For what its worth, the field does have something of an immune response to those sorts of people (software engineers only in it for the money). You often hear a lot of nonsense online about leetcode interviews or whatever, but most of my jobs have asked questions like "do you have a computer at home? what kind?" and "have you ever used linux?" or "tell me about some hobby projects you have done, its okay if it was a long time ago" and used the responses to try and figure out if you were interested in computers. Ive often had bosses talk about how its been much more successful for them to train someone interested or give them space to learn themselves rather than hire someone checked out who has only credentials. If anything, thats the entire risk that hiring is trying to avoid.

I get it a little less now, but perhaps thats because i'm starting to have a good amount of experience to talk about - and getting questions more like "talk about a project that you thought was going to fail. What happened? did you do anything? why?" to try the same thing but with management concepts. They want to see that you're interested.

Some of these were ten years ago, some in 2025.