Let's see, Most guys at RIM are UW grads != Most UW grads work at rim, which you claimed. You aren't coherent.
Instead of spreading fud, why don't you focus on finding out the critical success factors? Don't you think you'll be more productive that way? You already started by going to UW *maybe* factor. Great. Now go do more googling.Respected or not, the labour market is highly glutted up for CS/EE/CompE grads, and while UW grads do better than most other Canadian schools, they're not immune to the problems either.
You know this is a dynamic and agile field right? Only those who adapt with the on-going changes of technology is going to survive and prosper. So what? If you love technology and you make a commitment to keep up then you will be fine. If you become stagnant, then you will be cut. It's just business. Software and devices is going to be even more important than ever in the future.The same claims were made a decade ago, yet employment has not increased in the industry in the past decade and many hundreds of thousands (if not close to a million) foreign guest workers were imported to take most of the entry-level jobs in the United States. The Canadian industry has collapsed with firms like Nortel, Corel, Matrox, Mitel/Zarlink, PMC Sierra, JDSU, etc., being either non-existent, or a very small fraction of their decade-ago size. All of this against a backdrop of record graduations in EE/CS/CompE in the late 1990s up until around 2004-2005 when graduations started to fall off dramatically.
I don't know if you realize, but we are in moving towards an elastic computing which requires a new way of thinking of developing applications. But I don't expect you to understand the technical details nor do I want to get into it. The old ways of doing things won't work any more. Since you aren't actually developing these technologies, you won't understand the implications this have on people's lives.Maybe UW grads didn't suffer as bad as grads from "lesser" schools, but you got your head in the sand if you don't think that a lot of absolutely great talent has had their careers ruined by what's happened. But hey, nice try at throwing around a bunch of buzzwords, many of which (ie: "cloud computing") actually *reduce* demand for CS and IT people.