See, when I joined my current company, I was full of energy and I did BF. I fixed broken builds. I made our abandoned test suite green. I refactored our deployment pipeline. I hunted down the root cause of bugs and fixed them. But then I noticed several things.
First, rather than encourage people to behave like me by example, they did the opposite. Why fix a broken build when I would come along and do it? it turns out doing shit work just gives you more shit work.
Also the guy does hack jobs got promoted ahead of me because he is a master of optics and presents his work much better than it is. And look at how fast he delivers! it doesn't matter his code keeps causing problems in prod, by then he has moved on to another project and it's someone else's problem.
Oh, and that junior guy than I spend several hours a week helping makes more than me, because we hired him in 2022 when we were desperately throwing money at people, but I didn't get a raise in 2023 despite an "exceeds" rating because you know, it's tough times and we need to buckle up.
Listen, I love what I do and I want to excel at it, but is it any wonder and CBF? At the end of the day I work for a salary. If my efforts aren't rewarded, or sometimes actively punished, my motivation goes down the drain. Sure, part of it we do for ourselves, but at some point you have to question who is really benefiting from the situation.
Choosing an IT-career is just the least evil for me.
You aren’t forced too. You need to look up what ’forced’ really means. I’m not saying it isn’t hard though.