Obviously Greenspun's a webapp veteran. That doesn't mean his class doesn't need advertisement. As I alluded to in the previous post, it's not particularly popular at MIT. And to my knowledge, it's not a class like SICP that's been taken up at universities around the world.

I think at best Greenspun's inclusion of those factoids was meant to imply some causation (that his class helps people get jobs). Maybe he was just name checking for the fun of it. Either way, I suspect most of the alums who took his class and then went on to get jobs at GOOG and MSFT would have been able to without it.