Well, we're also the ones who spent several years busting hump to fix all the software we could think of that didn't understand that the year after 1999 was 2000, not 1900 or 19100. We had vendors sending us new releases in July 1999 that were still not compliant, we worked like mad dogs in the background to make sure everybody's milk got bottled and their checks got printed, then heard the world say "Oh, what a joke that Y2K thing was, all that fear and nothing bad happened! What a waste of time and money!"

So I'll say, on behalf of said academics, "Nah, we already knew they're all drooling lackwits, at this point it's become sick entertainment watching it all unfold."

I remember reading Knuth's Art of Computer Programming in the mid 1980s and thinking: yay, mathematical rigour will make CS really a "science". Then in my second round of university in 1986 a programming course was teaching Hoare's formal specifications and I thought: yay, software will have real "engineering".

Then I dropped out of the industry for a few years. When I came back to it (say, mid 1990s) there was no rigour, and "science" and "engineering" were just labels.