You've got a long post, so I am going to work through it point by painful point, while still being as brief as possible :-)

To recap, the question I posed is

I have to ask, what's the alternative type of author to one who does the job however and goes home?

> Surely you've worked on something with passion before?

I don't think that is relevant to the question. It's unreasonable to expect people to actually be passionate about work. Engaged while on the clock? Professional? Competent? Studious? Yes to all of the above.

I would answer the same to someone who says "I always put in an extra 2 hours each day. Surely you've done the same too?": Just because you do it, does not make it reasonable to ask of employees.

> I don't mind thinking about something over dinner or in the shower when I'm technically not "working".

That's also not relevant to the question. Just because you don't mind doing legwork during dinner does make it a reasonable ask of someone else. Maybe they want to talk to their kids? Maybe they want to watch TV?

It is beyond unreasonable to expect that staff will forgo their private time to think about work problems.

> I'm additionally much more motivated to engage in self-learning of new things that I may be able to put into practice on the work later. A single tiny example is just knowing about regex can save tremendous amounts of work. Same with parser generators.

Once again, this is irrelevant to the question I posed. I don't get the point you are trying to make with (what I construe as) irrelevant anecdotes.

...

You next paragraph, using code reviews as an example, I feel can be addressed by "The Company Pays For That Because It Is Done On Company Time". IOW, the company values it enough to make time for it.

> Though sure, you can also put in more time than the contractually obligated minimum. Sometimes that's fine. But it's not required. There are plenty of devs out there who do a fine job with professional detachment and make sure to be done and gone by a certain hour. But that requires caring at least a bit about professionalism, and not just hacking crap together to increase your ticket close rate.

Here's the meat of the argument, I think: just hacking crap together to increase the ticket close rate.

My original point is that, when this is done, this is not the fault of the employee! If the company incentivises that behaviour, then you shouldn't be judging your coworkers for following that incentive.

After all, as you've demonstrated with the code-review example, if the company wants a particular output, they can so very easily get it! If the company wants non-"hacked together crap", they can incentivise that.

IOW, you are negatively judging some person for doing exactly what is wanted by the company!
What you want is not relevant to the company.

The unfortunate reality is that "hacked together crap" is more often than not more valuable to the company than quality software as you define it, because if it wasn't then the company would stop incentivising the quality of "hacked together crap".

When the company removes ticket-closing rates in its metrics, and replaces it with "quality" (however you define it) then you won't see "hacked together crap".

Until then, it's almost certainly bad form to judge people who are simply optimising for the metrics that they are being measured on.[1]

The TLDR would be "You're blaming the players when it is the game that is rigged". Your ire is terribly misplaced.

[1] I worked, once, at a place that prioritised quality over development velocity. Four years of writing code for embedded devices in C, and I never once shipped a bug! _Not_ _Even_ _Once_ ... go on and guess what my bonus for that feat was? At a different place, I hacked together some spaghetti in a language I barely new, within a week, with no tests and 10% of the happy paths broken. Customer saw it, signed on, I got a nice bonus for ensuring that potential customer turned into actual customer, and some other poor shlub was given the project to move forward with the customer.

IOW, I am both the person you say you are and the person you say you dislike, and having both perspectives, vs your single perspective, makes me a lot more sympathetic to those who do an okay-not-hbad-but-not-actually-that-good job.

I hope that you, one day, can enjoy both perspectives too.