My point is that there will always be reasons to be miserable at any job, so you need to be able to find the pieces that are meaningful to you.
To stretch the analogy a bit to relationships... if OP is saying, "I don't like my relationship with my current partner" I'm saying, "Sure, you can find a new partner if that's what you want. And maybe you should. But just know, there is no magic partner out there that fulfills all of your needs. You're going to have a relationship with a real, human person, and your new partner will have things you love about them and things that drive you crazy, just like the last one. You need to know how to build a meaningful relationship and find fulfillment in it, otherwise, there is no magic partner that will fill that hole in you."
From OP:
> I want to work on personal projects that I find important and help out other projects, that's it. If rent wasn't an issue I'd be working full-time on open-source
That's going to have exciting parts and miserable parts just like their current role, so they will be quite disappointed after the honeymoon period wears off if they aren't able to find meaning in the drudgery. If OP is looking at this as their magical next partner, they will certainly be disappointed when they realize that their new partner snores and leaves the toilet seat up and leaves dirty dishes in the sink.
But aligning with values might be easier since that is what a nonprofit is all about. It’s an organization that is going all-in on one particular specific set of values, to the exclusion of commercial goals like making profit for owners or shareholders.
Which means that they also don’t pay as well (nearly as well) as private big tech companies. If nothing else, working at a nonprofit will help you realize how important money vs mission is to you, in a very personal way. You’ll either say “I can live on this” or “this sucks, I can’t stand being underpaid.”
Note that not all nonprofits are charities. There are thousands of trade associations, chambers of commerce, economic development councils, etc. in the U.S. And of course all sorts of political committees and orgs across the spectrum.
At least in the arts side of non-profits. Although given that its startting to seep into tech, I imagine it's true across all non-profits.
Do your own projects on the side and keep your antenna peeled for other opportunities more in line with your own life goals.
* are mostly B2B oriented
* are (usually) private
* have a healthy balance sheet
* have their own niche so they don't have to fight for survival but don't have to aggressively expand either
if you know where to look.
The caveat is that they probably are not hiring many people right now, and the bar is not low at all (even though most employees are mediocre). In the current market, many people want to work at those companies.
It was one of the best places I've worked. People were kind, had families, and went home after their 40 hours. I stayed for 6 years before deciding to strike out on my own.
Where?
I work at a company in the American Midwest that makes measurement equipment. A friend programs robots for a high tech factory. We're both musicians (and cyclists) and play in a band together.
> All I know is that this is how I feel
It's written as if the person's feelings are an external force, descending upon them beyond their control. The feelings that emerge in their life are the feelings they have no choice but to feel.
I think it's the exact opposite: Nothing, not a single person or circumstance, no matter how they act (or don't act) upon me, can make me feel a certain way.
I choose how I feel. It's not always easy, but it's always true. I think the OP knows this subconsciously, as evidenced by the doubt in their very next sentence:
> I'm pretty sure there's no alternative
There are myriad alternatives, waiting to be chosen.
If you’re at a job where you get handed jira tickets and crunch bugs, you can probably ignore the big picture purpose and purpose and just be a cog that pushes code.
But if your job keeps telling you to think about why and how to improve the product, you will immediately see your values butting up against management’s values. This is a recipe for disillusionment because it causes you to think about what you value and then you get sucker punched when you see decisions being made with a different set of values by a machine that disregards your own.
We’re not special in that regard. Our challenge lies in the sheer breadth of options available to us; but even that’s not unique: managing non profits, janitors, HR professionals, and lawyers also can work with a breathtaking array of companies.
Really the only folks who don’t have that issue to the same extent are tradespeople: carpenters, electricians, plumbers; but even they can say no to a job for a person or company they don’t want to support.
Nothing special about IT except we tend to enjoy the work itself not just the outcome of that work.
Who do you know that's working age, capable, and doesn't want a good job?
IDK, ask Larry Fink.