Maybe it’s because I literally do not give a shit about the company or it’s products or customers. I just want money. In fact, I want the opposite kind of imposter syndrome, where I trick the people hiring me into thinking I’m much more qualified than I actually am get paid a shit ton more money. Yes I know C++, Pascal, Assembly, COBOL. Please pay me $500k.
Yup this is exactly it. Have the same analysis in the same kind of gig. "Software engineering" is the ultimate bullshit job, the existence of <startups> is a net negative for society, and the amount of intellectual effort that goes into gluing disparate APIs together to do meaningless things is criminal, but I'm going to milk it for all it's worth.