tl;dr: "Someone who learns how to design can design anything" is about as true as MBA schools' "someone who learns how to manage can manage anything".
tl: "Someone who has a superset of skills can do the subset easily"
How do you know you could get any "real engineers" to work as programmers?
I consider good programmers to have deep interest in software engineering principles and techniques. My experience has been that it's a real crapshoot to find this in CS degreed people, and almost impossible in other degreed people. (YMMV.)
Because every single programmer I have worked with that I respect over the years have invariably turned out to have at least 1 real engineering degree. This is probably highly likely due to the drop in engineers required since roughly 85 compared with relatively high graduation rates for a while. Since ME/EE/CE/ChemE/etc are all relatively much harder to obtain than CS/Comp E degrees at the time, it doesn't take a rocket scientist (another real engineer btw) to figure out that all these disciplines used computers, generally those underpowered VAX, SGI, Cray, etc simplistic machines, to run relatively simple and small parallelized solutions on. So I suppose none of those folks, in a shrinking market and declining wage growth would consider falling back on a well paying and high demand job that required 1/10th of their training and had large upside potential. Nope, not at all.
The question is why....All that time spent doing stuff in java has rotted their brains.
It has nothing to do with Java, it does, however, have everything to do with the laziness and absolute incompetency of what schools are teaching their students. Any engineer in my day that dealt with computers learned about algorithms, memory management, and how to optimize problems for the hardware you were running on, which included understanding what hardware you were targeting. I swear they don't teach any of that anymore, especially to CS majors. I think their text books must be Sam's How to learn PHP in 21 days, followed by how to learn Java in 21 days. Since PHP was first, they never learn part 2 well, and that explains the incredible lack of competent younger programmers, especially any with "computer" in their degree titles. What amazes me more is that most can't navigate an OS either, and asking them to deal with one outside their "known" one is met with a look like you asked them something in martian.
Apple is not a Rolex or Tag Heuer.
You're correct, it's not a Rolex nor Tag Heuer, but it's not a Timex either. It's something entirely different, much like the iPhone when it came out was something entirely different, but happened to have similarities and all the function of other phones. In this case it functions like a watch, but anyone that buys it as a watch is an idiot. That's like buying a car to use as a wheelbarrow. Sure, it can haul stuff, but it can do so much more.
YouTube hasn't been tied to flash for a couple of months
Oh my... a couple of months? But, apparently they still run flash. The question is "why"? Oh, could it be that their own unsupported Android phones wouldn't be able to visit youtub?
There's a number of ways it phones home, some of which at least can be mitigated: spell check, url suggestions, and default search from the address bar which is my personal pet peeve, what was so hard about hitting the TAB key to go to the search field from the address field so I can control what I search for?
However, ask yourself this, what reason did Google have for making a better independent browser than Firefox, which was at 30+% market share at the time and used Google as it's default search engine? It wasn't altruism, so there must have been a driving reason for it.
...sure it proves some talent but 9 out of 10 recruiters will go with the C++ guy.
Might as well make that 99 out of 100, and that 1 will generally be out of business pretty quickly.
It's simple enough to just abandon flash. Apple did, it didn't seem to stop the world nor harm their market share. There are some sites still tied to or using flash (youtube anyone?) so perhaps Google should set about cleaning house first.
#2 is that no one in their right mind should use Chrome, at least not without blackholing every google address. My order of browsers is Safari, Firefox, Opera, IE in a dedicated windows VM, and then, only then, Chrome. I think I'm 20 revs behind in Chrome because it hasn't been run in a year, nor has IE actually... What a blissful year.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
