It's weird that people who claim unpopular opinions, often at the expense of others, so rarely can find the time to argue their excellent ideas. I have a number of friends that works in "IT" in Europe. The difference between working for a US and European "IT" company is night and day. It simply has very little status as a field in the US. If you had ever seen the things a systems administrators have to deal with from highly educated engineers, you would know that it has less to do with "IQ" and everything to do with domain knowledge.
I've had the pleasure of working with some great a Linux sysadmins. I had a great relationship with them as a developer. Another developer hated them and treated them poorly. Do you think they would help him out after hours if they weren't on call? Same thing for EEs who treat technicians poorly. A tech might tell them a rework is impossible. If they like you and you buy them a beer from time to time, they might say, "That's going to be really tough, but I'll give it a shot and we'll see what happens."
I think a great piece of advice for life is, "Never assume you are the smartest person in the room." Remember that everyone brings something to the table.
Not that I agree with the specific opinion in question, but when it comes to cause-effect questions with a moral angle, you're going to convince literally nobody by arguing. I never take the time, because it doesn't bother me in the slightest whether others agree with me, or are wrong.
I agree. The sysadmin people I have worked with in Europe in have generally been very clever people that I loved to have on my team. The IT/sysadmin people I experienced in Silicon Valley in my next company though.. meh.