I've been living in Germany for a very long time and the real decline started some ten years ago. At the beginning mostly because of poor maintenance. My first years with the DB 100 card (allowing to travel on all trains) were a pleasure then it deteriote to the point where you start yourself: where is this heading. As I said, the ban of SBB on German trains was a turning point for me.
But You're right about the networks being different (mostly because France suppressed many local lines in the last 20 years.
When I was young (70s-80s), we were all amazed by Deutsche Bahn's punctuality and quality of service (second only to the Chemins de fer fédéraux suisses). Now, French and Italian trains are a lot more reliable, which is rather strange.
The Swiss Federal Railways asked German trains to wait at the border and has even ban many German trains to enter Switzerland over excessive delays to prevent their train schedule from being affected.
The site is hilarious by the way. I hope it will have an effect on DB, even though I doubt it.
I concur: Perl taught me to mentally parse and build (complex) regexes, a highly transferable skill. The Lisp course I was taught in the late 80s, certainly helped me grok Clojure and find it a pretty natural fit. I think this is a very common trope.
A similar kind of observation made a profound impression on me some 30 years ago. A team of primatologists filmed Macaques in northern Japan. A female had two consecutive baby loss, the second one at least being stillborn. She successively acknowledges the death, takes care of the newborn as if it was alive, hit it furiously on rocks in despair and then again care for it, carry as if alive, get angry at it and so on. Her behaviour displays of acting as if knowing it's not, in this case in a pathological way. (She ends up being rejected by the group.)
Despite the Bonobo case being even more striking an example of being able to do as if, both shows that the behaviour is not unique to humans.
I was already horrified by what I heard in the Netflix documentary (some five years back, I guess). One frightening aspect was that some victims, despite having terribly suffered themselves, introduced him 10, 20 of their friends and acquaintances. One young lady among the victims even confessed with deep remorse to have sent, among others, her own under-aged sister.
You might be right about a Leetcode effect and the difficulty to find new interesting positions. But OP wasn't stressing that at all but the desire to architect and manage. I might have put to much emphasis of the managing and too less on the urge to architect and see things from above. I agree.
I am scientist and worked from time to time as a research engineer merely to pay the bills, so I may see things differently. I always like doing lab / field work and first-hand data analysis. Many engineers I know would likely never stop tinkering and building stuff. It may be easier for a scientist than for an engineer to still get trilled, I don't know.
I have always failed to understand the obsessive dream of many engineers to become managers. It seems not to have to do merely with an increase in revenue.
Is it really to escape from "getting bogged down in the specifics" and being able to "focus on the higher-level, abstract work", to quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering always has been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem solving. My guess is that the drive is toward power. Which is rather natural, if you think about it.
Science and the academic world
I have always failed to understand the obsessive dream of many engineers to become managers. It seems not to be merely about an increase in revenue.
Is it to escape from "getting bogged down in the specifics" and being able to "focus on the higher-level, abstract work", to quote OP's words? I thought naively that engineering has always been about dealing with the specifics and the joy of problem-solving. My guess is that the drive is towards power, which is rather natural, if you think about it.
Science and the academic world suffer a comparable plague.
Very much to the point. "Bots to remind one to check one's reminder" summarizes it all.
Note that the tendency to feel overwhelmed is rather widespread, particularly among those who need to believe that what they do is of great import, even when it isn't.
J is, within the APL family of languages, the one I have always found the most useful. I reach for it as I used to reach for my HP calculator in the past, to quickly compute or numerically model things. I always have it running in a terminal window.
Contrary to popular belief, its learning curve isn't steep. I once introduced it to high school freshmen who had no real experience with programming. I recommend the series of booklets by Kenneth Iverson himself: Arithmetic, Algebra, Calculus — there is even a Concrete Mathematics companion to accompany the book of the same name by Graham, Knuth et alii. They're all available for download on the site.
> Civic institutions—the rule of law, universities, and a free press—are the backbone of democratic life.
I disagree. The backbone of democratic life are the rule of law and freedom of speech, which makes a big difference. The press has historically been a counter-power inquiring into privileges and breaches of the rule of the law and thus promoted freedom of speech but almost only inasmuch it served the interest of the emerging merchant bourgeoisie . And we are long past that. Universities never have been liberal forces: they backed the Church and refused paradigm shifts. They still are very conservative even though in a peculiar sense, as leftist conservatives.