Originally Posted by
GarageYears
I presume [deSitter is] bitter for some good reason - maybe Word crashed on you one too many times?
He laid it out on the line earlier. It would appear that he got involved with a (software) company or companies that failed, and ever since has had a very dim view of the profession. There were a lot of companies (not just dot-coms) that folded around the turn of the century because far too many wannabe entrepeneurs thought that computer technology was a fail-safe way to make insane amounts of money*, it's true. It's also true that a lot of people decided to take computer science/software engineering courses in the '90s for the same reason. What I've discovered is that the ones who did it for the love of the craft tended to stick with it through the tech crash and beyond whereas those that were in it for the money have switched to management as a career path.
Some are basically ignoring the posting I made earlier where my professor went to visit Airbus - in which he explicitly states that the processes were way in advance in terms of testing and redundancy than he had previously thought and also that pilots were very much in the loop for the requirements-gathering process of the systems that went into the A320 and her descendants. In short, this is not and never was a case of eggheads trying to tell pilots what to do or stop them from doing things the way they wanted. If management and corporate finance departments in airlines are misusing automation in this way then it is a problem within the aviation industry and not the fault of the product, in the same way that blaming the manufacturers of Ginsu kitchen implements for knife crime is also nonsensical.
Anyway this thread seems to have seriously lost it's way.
You're right, and I'm going to leave this part of the discussion there.
[* - EDIT : There's a reason that the successful technology companies were either backed at an early stage by big investors (e.g. Oracle, Apple, Yahoo! and Google were all backed by Sequoia Capital), or piggybacked on the success of long-established companies (as Microsoft did with IBM, a deal partially brokered by Bill Gates's parents both being senior product lawyers for the latter) before they became successes in their own right. Any smaller-level entrepeneurs would have done well to factor that in before they put their money down.]