He exaggerated his points because he did see the big picture which became reality; untrained people writing buggy, horrible software. He knew that would happen and tried to use his position to do something about it. And we are doing better? Computers were doing important things back then, but now they are almost driving our cars, they are flying our planes and giving us radiation therapy. All that, usually, without formal proof and with some kind of 'but we use unit tests so ...' attitude. Outsourced if possible because then it's cheap. Of course, humans make more mistakes than buggy software generally, however his point was that we have ways to almost prevent this by properly training software developers and writing proper software. You cannot prevent everything as he suggested (but, again, he exaggerated to make a point); you can make it better by not calling people who did some online course programmers and by creating open and robust systems. If you are young enough, I would be willing to bet that you will, at some time in your life be seriously hurt or even die from the consequence of not taking this seriously enough. You are probably losing money because of software bugs already; besides rounding errors, you (probably) have no idea how many bugs there are in the software which processes your insurance, taxes etc, all written in that evil Cobol by untrained monkeys. I know this for a fact in the Netherlands as I have seen this up close; probably true everywhere.