BANNED (redundant question).

If they’ve stopped engineering, then they probably weren’t good in the first place, what skills they had are rusty, and their knowledge is out of date.

I’d argue programming languages are like natural languages. Use it or lose it.

By idiots I mean the people who haven’t engineered in years.

The subject of the article.

Seems self-evident.

Still five nines of uptime — 79.9999%.

Great. The “why don’t you just…” idiots are “writing” code again and not reviewing it.

What could go wrong?

Surveillance.

A founder-engineer driven company. Facebook is one of the few Big Tech firms whose founder is an engineer, and still is the CEO. Netflix is the other one where founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings was also a software engineer before starting the company. Amazon was the other example of this until recently, but it’s not the case at Google or Apple. There are good examples of smaller companies like Cloudflare, but they’re all younger than Facebook.

Jeff Bezos was a Wall Street douche. He didn’t care about the internet or even books — he wanted data. He figured smart people like to read, and a web-based book seller was the easiest way to get data on smart people.

Not an engineer.

Apple was founded by the two Steves. One a brilliant electrical engineer and the other had some engineering skill. Their entire purpose, initially, was to build the PCBs from the schematics they’d been giving away to others in their proto-makerspace.

Engineers.

Google was started by Stanford engineers.

Zuck is an engineering drop-out. I doubt he’s written a line of code in a decade.

Is the author trying to be wrong about everything?

Fast == bugs