I think his point was that some very important software might end up being written by those people who could not grasp the fundamentals of CS. I've seen recursion fail to fit into the minds of some otherwise very bright individuals.

What I'm not entirely sure of is that decent financial/industrial/important software can't be written by someone who can't write an algorithm to sort an array. You don't need to know much CS to call array.sort(), only that you want the array to be sorted. Now this level of engineer might not know what to do if it doesn't work (or worse, works but badly) but if he's got enough domain knowledge otherwise, he'll know to spend some money on a few high dollar hours with someone who can fix it.

I'd rather have someone who's a very good EE who didn't quite grok recursion working on my power grid software than a very good programmer who can't tell an amp from a volt. At least the EE can tell when its broken.

The author was surprised that candidates came to him with actual accomplishments on their resumes but didn't seem to know the basics of CS. My counterpoint was that its probably possible to accomplish quite a lot without knowing the basics these days, and if you do it cheaply, that might be just fine.