I'm 40 years old, and I've been an engineering manager for 15 years. I don't know if my expectations have grown and this is just a typical "this generation has no work ethic," or if something is fundamentally different. But I'm seeing a widespread inability to take responsibility for working problems to their completion.
I've talked with my mentor about it, he seems to think that it's widespread across industry, affecting anyone who experienced COVID lockdowns in their formative dev years. It essentially destroyed their normally onboarding experiences and taught them that all the rules of the game can change on a whim.
Now with the AI "revolution" happening, developers have the greatest tooling ever available to solve all their problems, but they've been terrified that they're about to lose their jobs to said AI, so they _also_ have no motivation.
I have no solutions and I'm essentially screaming into the wind here. But if anyone else has experienced things like this, misery loves company :)