Sadly this new generation of “engineers” are too busy making the next “big thing” to enable social media to be the panacea of all the worlds woes.
The brains of the 40-60’s generation did more with a slide rule, pencil, and a pad of paper than their successors can do with the latest macbook or desktop. We sent men to the moon with computers with a fraction of the computing power and storage of your kid’s iPod. It is a funny how most of the software engineers we hire under the age of 30 have no knowledge of how the system actually works. Everything comes in a 4th generation prepackaged application. They can make objects and flashy UI stuff but without the developer tools cannot really tell you how it happens under the hood.
The whole ethic has shifted. Things built to last, honesty as a trait. The problem is not with engineering per-se - the one profession (all branches of engineering) closest to my heart and those to whom I best relate. Engineering is simply, like all other professions, subject to the zeitgeist of convenience and profit maximization at the expense of building an objectively superior product.
Yes, 4-GL COTS make us lazy. Some methodologies, while making for pretty source, can impose dramatic penalties on the final compiled product. Anything can be taken to an extremely, including modularity and object-oriented philosophies. Very few people consider cycles, stacks, and memory anymore. These are cheap anymore. I'm thankful that I'm barely old enough that my first professional job was programming assembly language.