> This draws many engineers towards a very objective worldview.

Would you have an engineer any other way? I'd argue you can't be a good engineer without an objective worldview - because engineering is the art of making physical things outside your body do what you said they would, reliably. Yes, code eventually runs on physical things.

It doesn't matter what you believe, how you think the world really works, whose side you're on politically - it matters that the bridge stands. That the networking router ASIC routes 100G of traffic accurately and with low latency, without randomly locking up. That the airplane's fuel burn is what you say it will be. These are all pretty hard objective external truths that don't care what you think about them - they are what they are.

On the other hand, especially in the "consumer tech" spaces, I think a lot of engineers (at least those I know and converse with) are looking towards early retirement, or at least "not doing that which they've done." The state of modern computers can be described as "broken and getting more broken," with the fixes for the last complex hacks breaking and requiring yet more new complex hacks. Do that for 20 years, and you end up with this teetering pile of... something, and then you do the same thing with the software on top of it. Piles of libraries, running on a pile of libraries, running on gigabytes of God knows what, running on... all the way down. It's a security mess.

Then what do we largely choose to do with it? There's some neat stuff, yes, but a lot of the tech industry is based, tightly or loosely, around collecting all the data, processing all the data, and using it to predict all the things, then sell those predictions about human behavior to whoever will pay. It's the default model for a company these days, and it's increasingly hard to ignore that - even for an awful lot of money. If you've looked at the past 15 years of your work and realized that it's gone to some pretty human-toxic ends, "not doing that anymore" is pretty appealing.

The security, similarly, is a pile of crap, and everyone knows it. But, despite that, nobody is willing to consider alternatives to "Well, patch it and carry on." Say what you will about the conveniences of digitalization, things like the OPM "theft of everyone who's ever applied for a clearance's life history" wouldn't have happened if the data had been stored on paper. It's mighty convenient to have it digital, but it's a lot harder to have someone haul out 500 tons of paperwork without someone noticing.

So, yes, there's been some interesting work going on, but there's also an awful lot of "Well, it sounded interesting, but it's definitely been not used how I hoped..." work done in the past decades.

And if someone is in that state, you're unlikely to hire them for much. They're probably planning their exit already to go be a gentleman farmer of llamas or goats or something. Emus are just too mean to bother with.

I know a lot of people somewhere in this pipeline.

Another issue I've seen is that there are a good number of engineers (again, I talk to a variety of them) who are a bit hesitant about the Covid vaccine mandates - especially those who have already recovered from a bout with it before the vaccines were available. Quite a few companies are covered by some variety of uncertainty with that, so there's some decently sized pool of engineers (typically older, more experienced) who just aren't going to go work for some large set of companies. You can agree with them or disagree, but it doesn't change the fact that it's going on, and people are trying to figure out how to work with it.

I think we'll just see a big wave of retirements in the next few years of senior engineers who have no interest in the tech field anymore, and are happy to let it spin in the wind after what it's done for 20 years.