[spacenick88]

SpaceX is landing rocket stages on a drone ship after having them drop from 7400 km/h at 100 km altitude. JPL has a city car sized rover craned from a hovering lander on Mars and DeepMind has a computer win against the acting Go champion. Pretty sure that rules out the "today's engineers are bad" hypotheses.

[ptidhomme]

Indeed we still make great technological achievements, and thanks God there are still brilliant engineers out there. But they may not be equally distributed in the industry.

And many of them (in my humble experience, at least) rely too much on computing tools and algorithms they do not completely master, expecting a "magical" answer out of them.

[magduf]

There absolutely are brilliant engineers out there.

The problem is, they're probably not working at Boeing.