Dear, for your sake only, I am pasting this definition straight from wikipedia -

Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, design, analyze, build, and test machines, systems, structures and materials TO FULFILL OBJECTIVES AND REQUIREMENTS WHILE CONSIDERING THE LIMITATIONS IMPOSED BY PRACTICALITY, REGULATION, SAFETY, AND COST.

The exact reason why most software engineers aren't really engineers.

Yes. This. There are only 700 software engineers in my province. I'm pretty sure not many are working on front end web development. Yet every front end job posting is "engineer". Just no. You don't get to call yourself a doctor because you are medically-inclined. Same applies to engineer.

That's fine, but that's not engineering. Bridge designers do not try to build bridges out of materials discovered in the laboratory last month.

... and bridge designers don't design 'to have fun', but to have structurally sound, cheap and reliable infrastructure tool to cross rivers. Or imagine hiring a construction company for your dream house, realizing only after all is built that they were experimenting and 'having fun' with new unproven materials, construction, wiring etc.

OP's approach is mighty fine for his own endeavors, but if I had such a worker hired, there would be a serious talk about priorities. If no agreement is found even 100x engineer would be let go.

Quantum bridge: its in a superposition of open and closed and will collapse to one of those states when you try to cross. Also its made out of glass and runs on the block chain.

Research engineers do. GP said he is not aiming to build a profitable above all else company. Maximizing fun in a hobby seems legit.

For a hobby and for learning it is absolutely fine. The critique is on businesses running that way fmeither since some developers want to drink the cool-aid on the job or since the company wants to be "attractive" riding the hype train. (How else could they attract the best developers? ;) )

Exactly. Look at Eiffel's Folly, for example.

Because real engineers enjoy making hard things boring.

edit: to be clear, I'm not claiming to be a 'real' engineer. I love writing whimsical, complicated stuff if it makes things easier for users, and make sure I'm writing maintainable code my colleagues are comfortable with with code reviews and removing as many flourishes as possible.

I'm sure I read a definition of engineering once that was basically "meet the requirements doing as little new as possible".

I love engineering. I don't love over-engineering.

I also love to experiment with new interesting stuff. But that's not engineering, it's learning.

If you want to hack on new technologies, great, that's understandable. But do that on your own time, not when you're being paid to achieve business objectives.

This is how you kill innovation pretty effectively, especially considering the usual length of workdays in our industry.

Remember: You will not retain talent if you want them to act like code monkeys.

If you haven't got SV money behind you that's even more reason to focus on delivering something that works.

Your own project on your own time? Go for it. Clients should get the best fit, most reliable option, not the flavour of the moment.

(That all said, RoR is not a great choice these days as it is a niche skill)

Clients are usually not hiring engineers. They have opinionns on management, on what should be done, on how you should work and in which conditions. They have opinions on you being remote or not, on how you should look like, on your mental health (cf. some pieces on whether people on the spectrum make better employees).

Most of these opinions are not grounded and you can not leverage the related tools to improve the work process.

How surprising is it that, given how few variables we are left with, these variables are heavily over-engineered?

I guess.

Those restrictions you describe are classic hallmarks of a toxic workplace IMHO, and somewhere I would leave as soon as I had the chance. I guess I'm lucky to have that choice.

Assuming your field is web development, what is not a niche skill? It seems the choice of backend frameworks is somewhat fragmented with no clear default winner.

I'm not sure there's an outright winner, but RoR was the hot thing what, 12 years ago?

It can be difficult to recruit for now.

(Also no, I'm not in web development, I have just observed this)

I'm not a Rails developer myself, but definitely noticed a lot of demand for Rails work in the various remote job newsletters I'm subscribed to. Can't say how much is legacy vs greenfield or whether this is a reflection of demand for a niche skill or that Rails is still a popular choice for companies. Either way, makes me regret a little I didn't stick to Rails development years ago as it seems quite lucrative even today.

RoR is absolutely not a niche skill-there a huge companies using it (GitHub, Shopify), tons of conferences on it (and a lot of Ruby conferences are heavily Rails), and my company personally has had no trouble recruiting devs. StackOverflow puts it at 8% absolutely popularity while Express is at 17%, so just little less than 50%, so it’s not niche just not in the top 3 backend web frameworks.

It s not fun at all 2 years later though

And it s debateable if learning other people’s apis is fun