This is not true, I can confidently say, most of the time. Engineers generally want to build software they think is a good trade off between fulfilling the spec and not being too hard to build.
This does not generally translate to good software. It’s not a detriment of character or anything like that. They’re just lazy like most people are
Classically people got into software engineering because they liked writing code and they needed a way to pay the bills. Plenty of retired software engineers still code because it is part of who they are.
Most software engineers especially now are definitively not plucky kids who just love computers. They are in it entirely for the money. It's a completely different kind of person, the motivation comes from a completely different place.
A company should be able to build working software even without good engineers. Just like how TCP can deliver ordered packets over unreliable connections - you change the processes and systems to do it. Of course, you give up some things - such as speed and agility in that case.
For most people, a job is a job. It's not something they want to dedicate their life to - that's for artists and craftsman, and not many people are of that ilk in the modern day.
When I graduated (2006) it was still mostly that way, a few kids in it for the money tried to get a CS degree and failed out and changed majors.
Most of the people I've had the pleasure of working with have a love for the craft.
Sadly I understand that with how messed to the economy is now days, making a good living in a US costal city doing anything else but software is rather unrealistic...
I'm generalizing, obviously, but I think most engineers would rather not build horribly tech-debt-y things all else equal. Yes, there are some business-minded engineers, but just looking at my own data set of job seekers, people seeking code quality far outnumber people seeking rapid product iteration.
This is not true, I can confidently say, most of the time. Engineers generally want to build software they think is a good trade off between fulfilling the spec and not being too hard to build.
This does not generally translate to good software. It’s not a detriment of character or anything like that. They’re just lazy like most people are