Not a knock on Rob Pike, obviously a very smart dude, but knowing computers at one point doesn't mean you've invested the time to keep up with them since. My dad was a network engineer in the 90's and early 00's and I learned a lot from him, but these days, when he needs to pick out a laptop or something, he asks me. I'm more connected to it than he is now, because he has other things on his plate.
If Rob Pike can be said to be too technically unfamiliar for an Apple product, then there is something very very wrong with Apple's expectations of their users.
Is he too technically unfamiliar? Or is he trying to leverage assumed domain knowledge in an incorrect way? I mean, I'm not a programming languages expert. I couldn't work on Go. But I do know that the bootable OS X installer is within the app package upon which he was casting aspersions; I've used it myself to reinstall OS X and to install it on different machines.
Some friends of mine who are professionals in other fields have noted (not about me, I hope, but I know that I'm guilty of this at times as well) that "computer people" have no end of cases where they think their preexisting knowledge is enough to solve a problem when it has little or no bearing on the topic at hand (politics, biology, whatever). I see no reason that can't also be true within the computer field as well. Because a pretty cursory Google would have explained all the things people elsewhere in this thread have explained about how to actually do this--but he didn't do it, relied on his own previous knowledge, and it didn't really apply.
It doesn't really sound like he got himself into this situation because he struck out on his own and broke something.
It sounds like he got into this situation by calling up and trusted customer support and doing what any normal consumer does: then calling the fixup guy who is supposed to do this stuff professionally.
They said to make a backup and everything would work. He made a backup and it didn't work. From there, everything got worse.
I know that is pretty much the opposite of what I, an undoubtedly overzealous "technology guy", would try to do. Though, as a technology guy I probably would have said "Fuck it, lets install linux" not even halfway through the trouble he was having (and if it were still 2003 and the linux distro I was trying to install were Gentoo, the effort required between the two probably would have just about evened out).
Sticking with it and trying to work with customer service is a very "normal trusting consumer" thing to do.
The world of computers is large enough that expertise in one area doesn't make you connected. An immunologist doesn't necessarily know about new surgical techniques.
If he had someone who knew about Apple, or even if he searched google for 'bootable lion usb' he could have had his problem fixed in 20 minutes (disk utility to 'restore' the main .dmg from the installer onto his other USB stick)
Interesting in that when it comes to computers, he [Rob Pike] knows what he's doing.
Clearly not. For one thing you just don't erase a working drive with your data on it until the repair is successful. If it's some warranty thing and they are going to take the drive then you at least make a 1:1 image of it using dd or equivalent block copy first. If they are replacing it with the same size just dd the image back for that matter.
The worst part is this repair is trivial for anybody that knows what he's doing. You just order a replacement drive from newegg (or wherever), mount the new and old drives using target disk mode or external enclosure, and copy the disk. Then you swap the drives. This wasn't an Air or something difficult, just unscrew the case and replace the drive. Or if you really don't want to take it apart yourself have the repairman do the swap.
It's really easy, especially with a second Apple available. I did it just a few weeks ago for a family member, the only actual time investment is opening the case to swap the drives.
