That quote's perspective now seems to me to be correct and fundamental to our industry, but it was basically ignored during my degree and I'd say it's still very much under-appreciated in software engineering.
I'd guess it looks under-appreciated on the surface, because it is hard to run a business on such a premise.
Admitting it "officially" ultimately boils down to retaining by all means the engineers who already acquired the knowledge. Some of those will ask for more benefits, others will play games of power, others still will simply refuse to stay once they stopped learning.
(In my industry and geo) businesses chose the opposite -- they slice and dice the knowledge into tiny bins so that a total newcomer can learn up quickly enough. This drives down wages but now requires many more people where a few should suffice.
Solution to that? Total subcontracting of sw development. Which is of course a slow death for the business, but a) at least it looks like a business model, b) death is slow enough so that managers have time to move on, c) this has a merit of being implementable. The alternative -- finding people who already know or learn very fast, and then keeping them -- is not for every budget.
> Admitting it "officially" ultimately boils down to retaining by all means the engineers who already acquired the knowledge
I mostly agree. Admitting it acknowledges the importance of the humans in the system, and diminishes somewhat the allure of the code they write. It pushes for more focus on learning and sharing, and strengthened the labour power of the human interacting with the engineering system, as they're full acknowledged as inseparable from it.
Admitting it "officially" ultimately boils down to retaining by all means the engineers who already acquired the knowledge. Some of those will ask for more benefits, others will play games of power, others still will simply refuse to stay once they stopped learning.
(In my industry and geo) businesses chose the opposite -- they slice and dice the knowledge into tiny bins so that a total newcomer can learn up quickly enough. This drives down wages but now requires many more people where a few should suffice.
Solution to that? Total subcontracting of sw development. Which is of course a slow death for the business, but a) at least it looks like a business model, b) death is slow enough so that managers have time to move on, c) this has a merit of being implementable. The alternative -- finding people who already know or learn very fast, and then keeping them -- is not for every budget.