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> And here I am driving a 2003 Golf with a tape deck (and CD player).

That sounds wonderful.

There was a brief, magical moment in history when cars would come with AM/FM radio, a tape deck, a CD player, and an aux port so that you could plug in audio from every other device that humanity would invent for the rest of time.

It feels like the most fleeting of moments, and it was so long ago. Maybe it was just one summer afternoon in the early 2000s.

Anyway, I think we've largely been going downhill since then. For whatever reason, humanity achieved a lovely little peak of engineering, and then we immediately abandoned it for worse options.

Absolutely incredible to see Apple pushing performance like this.

I can't wait to buy one and finally be able to open more than 20 Chrome tabs.

Any thoughts on root cause from your perspective?

I've been on the other side of the table recently, and I agree it feels like a buyer's market. But it still took a while to find good candidates, and a lot of candidates showed up to interviews weirdly unprepared on even the basics.

If it's a drought for you, then I'd have to add: It seems like an especially weird drought, as well. Supply and demand seem to be doing odd things.

(And, for the spectators of this comment thread, I can confirm: Yes, 2 people with 3 anecdotes each is enough to speculate wildly about an entire industry.)

> The IEEE has been riding this horse for a very long time

Well, there's your mistake right there. You're supposed to be riding an ox.

All this talk of oxen and horses got me curious about the PDF, so I went and took a look. It's really far worse than you've described.

I couldn't stomach it for too long, but here's some highlights:

(1) The first ~65 pages are about "requirements gathering." Page 60 offers up this gem of insight:

    Priority = ((Value * (1 - Risk)) / Cost

(2) The next hundreds of pages go through topics in sequence, like "Architecture" and "Design" (who knew they were different?). Naturally, "Security" is slapped on several hundred pages later.

I couldn't make it through the whole PDF, in all honesty. But I'm quite certain the soul of software engineering is nowhere to be found in there; they've eliminated it entirely and replaced it with stamp-collecting and checklists.

> I would rather be a poor entrepreneur/freelancer than wealthy salaried employee. And office isn't really the factor, but other things, like freedom.

To add a data point that will sound snarkier than it is:

I used to say very similar things. It is a really wonderful sound bite, and you can get together with all the other starving founders to say things like this to each other.

Looking back on it, I think this philosophy is actually a really important part of the startup-industrial complex. If you can just make it "not cool" to go get a job, and starting a startup is all about "freedom and adventure," then it becomes really easy for VCs to normalize things like "founders paying themselves subsistence salaries." That means the pipeline of new startups will increase in quantity and decrease in unit-cost -- which is exactly what the VCs want.

What they won't tell you about, if you want to chase the founder dream, is the opportunity cost. It turns out that maxing out your 401(k) is pretty great, as is having an infinite supply of sparkling water and spending your days building software with a whole bunch of other brilliant people.

I'm still not going to RTO, though. That part is just dumb, and I think every serious company that truly values engineering productivity will agree.

The "outliers" are the companies paying these insultingly low salaries for technology development. That's why there's so much low-quality software in the world.

FAANG (and a few FAANG-adjacent) companies are the only ones paying close to decent wages, and even they've been making frankly egregious cuts to their protein-bar budgets lately.

Let's not sit around manufacturing skewed datasets that give people the wrong idea about what software engineers should get paid.

> I don't think the author is sympathetic to autistic people

I think it's actually the exact opposite.

This reads to me like a very kind sentence. It can be very helpful to spell things out like this for such an audience. It is clear, simple, and direct.

I'll also note the sentence doesn't contain any sort of added emotions or judgment. (For example, the author could have made it worse by saying "If you decide to engage in" rather than "If you engage in," as it's currently written.)

So it really is just a straightforward statement about things that are usually never discussed at all. And, even better for this audience, the information is provided plainly, in a safe setting, with time and space to process things.

Forward/backward in which dimension? There's at least three or four to sort out.

> My female friend once experimented by putting up a picture of a shoe as her only dating profile. She still received many likes - some of them paid Super Likes.

Well, obviously. Every guy wants a woman who's got some depth to her sole.

There's also several more classes of B.S., for what it's worth.

An exaggerated/anonymized version of a recent one I got, from an otherwise-really-strong senior engineer: "Of course when I said we would put a button there, it also meant we MUST build an entire UI framework from scratch, with full test coverage for the entire thing!"

...actually, that's not even that exaggerated. Shipping software at big companies can be unreasonably difficult, sometimes.

> My own feeling is that guilds of all sorts prioritize exclusivity for the purposes of bestowing power on some select few. As the article states "Master’s were few and far between".

One possible reason could simply be there's a lot more future impact to granting someone the final title. If you proclaim someone a "Maestro of C++," then suddenly all the other C++ laborers will get a clear signal that whatever that person is doing is implicitly also what they should do, if they want to move up the ladder.

Beyond that, the top jobs usually comes with required work to train the next generation. So this person would heavily contribute, both implicitly and explicitly, to the future of the C++ guild.

Considering that impact in combination with how hard it would be to undo the decision, it's not surprising that many organizations might be cautious about deciding to hand someone that title.

> clear guidelines, training, testing and certification.

This makes sense, too. For any organization that wants to stay in the business of handing out these titles for the long-term, meaningful transparency is a good way to go about it.

...and whoever did that "accidentally" when they had to leave around lunchtime on Friday was, presumably, celebrated as a local legend.