A guy whose evidence is "I've seen stats", without linking to them shouldn't be lecturing about hard evidence.

On PC platforms perhaps. Not on server platforms.

Dominance where exactly? A helluva lot of Windows development is still done in C/C++. Java still has massive penetration in the enterprise. I'll admit that .NET is a big player in the Windows world, but considering the Windows market appears to be at best static, and as a platform, compared to other computing devices (enterprise computing, mobile computing, etc.) is in absolute terms possibly even declining, I'd say .NET could hardly be described as dominant.

Excellent example!

Thanks!

Incompetence and only be fully developed and utilized to its maximum potential if it is paired with arrogance, as otherwise people could utilize undesirable insights into their own skills (or rather lack thereof) as motivator to increase their competence level. One of the tried-and-true ways of establishing arrogance is fostering high self-esteem that is not founded in accomplishments, but in the believe that everybody can and should regard themselves as highly valuable, regardless of whether they have actually accomplished something.

Makes me wonder whether this drive to give young people high self-esteem is actually a coordinated attempt to sabotage education and self-improvement.

I do not think it can be fixed. The western world managed to acquire technological leadership, and then its governments found out that they do not actually like their citizens to be educated and smart. Hence they have been sabotaging that systematically for a long time and the fruits of that sabotage are obvious now. This decline will continue for a long, long time.

Many smart potential or even fully educated STEM workers take one good hard look at the way STEM workers are treated and compensated and go somewhere else. What is left is the not-smart ones and the ones that for some other reason have no alternatives.

That equation does not work at all, except in menial jobs that are not physically demanding.

That one is pretty simple: The media have no clue about technology at all and think being able to use a simple user-interface is actually is some way comparable to "mastering" and "controlling" a device. Of course, none of that is the case. Instead, there are just even less incentives to learn how technology actually works. All surface, no deeper understanding at all.

Most businesses wouldn't have any major issue spending that little extra money; if they did, they wouldn't if they were slightly more efficient or if the CxO's got a few million dollars less.

Eg. Coca-Cola has 130k employees. Increasing their employee base by 50% (I assume an average cost of $100k/employee) would cost $6.5B/y or barely 15% of their yearly revenue.

You can make the same calculations for a number of companies, unless the company is severely mismanaged or inefficient (in which case it should fail anyway) you'll find that it is VERY affordable if only their CxO's would give up a few million of bonus or the shareholders wouldn't mind to throw in a penny.

Get two jobs. IF one really works 80 hours/week, then I hope they're not salaried but get paid 1.5-2.5x for any time over 40, the facts however are that most people working 80h/week only get paid to do "~40".

Backups can be cheap/free. With some imagination and extra work I ran a design department without any dedicated server or backup hardware (a large company where requisitioning a server needed board approval which only met once every 6 months - they failed shortly after I left).

The entire 'cloud' hype has shown us that you can run storage over hundreds of nodes with a large number of them that could suddenly fail. Desktops all have at least 50GB-1TB of free space and could thus act as a simple storage node.

The problem IS clueless IT people. These people that come out of school and have programmer jobs or IT administrative duties but couldn't code their way out of a box with LOGO.