"You get paid to get stuff done, period."
It sounds like you hate your job? To be sure, I've done plenty of grinding over my career as a software engineer but in fact I coded as a hobby before it turned into a career, I then continued to code on the side, now I am retired and code still.
Perhaps the artist in me that keeps at it.
I love my job FWIW. I work at performance engineering and we work with the most complex systems in the world (GB200/B300/...). Couldn't be happier.
But I just don't care if I have 5 layers of abstraction and SOLID principles and clean code and.... bah. I get it. I have an MSc in it and I've been doing this as a hobby and then professionally for decades now. It just doesn't matter. At the end of the day, we get paid to ship something that solves a problem.
It might be a novel problem. And it might be at the frontier of what we can do today. But it's still a problem that needs solving and the path we take is irrelevant from a user's perspective as long as it solves the problem.
I don't think they hate their job, just seem to be frustrated at slow bureaucratic processes and long code reviews which I've experienced too. After a while it can get aggravating as to why some people want to nitpick minute details of the code which slows down development overall. I am talking about cases where the initially submitted PR is perfectly fine, not grossly incorrect.
Oh wow, if we're talking about code reviews that's a different topic. I've never, FWIW, encountered "artisans" in code reviews. More like "that's not how I would have coded itsans" and "let me show you some new tricksans".
Yeah, to hell with code reviews. The best years of my career were when I was given carte blanche control over an entire framework, etc. When code reviews came along coding at work sucked.
If anything, the code reviews killed the artisanship.
90% of the CRs I've ever gotten have been "artisanal" just because nitpicking superficial nonsense is easier than meaningful critique, and even when the code is perfectly fine it looks more productive from a managers perspective if you're nitpicking a function name than if you just respond with lgtm.
Yeah that's what I understood them to mean from "like when in the office people have been spending weeks on optimizing code... just to have the exact same output, exact same time, but now "nicer"." There does come such a time either way when the juice isn't worth the squeeze so to speak in terms of optimization of code.