You contradict my uni SWE professor: my understanding was that waterfall was SWE’s almost-cargo-cult adaptation of engineering practices from other fields (civi

You contradict my uni SWE professor: my understanding was that waterfall was SWE’s almost-cargo-cult adaptation of engineering practices from other fields (civil eng, mech-eng, etc) which “worked” in many use-cases but was/is entirely inappropriate for continuous delivery, which is how I’d wager the majority of software gets delivered thesedays (as opposed to them all being “1.0” releases burned to a CD on the client’s desk, with no further changes made, ever). Agile, XP, Scrums, Sprints, etc, do not represent a dumbing-down of engineering practices to accommodate coding-camp-types: it requires just as much discipline and understanding as the techniques of yore, but it overall works-better which makes doing our job easier. Do not equate “easier” with dumbing-down. And I’d wager a faangma summer intern SE today would run laps around a decade-burned SE from the 1980s - not least because they had the benefit of learning from the mistakes of the past 40 years.