Sure, and that's a big shift in industry culture over the last several decades.
While there had long been perfuctory white collar programmer analysts filling the ranks at some dry divisions at IBM, it used to be way more common to have a software engineering department full of Asimov-steeped Omni-reading nerds who had genuinely passionate interest in the field that had taken hold even before they started working in it.
But later the career increasingly came to be treated more like law, medicine, or finance and you started to see those rooms fill with people that were often generally bright but not really "called" to the field in the same aay.
To the best of my knowledge zero of the people passionate about programming that I know have spent a meaningful portion of their career at non-tech companies. Internships or first jobs out of college are common, but the passionate people end up going somewhere where the thing they're working on is more than an incidental cost center for their employer.
I'd guess it makes sense that if programming is a passion for you then probably a non-tech-centric F500 company probably isn't where you'd choose to work.
For context: my current company with ~400 employees (not just engineering) is the largest company I've ever worked at.
I wonder if carpenters, plumbers and electricians, etc have the same kind of love for their jobs in comparable ratios.
I certainly don't ask when I hire one.
I mean I got into it because I loved it as a kid in the 80s and 90s. And I still loved it in college. Turning it into a job quickly crushed any love I had though.
For most people it's a job, and that's ok.