alt Hacker News> maybe not in their first 10 years of their career, but what companies do is cut that short and push engineers away from the technical work
Perhaps the issue is that there just isn't that much technical work to go around.
While software was booming I remember hearing stories from EEs who found the opportunities in that field lacking. My understanding is that a lot of the people didn't do much technical or engineering work, but those who remained in the field became "BOM spreadsheet babysitters" and "Guy who's only here because we need a licensed engineer to sign off". It really pushed my away from that field even those there are many domains within it that greatly interest me. My understanding is that a lot of the hands on or technical engineering positions went to Asia along with the manufacturing
Yeah that could be the case. In my experience companies slice their software products in tiny slices and give a tiny slice to engineers, which is technically easy. Then after a few years there is real pressure to move away from doing hands-on technical work and just manage your own team of engineers with their tiny slices.
Instead of doing that, companies could structure to have less engineers with more technical work, and letting them specialize over many years. But part of the incentive is not wanting any one engineer to have too much knowledge in efforts to make them replaceable. It's an unfortunate side effect of how companies optimize things, and the consumer has no way to know or select this at the market level.