(1) Progress. The progress in computing he is talking about is not very important and not much worth following in detail. Bluntly programming is still:
(a) for needed data, select data types and name and allocate space,
(b) manipulate the data with expressions, assignments, if-then, and do-while,
(c) have some too simplistic approaches to exceptional condition handling that risk allocated resources not freed.
(d) simplistic concurrency tools that are hard to debug and have poor means to detect and resolve deadlocks,
(e) get modularity as needed in 'divide and conquer' by calling functions, methods, APIs, etc., standard old call-return 'semantics'.
So, no wonder given a new flavor of the month of syntactic sugar, people learn it only when they have to.
(2) He recognizes that he is asking people to learn things that go out of date too quickly. Good. But he is too accepting of having people waste so much time.
(3) For knowledge that has usefulness longer than the life of a butterfly, he retreats to communications skills?
So, net, he doesn't know where the powerful, lasting knowledge is.
So, what might such knowledge be?
Okay, start with a problem to be solved where we need to write some software. Okay, from 40,000 feet up, this software will take in some data, manipulate it, and deliver results.
So, ask, do you understand well enough now how to do those manipulations at least in principle by hand?
If so, then likely can start designing and then coding. Some huge fraction of commercial computing has been like this.
Else, for a hint on what such knowledge might be, have to ask, how will we determine the needed data manipulations? A huge fraction of computing in science, engineering, and for US national security has needed and often found answers to this question.
If computing is going to move past the merely old, and manual, then the "else" above needs to be followed.
By analogy, in part he's thinking that the main issue in good cooking is the shape of the chef's knife and the material in the cutting board and ignoring what is between the ears of the chef. That is, he doesn't understand cooking past what is routine with a knife and cutting board.