Ladies and Gentlemen:
All comments about the ethnicity of the $9 an hour programmers aside, I have to sit back and think about how complex systems are on a modern aeroplane for anybody, regardless of pay grade, to be able to be fully conversant with all the systems interactions that can occur.
If you remember back in the Reagan era, there was a program called the Strategic Defence Initiative, more commonly referred to as 'Star Wars.
Amongst all the scientific commentary of the time, I cannot forget that of David Parnas, whose lucid insight may have turned the tide against relying on technology to overcome a threat created by technology.
His position was that the SDI was such a complex system, that a counter-system would be so commensurately complex that it would not be possible to test it until the actual threat arose, and then it would be too late to fix the inevitable bugs.
I wonder if we now have achieved that level of complexity in some aircraft systems, where, in our race to relieve the crew of responsibilities and workload, we have created systems that can actually make life more difficult for them if systems are not fully debugged and their operation fully understood?
Those two switches on the engine quadrant controlling trim are so convenient, I have to wonder why their access is not the first thing anybody thinks of when such a problem occurs.