I’ve been writing software for over half my life and the core motivation has always been to solve problems and build software that I would want to use myself.
This is in part why I got interested in functional programming during university as it seemed to be able to tame complexity over time more effectively than traditional imperative approaches while often being more elegant and concise. Even though I still focus on software qualities like reliability, correctness, performance, and usability, I find myself also considering the practical business side of software engineering and much more often.