The issue is the bar has been raised for what people call "functional" now. Everyone is picky "OMG not pure so it isn't really functional!!"

Yeesh.

I was actually on the OneNote team when they were transitioning to an online only transcription model because there was no one left to maintain the on device legacy system.

It wasn't any sort of planned technical direction, just a lack of anyone wanting to maintain the old system.

That was such an amazing mission statement. It was a real measurable goal, and progress towards it was quantifiable. And Microsoft actually did it! That mission statement drove actual strategies (lower costs, don't complete with Apple on the high end, force OEMs to compete against each other on price, etc) that resulted in its ultimate fulfillment.

I actually haven't used Rhino for much of anything for decades now, I think the last time I used it was to build a scale model of my old town home. I cannot really justify spending $1000 on a program that I would only boot up once every few months for fun. But I have kept love for it all these years, every time I have started it up (downloaded a trial to get some particular task done) I was able to continue right where I left off making things.

VR, or at least AR, is obviously the future. But Meta, like so many companies before them, saw the future and tried to jump on board way before it was the right time. See: WebTV, the tablet PCs from the early 1990s (!!), Apple Newton, Palm Pilot, etc. (I call it the first mover disadvantage!)

I think calc 1 and 2 are extremely valuable. The concept of rate of change is fundamental to so many things in life, and understanding "area under the curve" is essential to understanding how many ideas are communicated, including lots of graphs in physics, chemistry, and economics.

Beyond that I feel calculus starts getting into specific applications and is less generally applicable to the populace at large.

The (public!) school had a grant from one of Seattle's biotech boom companies.

EVERYTHING is awful compared to Rhino3d. Viscerally painful to use bad in comparison.

The book was on 3d modeling in Rhino 3d. I was really good at Rhino3d at that time, to the extent that using it felt like a natural extension of my hands. IMHO every other 3d modeling program has a trash UI compared to the absolutely amazing UI that Rhinoceros 3d has.

I had to learn how to translate my absolute love of Rhino3D onto a page and explain it to other people. It was hard. It made my brain work in ways it was not used to, but it was an incredibly valuable experience.

The only remaining copy of the book sits behind me on a bit rotted CDR.

I have had 3 types of math teachers in life. American teachers, who generally teach rules from a book according to a curriculum. Russian teachers, who have a passion and a love for the field and who teach how to intuitive the answer to math problems first before going all in on the formulas. And East Asian math teachers who show off the beauty of the equations themselves.

I had one math teacher who couldn't speak English. He didn't need to, he had an incredible ability to communicate math through pure equations. It was lovely, one of the best math classes I've ever had. Math was truly used as a universal language.

I had another teacher (Russian) who got so excited solving equations and explaining DiffEq that he'd break his chalk in half and he'd go diving under desks to pick up the pieces.

But it is artists who are some of the best at transmitting intuitive knowledge. They have centuries of best practices of how to train students to rewrite their brains to literally see the world differently. (And yes a lot of it does involve drawing boring still lives of fruit bowls! But, hey, it works)

Same goes for the basics of statistics. A basic understanding of statistics is a requirement for any college degree in many countries, and for good reasons. Stats comes up all the damn time. From proper A/B testing, to marketing, to understanding public health emergencies, to making informed medical decisions.

This was also before SSDs as well.

With local build times already measured in multiple hours (large C++ code bases, lots of caches obj files loaded from central build servers to make local incremental rebuilds even possible), Microsoft didn't want to make things worse by forcing any bloat on developer machines.

Microsoft was never elitist about what schools they hired from. When I was there almost anyone who applied from an accredited CS program got at least a phone screen.

But no one in their right mind, in 2012 (when this particular incident happened!), would voluntarily pick up native Windows development skills. It was obvious even then that it was a dead end market.

The number of companies hiring native Windows developers is tiny, and the pay isn't all that good.

It isn't quite COBOL bad, but it isn't a growing market.

The deal used to be a lower cost of living in a major coastal city, an amazing campus (it is seriously lovely), every engineer had their own office, serious job security, and an unbelievable health care plan.

Seattle exploded in price, they moved to open offices, Microsoft started doing mass layoffs, and they gutted the healthcare plan (by the time I left the main plan on offer was a high deductible with a miserable prescription formulary).

Hard to attract talent when there is no big differentiator.

Of course in the 90s the deal was work there 10 years retire a millionaire. Easy to attract talent when that is the offer ...

Before the days of title inflation across the industry, a a Principal at Microsoft was a rare thing. When I was there, the ratio was maybe 1 principal for every 30 developers. Principals were looked up to, had decades of experience, and knew their shit really well. They were the big guns you called in to fix things when the shit really hit the fan, or when no one else could figure out what was going on.

I left Microsoft in 2014. Already back then I could see this sort of stuff starting to happen.

The Office Org was mostly immune from it because they had a lot of lifers, people who had been working on the same code for decades and who thought through changes slowly.

But even by 2014 there were problems hiring developers who knew C++, or who wanted to learn it. COM? No way. One one team we literally had to draw straws once to determine who was going to learn how to write native code for Windows.

It wasn't even a talent thing, Windows development skills are a career dead end outside of Microsoft. They used to be a hot commodity, and Microsoft was able to hire the best of the best from industry. Now they have to train people up, and Microsoft doesn't offer any of the employment perks that they used to use to attract top talent (Seattle used to be a low CoL area, everyone had private offices, job stability).

When I started at Microsoft in 2007, the interview bar included deep knowledge of how computers worked. It wasn't unusual to have meetings drop down to talking about assembly code. Your first day after orientation was a bunch of computer parts and you were told to "figure out how to setup your box".

Antivirus wasn't mandatory. The logic was if you got a virus, they made a mistake hiring you and you deserved to be fired.

When your average developer can go that deep on any topic, you can generally leave engineers well enough alone and get good software.

Mortality is a feature when it comes to species level fitness. Sucks for the individual though.