[fsloth]

"I think you want to seek out companies where the main business risk is technology risk still."

This is an excellent assessment. Any software product that depends on understanding deep first principles based complex systems has an ecological need to maintain a working engineering culture. At least in those parts of the organization that does product development.

I've worked my entire software engineer career in computer graphics and computer aided design (after getting my masters in physics) and while in these fields you've seen the usual MBA types poke their heads out, there have still been nooks where proper engineering was necessary.

So, find a company that seems to be needing internal development of non-trivial software.

But the original attention was correct as well - there are so many non-value adding bullshit jobs to keep things "professional" that they try to embrace all nooks an crannies, so even a healthy engineering culture is usually at risk, all the time.