The only way I see around this is a really aggressive cap on rent. Like, once a rent is established, it can never be raised, for any reason, ever again

We have something like that in my city. The rents grow, but are bound to the inflation. The dynamic is similar - the old contracts are vastly cheaper than the new contracts. That has several downsides:

• young families can’t afford good apartments, since they will need to tap the new-contract market which is expensive
• old people have nice large apartments for very little money. Sounds good at first, but then you often have situations where a single 80-year-old has a 100 m^2 apartment in the downtown, while a young 4 member family is in a 60 m^2 while paying more money. Even more perversely, the 80-year-old can’t move out, because they wouldn’t be able to afford a smaller sized apartment with a new contract.
• old contracts become a form of property in itself and are sold on “black market”, inherited etc.
• old contracts are not let go even if the apartment is not needed at the moment. So apartments are often empty, waiting for the kids to grow up, or used only occasionally (the family has a house outside the city and only occasionally spends time in the city).
• you’re heavily disincentivized to move (to be closer to your work, family, get a bigger apartment for growing family etc.) because your old contract would get cancelled, and you will need to get a much more expensive new one

I think laws need to be changed to make owning (not building) real estate unattractive as an investment. Something like wealth tax (every year you pay X% of the property value) aimed at real sector specifically, with very progressive structure / exceptions for single homeowners.

That should help in a lot of cases. Then it also depends on the demographic development - many places will actually see drop in the population in the coming decades, that should make housing cheaper. Areas with growing population - there it may not be possible to stop the price increase completely.

I still kinda disagree. We’re talking here about engineering role after all. I have a colleague who is a code wizard, but has kinda problem with (under)communicating. He’s still widely respected as a very good engineer, people know his communication style and adapt to it.

But if you’re a mediocre problem solver, you can’t really make up for it with communication skills. That kinda moves you into non-engineering role like PO, SM or perhaps support engineer.

But I would say this - once you reach a certain high level of competence, then the communication skills, leadership, ownership can become the real differentiating factors. But you can’t really get there without the high level of competence first.

I’m not sure if the competence is really in the last place. I’d say it’s on the equal level. Great communication and ownership of the problems means little if you can’t really solve the problems.