If I recall correctly, the crew of the Ethiopian flight that crashed were very experienced and they did understand what was happening. They just couldn't mitigate it in the short time they had.
Note that my point was not that the crew was inexperienced or incompetent. My point was that those flying machines are crazy complex, and actually made of tons of safety-critical computers.
I just did not find it fair to say "pilots know how planes really work, but software engineers don't know how computers really work". Both are waaaay too complex for one person to actually understand fully.
