I'm a senior engineer (web full-stack) at a bank. I've been doing this for about 5 years.
When I write code, I find it similar to authoring a book or even writing a poem. I love trying to write code that reads really well, has beautifully designed boundaries between dependencies, great structure and so on. I also find that I write code with a big focus on making it a joy to work with for developers that touch it later on.
I struggle with the emphasis on collaboration and quick iteration approach in this field. "Co-authoring a book" with 6 other "authors" in two week chunks just seems crazy to me. And what I've seen that passes as shippable code is also crazy to me -- but hey, "it works".
I also have never been a guy that gets overly excited about using technology to solve problems or using software to satisfy business needs. I really just like writing code, setting up development environments or CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure or whatever...just for those things themselves. (Again it's like an art form to me. And I really really like reading other's well thought out code and appreciate for just that rather than the use-case or problem that the code is actually solving)
Anyone else out there like me? (Not arguing the merits one way or the other...just curious if I'm a weirdo)
Side note: as a 20 year vet, can you comment on my theory that I'm going to age out of software engineering? How did you make it 20 years? (Real question)