I agree with your argument on a logical, rational level. I can concede, however, that "branding" is important to people in ways they rarely care to admit. Having "a site" can feel different to people than carving out an area of interest with a search query, especially on a site with a "community." Communities form around sites and brands, not search queries.
That said, I still agree with you despite appreciating the nuances of bizarre human behavior ;-) Sites like MetaFilter, Reddit, and Hacker News (to a lesser extent) have managed to spread their brands into multiple topic areas (and multiple "sites" in Reddit's case) without diluting people's sense of being a Mefite or Redditor.
I agree with your argument on a logical, rational level. I can concede, however, that "branding" is important to people in ways they rarely care to admit
Bingo. One thing I remember from Jeff & Joel's podcasts when I listened to them was how much thought they put into facilitating a sense of a community on the site. Another is being surprised how technically competent Joel is, when it comes to technical CS stuffs (explaining the difference between the halting problem and NP problems, for example). He's also certainly no newbie when it comes to building a brand with a following.
While I agree that we need more people with deeper CS knowledge in the business, your particular example (halting problem and NP) is somewhat strange. Any CS student should have learned this in the 3rd semester or earlier, at least in my university. I wouldn't count that as an example of great technical competence.
The halting problem, logic, complexity classes, type systems, evaluation models etc are basic concepts. So I'd rather be surprised if anyone who's said to be competent could not explain those.
I'd be surprised if the average person who's been out of school and programming for at least a decade, let alone moved mostly on to managing programmers, could still remember the difference between an NP complete problem and the halting problem at an "can explain it to your grandmother" level.
I disagree, because the NP completeness and halting problem are very different concepts. Confusing those means not having understood them in the first place.
However, things would be different if it was about something like "NP hard" vs. "NP complete" vs. "NP". That kind of details are easily forgotten if one doesn't work in that field.
Well, BQP and FBQP are very different concepts, but I doubt anyone who hasn't actively studied complexity theory in the last few years could explain the difference. Same goes for NP-complete and Entscheidungsproblem; if you don't use it, you lose it.
I mean, anybody with a CS degree should know that the halting problem has something to do with predicting whether a given Turing machine will ever stop; but that's not "explain it to your grandmother" level.
The halting problem, logic, complexity classes, type systems, evaluation models etc are basic concepts. So I'd rather be surprised if anyone who's said to be competent could not explain those.
I haven't asked for it in interviews, but from my experience of about two dozen technical interviews and phone screens, I'd say only 1 or 2 people could tell you even a general definition of "halting problem" and "evaluation models".
So this is interesting - where are you located? Does your experience stem from interviewing in industry, or your coworkers at a Stanford research lab? ;)
Here in Germany I guess the rate (1 or 2 out of two dozen) is similar. But that's not because our universities don't do their job. It's because most software developers didn't (or failed to) study CS in the first place.
They either didn't even start it, or they dropped out, or they studied something else that doesn't deliver the theoretical basics (e.g. "IT systems engineerings" and other things with expressively long names).
However, there's such a big demand for software developers that they come quite far without any formal qualification.
And most of them do quite a good job! ... until things get more complicated.
(FTR: I'm a student at the Humboldt University of Berlin, but I think the other universities have similar standards. I'm also co-founder of a small software dev/hosting company.)
That said, I still agree with you despite appreciating the nuances of bizarre human behavior ;-) Sites like MetaFilter, Reddit, and Hacker News (to a lesser extent) have managed to spread their brands into multiple topic areas (and multiple "sites" in Reddit's case) without diluting people's sense of being a Mefite or Redditor.