There are so many excellent arguments against democracy and why the notion of 'the people at the helm' does not work well. It's a shame to see someone attack the whole thing with so unsubstantial an argument.

I find that the 'spoon-fed solutions' are .reg files users can run, commands they can enter into the terminal or a batch of settings they can change. The important fact is that an alarming number of people don't want to learn how and why those actions fix the problem; they just want it fixed. What happens when the company's internet connection goes down and they can't get to the site from their browser history to read the instructions again? If I Google something or find a ready-made fix, I'll examine it both to find out how/why it works and also to ensure it's not going to do something malicious. That is why these IT folk are a plague; they have no desire to understand what they are doing so they will make mistakes and can be easily manipulated into doing something that they shouldn't.

IT folk my age (twenties) know bugger all about computers. And yet I see them, slowly taking up the reigns of the industry. What annoys me most is that they are increasingly not the people who figure it out for themselves and who can learn by doing, but those who take classes and get their precious little degree; they're making mistakes on a grand scale that they should have learnt to avoid in literally their first class. I should feel old making complaints like this, but really I just feel anger that what is common sense for me is out of the realms of the expertise of most of my contemporaries. Bloody stupid kids.

Back when I was in school, I one day jokingly wrote a hit list. A complete act of jest to kill some time in a boring class. Little did I know that the Columbine massacre had just occurred in the States. For three years to follow everyone was afraid of me. I nearly got kicked out of school and was completely oblivious to both that fact and the reasoning behind it. But what works works, I suppose.

As an Aikidoka, I completely agree. But the best way out of a fight that Aikido teaches is simply to not be there when it starts, or to diffuse it before things come to blows. It works extremely well for me. That and [back in school] beating the school's 'hardest' kid in a benchpressing contest. That earned me a lot of respect (albeit a few years too late to be useful).

Seriously? I've never met anyone with a degree who I would trust to change the colours on a website. In all seriousness. CS degrees (in my experience, granted) just churn out people who think they know how to code and refuse to accept when they're wrong because they're the one with the formal training.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_differences#Formal_and_notional_agreement

Manbearpig!

Incompetent is the key word. Ever try to sell footwear on eBay UK? Their 'Item Specifics' dropdowns insist that everything is a boot. Sometimes they don't allow you to choose the condition. Scheduled start times are pushed forward by fifteen minutes if you revise your listing. And their JavaScript for all of these wonderful bugs/features is just a mess. I wonder if they bought their coder second-hand on eBay for 99p?

I've seen nothing but the opposite. I work for a large eBay seller and we've never had PayPal/eBay settle a case in our favour. Not one. Out of thousands of buyers complaining about items where they clearly haven't read the description, the dispatch time, mention of any faults, etc., not a single case has been decided in our favour. On eBay, the buyer is always right, and to Hell with the seller's fairly-earned money.

I notice a similar trend with people who have Computer Science or similar university degrees. Typically, there tends to be a large section on their CV/resumé that details their one programming project. And they're so proud of it. Now, I'm not university educated, so please ignore my obvious resentment towards some of these folks, but I've had applicants boast of being able to write a a simple appointment system (PHP/SQL) for a service (say, a barber shop) in just three months! Now, to me, that should take thirty minutes to code, three hours to debug and perhaps three days to smarten up in HTML form (why do people think that 'I can write code' means 'I am a graphic designer'?). It just seems that universities aren't churning out programmers with any worth anymore. Wasn't there a time when having a degree meant you were good at something other than filling out a student loan form?