I am biased, but I completely disagree with you. I had him as my professor three times while I was at NYU, and Dewar is very much in touch with real-world engineering projects. Also, hardware and OS-level knowledge is very important during performance optimization, which very often gets left out in "real-world" programming jobs due to lack of time in the project schedule and lack of knowledge on behalf of the very same programmers that came out of a vocational education. This is something to lament about in the industry, and not say "oh well, since we don't do it and seem to get away with it, let's maintain the status quo".
That's a different argument than the one that was made in the article; the argument in the article, that Java isn't used for complicated projects and that engineers need to be able to debug compiler or processor bugs, is an incredibly poor one.
I've done a lot of performance optimization of Java apps in the last 6 years and I've never once had to look at bytecode or think about processor instructions or OS issues; I've had to think about memory allocation and consumption, synchronization, algorithmic complexity, caching, query plans, database denormalization, etc. Obviously optimizing a C application is a different world, but it's definitely not the case that even the majority of software engineers ever need to dive that close to the hardware these days given the rise of managed/VMed languages like Java, Ruby, Python, and C#; it's good to hire someone who can do that or who can learn to if your application might need it, but in general it's just not as important as a lot of other skills, and I think it's pretty incorrect to say that engineers who can't do that will have no job prospects in the US.
