I belong to the "hacker-type from the 90s" group and what you wrote really resonates with me. Yet. I worked with clueless managers leading whole dev teams to

I belong to the "hacker-type from the 90s" group and what you wrote really resonates with me. Yet. I worked with clueless managers leading whole dev teams to burnout because they read a book and apply it verbatim, without understanding anything about it. In a team full of great "hacker-types", a new project manager arrives and in one of the first meetings says "You know you are all very intelligent, you don't need to prove it all the time". We delivered ahead of schedule, having a lot of fun, and all coders agree that he was the reason for it. I "managed" a 2 person team where the "just-in-for-money" dev was reliably churning out one API endpoint after the other one. He loved it, because it was repetitive boring work. The codebase was really consistent, no extra patterns, all code he wrote was really easy to read. The other dev, "hacker-type", in 40 hours of work across 3 days, writes a beautiful, perfect plugin system, i was hoping for a prototype in 2 weeks. Of course, he loved it. At the same time, I gave him a "boring endpoint" once, he proposed a "solution" to a "problem" that was never there, his brain needed to over-engineer the problem until it was fun. I agree with the sentiment of what you wrote: if your job is your passion, a new tech innovation like AI feels exciting rather than scary. But i don't see staying up until morning as a requirement for being a good coder. As a "hacker-type", my early growth ladder towards being professional in a business environment included a few steps about finding work "less fun".