Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am a mechanical engineer. Mechanical engineering jobs ask for SolidWorks/AutoCAD/CATIA/Creo/etc experience, not just computer-aided design; ANSYS/ABAQUS/NASTRAN/etc expertise, not just finite element method; Fluent/CFX/OpenFOAM/etc knowledge, not just computational fluid dynamics. With the exception of OpenFOAM, all of these software are proprietary, largely non-interoperable, and expensive—like thousands to tens o…
>Outside of programming, this is the norm. The number of free and/or open-source tools available to a mechanical engineer or an electrical engineer are infinitesimally small and it is almost impossible to do a serious engineering project with only free tools. >Since this is quite lucrative for the companies making those tools, I can only imagine tech companies would be more than happy to lead us to a future where sof…
I can only speculate, since I am not a software engineer, but I think part of maturing is things get more complex and making things more difficult and expensive. Thirty years ago, someone could say "Fuck it! I'm fucking sick of Unix! I'll just go write my own fucking operating system!" and actually do it. Today, operating systems are so complex and large that this is not feasible anymore. Maybe you can write your own AWS replacement today, but would you able to write a replacement for AWS of 2050 in 2050?
It it one of those things that I would be happy to be proven wrong about, but as of now, I am not super optimistic that the current state of freedom of software engineering tools would continue indefinitely.