14 ms·

Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

122 points by herohamp 7y ago

zeku 7y ago
this is just a rant and not constructive.
- tpmx 7y ago
  An observation doesn't need to be constructive. I needs to be relevant and novel. This is a relevant and novel observation. The people seemingly feeling hurt by this - you do realize you're outliers, right?
  - horsawlarway 7y ago
    You're getting downvoted because this is neither relevant nor novel. The number of folks who genuinely understand computers has been rising at unprecedented rates. Just look at the number of employed programmers. Does that mean most children understand it? Of course not, just like most adults don't. When Grandma is amazed that her grandkids manage to make Netflix work, I don't think there's any real expectation that they will become software engineers. This is like bitching that kids from the 1920s don't know how combustion engines work. It's not productive.
    - tpmx 7y ago
      The amount of people who can create things that have some value for someone at ever increasing abstraction levels have increased, for sure. Also: I really dislike that self-righteous "your're getting downvoted for..." thing you're doing. I don't mind being downvoted when I know I'm correct ;).
  - joethebob 7y ago
    This is relevant and novel? There's really nothing here that hasn't been true for at least the last 20 years. It usually one of the first things you learn after discovering any aspect of technology is how few people actually look under the hood.
- noicebrewery 7y ago
  Lots of "they"s and generalisations. In the words of the people the author is mocking, "ok boomer"
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
8bitsrule 7y ago
When I was a teen, I couldn't have explained (in any detail) how a car engine worked either. Five years later, I'd quickly learned in order to keep my own running. Those who need to, and have the time, will figure it out. If they are clueless, that's good. There are much more important things a teen needs to learn.
- jakoblorz 7y ago
  That's so true. The question is if kids learn the tools to understand what computers do when needing self-study later.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
jtmcmc 7y ago
I use green text on a black background in my terminal.
- arthurcolle 7y ago
  Same here, with a little transparency I find it fantastic to read.
- gburdell3 7y ago
  You use a terminal?? Back in MY day, we used PUNCH CARDS! Kids these days...
- imron 7y ago
  I can't use a white background on my terminal. It'd be like looking at a light bulb all day. Dark mode FTW.
- CivBase 7y ago
  Same. The author calls it obnoxious, but I think the lower contrast between green and black is easier on my eyes.
joezydeco 7y ago
The motivation is different, that’s all. When we were kids we needed to learn to hack DOS and Windows because our games wouldn’t run without them. Hard drive crashes, SCANDISK, reinstalls, fucked up drivers... whatever it took. My kids can’t fix Win10 but now they know their way around web filters and how to hack Screen Time to bypass the shutoff. They’re trading pirated movies in gDrive and doing all kids of other stuff I have no clue about. Nothing has changed. It’s just a matter of your point of view.
- tpmx 7y ago
  The abstraction layers they are (typically) comfortable with have shifted 1 or 2 levels up.
  - choward 7y ago
    Those level ups are pretty bad though. They take you from owning your data and devices to third parties having complete control.
    - dnpp123 7y ago
      Because we (as a society) failed to make those layers compatible with privacy and data ownership ?
      - asdff 7y ago
        Apple deserves a lot of blame imo. They could have shipped the iPhone with terminal and root access and opened the floodgates on some very unique ideas with the new technology, but instead forced the hacking community to be this kind of unsupported/illicit grey area that shrunk every time a jailbreak was patched.
- vidanay 7y ago
  I'd rather be like my kid and worry about making sure his Fortnite is updated than playing the HIMEM.sys jigsaw puzzle that I had to.
cuddlybacon 7y ago
When I was in school, there were computer classes from grades 6 until 12. It covered topics like typing, keyboard shortcuts, internet browsing, internet research, and basics in more advanced topics like Photoshop and programming. By the time my sister, who is 7 years younger than me, got to school that was mostly gone. It was cut back "because kids just know that stuff".
tuzakey 7y ago
From 2013: http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co... It's not just teens.
gumby 7y ago
They don't know what their car's choke would have been, or what a dwell tach is. So? They can still drive. Not one in 100,000 could milk a cow. I write assembly code that runs in supervisory mode. My kid couldn't write assembly code to save his life, but just taught me a new algorithm I'd never seen before. And he could learn assembly if he wanted.
- Johnny555 7y ago
  Not one in 100,000 could milk a cow. I know this wasn't your point, but I'll nitpick anyway since that number felt too low, so I checked, and the number seems like it should be closer to 1 in 200. There are 72M children [1] below the age of 18 in the USA today, so 1 in 100,000 would only be 720 and there's something like 40,000 dairy farms in the USA, and I'd bet every child on those farms older than 8 (probably younger) could manage to milk a cow. The FFA has 700,000 members [2], and I'd bet that at least half of them could manage to milk a cow, so that's closer to 1 in 200. This isn't quite a fair comparison since the article above was referring only to "teens", not "children", and the FFA numbers include members up to age 21 and includes members in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands). [1] https://www.aecf.org/resources/the-changing-child-population-of-the-united-states/ https://www.aecf.org/resources/the-changing-child-population... [2] https://www.ffa.org/our-membership/ https://www.ffa.org/our-membership/
  - gumby 7y ago
    Thanks for the clarification! I originally had typed "1 in 10,000" but that seemed too many kids....and it turns out I was utterly wrong!
    - vidanay 7y ago
      Udderly
    - dismalpedigree 7y ago
      turns out I was UDDERLY wrong! Long day. I’ll be here all week!
theLotusGambit 7y ago
> Why do the teens of today think this? Because simply, they don’t care. All they want is a computer that works, and that runs their text messaging, anti-privacy and social media apps. Wanting technology to just work without having to deal with esoteric nonsense? How childish!
- ryukafalz 7y ago
  That “esoteric nonsense” is how all this stuff actually works, and if you don’t have a grasp on the basics, it’s hard to tell when you’re being taken advantage of. (And these days, it feels like everyone’s looking to take advantage of unsuspecting users.)
  - hatsuseno 7y ago
    When I have a problem with my car, I take it to a dealer or a certified repairshop. I effectively know jack-all about the workings of that machine. I can be easily conned into paying for repairs that don't need doing. Do you wish to claim that no such context exists for you? It's easy to gloss over the fact that for >99% of users the machine "just needs to work", and I don't think that's unreasonable. There will be a subset of kids that /do/ take an interest in this stuff, and will pick it up as the next generation of "IT magicians".
kdamica 7y ago
I think there's a point to be made here that proficiency with UI is often conflated with technical understanding by nontechnical people, but I'm not sure the point about teens is well-founded. Specifically, while it's probably true that teens don't understand IT, neither do the vast majority of adults. I'd love to see some data on this.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  > Specifically, while it's probably true that teens don't understand IT, neither do the vast majority of adults. I think that’s the point. The whole promise of “digital native” generation is false.
rdiddly 7y ago
Kind of like every other demographic. But yeah definitely don't make the mistake of assuming tech knowledge is inversely proportional to age. Otherwise it'd be like we're all coming out the womb writing assembly language and by age 50 we can't even work a toaster.
pnathan 7y ago
I've observed this myself. A lot of the computer studies stuff for high schoolers in the 1990s was "How To Use Word", I don't imagine its gotten better since. > Using green text on a black background is not only obnoxious but also hard to read. speak for yourself. :-) > they don’t care. All they want is a computer that works, This isn't actually an unreasonable ask. It's roughly identical to cars, phones, and other tools. The author's original point - that teens aren't gurus - is quite excellent.
chrisco255 7y ago
It ought to be a dying trope that kids know tech better than adults. I think the author is correct in observing that tech has become so user friendly and ubiquitous that understanding the basics doesn't really mean much. It's certainly not going to help you get ahead in any field. And as Millenials and gen X gets older, they have been around technology for decades longer, and the tech is no longer changing the workforce as quickly as it was in the '90s and '00s and even early '10s.
Kluny 7y ago
"When you explain what happens under the hood, they will ignore you. When you tell them what a certain setting probably does, they will ignore you." So teenagers do what teenagers have always done? I agree with the others - kids who need to figure stuff out will find a way.
- PeterisP 7y ago
  Sure, kids who need to figure stuff out will find a way, but the issue is that since the need for kids to figure stuff out has largely disappeared, the technical proficiency motivated by this has also disappeared. If some time ago we could implicitly assume all kinds of things that everyone "technical-minded" would know because they inevitably would have needed it as a kid, we now need to teach the very basics of how stuff works 'under the hood' explicitly without this assumption.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    Do we need more operating system maintainers or library writers if we have more developers? I propose that the number of low level people we need is logarithmic to the number of devs. Uncle Bob proposed that the number of devs had been doubling every five years for the last couple decades. That means five times as many people are available to fill these critical spots. If he’s right and I’m right, then if every 5-year generation of devs has 60% of the ratio of people interested in low level stuff as the one before, then we will have plenty of people to keep the wheels on. Which if my math is right is 5% of the rate of gearheads we had in the dotcom boom. Which honestly was not that high even then. I was using a lot more theoretical knowledge of hardware than nearly all of my coworkers would cop to.
rootsudo 7y ago
I am happy that I grew up in the golden age of computing - people say it was the 80's, but being a "90's" kid, we had classes from HTML w/ dreamweaver, how to modify/break windows 95/98 --- In fact in NYC, my elementary school had keyboard class where you'd learn to type and general proficiency w/ a computer. In Florida, middle school photoshop, dreamweaver, fireworks and even access database. High school had C++ class - from what I believe was a fired Compaq programmer, needless to say it sucked but gave me a foundation. Meanwhile this was also the time where you needed to know a bit of HTML to modify your Geocities, Angelfire, Neopets (middle school days) to Myspace profile. Facebook came in and removed that whole layer of customization - Windows XP was really stable and besides malware no one needed to really know how to fix their computer. Then if you were into Video game culture, you had to learn how to solder to modify consoles with modchips, how to burn a CD, and generally modify and configure OS settings from IRQ to adding a DVDRW. Same with pirating videos, there was no youtube - maybe you'd get lucky and find an FTP server that hosted videos but even then you'd had codecs. Default, Windows didn't include Divx, MPEG2, etc - just WMV/WMA. Same with burning an MP3 to CD. Nowadays I feel like a SRE/Sysadmin hack, but man then again I know my way enough a system, can program lazily and hold my own with people who consider themselves senior devs, architects etc from MSFT, NIST, SpaceX -- It's nice. Maybe I do know something.
- non-entity 7y ago
  I normally roll my eyes at "wrong generation" stuff, but holy shit it seems like it would have been really fun to have grown up or even worked in the industry during the golden age.
  - jimmux 7y ago
    As someone who was messing around with computers back then, I'm jealous of kids who are getting serious about this stuff now. I was lucky to have a computer at all to learn on. If I did anything remotely hacky, I would be warned about breaking an expensive and irreplaceable piece of equipment. There was no help or documentation. No Internet to download the most basic of resources. If I didn't stumble upon HyperCard at 12 years old and figure out what it was through trial and error, I may never have got the spark of curiosity that put me on the path. Some of the projects that exist now would have blown my little mind back then. People are reverse engineering my favourite old games and making them better! Insanity! And free 3D game engines! Using a nicely configured IDE with autocomplete, format on save, linting, etc. allows the mind be so liberated from the tedious details and really focus on the actual problem. You can actually do interesting things in JavaScript. It's a world apart from when typing <blink> tags into Notepad was enough to impress your friends.
rc-5 7y ago
Allow me to preface this by saying that I am, in fact, a teen, and absolutely do not represent the majority of teenagers. This post is a generalization and a subjective rant that absolutely doesn't hold up in real life. >>>When you explain what happens under the hood, they will ignore you. When you tell them what a certain setting probably does, they will ignore you. In my experience, although there may be some teenagers for which this is true, this is also true for people of all ages - those who aren't interested in learning the base technology simply won't. >>>Green text with a black background is the norm, right? No. This seems a diversion from the writer's point, that teenagers don't understand computers. Maybe it's meant to simulate what the writer believes teenagers think of the command line? If so, it's hopelessly off it's mark, like much of this post. >>>All they want is a computer that works, and that runs their text messaging, anti-privacy and social media apps. They think that Linux is for hackers, that OS X is premium users and windows is what everybody else uses. No. Just no. I don't know where the writer could have gotten such an idea - most people who use OS X at my school do so for dev, but there is definitely also a sizeable Linux population in addition to the Windows contigent. Personally, I have devices running Windows, OS X, and a few Linux distros. Ultimately, however, the writer disproves his own point, that teenagers don't know how to use computers as well as their reputation deserves. Being at home with the development of computers is vastly different from actually using them - something at which, I counter, teens are actually pretty good. Yes, the majority of teens may not use the command line much. But the computer is much more than the command line - something other posters on this thread have noted well.
- mntmoss 7y ago
  I believe the original article is bad, but not simply for the reasons you state. It's rather part of a tired genre of "kids these days" articles where modern technology has somehow poisoned them beyond comprehension. In fact, kids tend to do things in a pragmatic and rational way, and it is on the author to appreciate what they are and are not savvy about. The typical pattern around new technology in my own life(30's Millenial) is that even within the generation you get people who develop a specialty, and their counterparts who learn to be good at asking for assistance. And intergenerationally the pattern magnifies as you get more and more dependencies on the group of true experts, and there's often a gap in the training of the next group - "no careers in this". People perhaps 30 years older than me - the Boomers - would have come of age in the mid 70's, right as semiconductor ICs really started making waves. The probable focus of their attention with respect to technology would not necessarily be "computing" but "electronics," since so many consumer electronics suddenly became possible. But as consumers they would want service and support, and so the nature of the sales around this stuff was to promise that they could use the device in a very basic way and have someone take care of them if it broke. The Gen X and cusp Millenial crowd, on the other hand, grew up with the devices ambiently around them and little marketing dialogue(what dialogue they had would be diverted towards toys and games consoles). Their incentive was to figure out enough to fix some yard sale or dumpster find; and modern notions of computer hacking derive from that romanticization. But the reality for many folks in these generations is that they can only be self-reliant in so many ways. It takes unusual persistence to reverse engineer your computer starting from nothing or only the most basic kind of information, and yet that is often the kind of story heard from people who "got into computers" around this tine. As you get to the more Internet-connected era, it gets a lot easier to get directed to some kind of help or guidance, and that made for a substantial generational shift, although a lot of my memories of programmers on the early Internet is of the most arrogant, ego-centic types anxiously blasting anyone who dared challenge them. The word "toxic" had no parlance yet. I believe the main challenge that is faced by the younger crowd now is what happens once the brightly paved road to knowledge drops off - there are lots of "friendly" 10-minute video tutorials for everything, but often the conceptual depth is missing, and so you have a cycle of learning and relearning with more rigor, while it would be more common in the past to jump from self-experiment straight to academia, simply because all the knowledge really was centralized there.
deleted 7y ago
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deleted 7y ago
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jdofaz 7y ago
This is from 2016
- dang 7y ago
  Added. Thanks!
ImprovedSilence 7y ago
I mean, I didn’t have a clue about IT and only ever used windows until AFTER college. In high school I didn’t have the slightest care for any computer type stuff besides AIM, Napster and cracked video games. I had two programming classes in college. (Neither Of which I cared for too much or really learned much about the underlying machine)and they were both done on Windows computers. I guess I’m lucky my degree (EE) overlapped with comp eng, I got into some decent jobs that let my work overlap gradually into software land. I now I work on Linux machines all day, and have a very healthy hunger to continue to learn and pick up new knowledge. But bottom line, none of this developed until I got into a career. Kids back in the day were just as clueless. And there are a few outliers, sure.
outime 7y ago
When I had my first computer as a kid (~8yo) and no one to teach me about the inner workings, I still felt that I wanted to dig deep into it. As the years passed by and saw the evolution from dial-up to all-day-long available & fast connections, tons of material to learn online, videos on demand... I thought oh wow, the next generations are going to have so much IT knowledge very early! Turns out that today, in my humble experience, it’s very rare to find geeky (pre)teens unless they have geeky parents (and not even then). Computers became much more simplified, problem-free and in different forms to mostly consume content. So the curiosity that grew inside of me while solving daily computer problems is very difficult nowadays as most of the issues aren’t very challenging (which is very good for the average user).
- rc-5 7y ago
  This comment has somehow sparked an idea in me... I, too, dug into computers as a child (now a teen). But I got my first computer (a Chromebook) in 5th grade. Perhaps not having computers (or tech in general) as a child causes an enlarged interest when given access to computers?
rodgerd 7y ago
Gen X doesn't have a clue about punch cards. Boomers don't have a clue about steam engines. My teen is a lot more interested in what she can use tools to do and create, not fucking around with installing hardware and operating system. I feel like this is a better use of her time, frankly. This is like listening to people my parents' age rant about how no-one has to use their pantyhose to fix a broken fan belt, or adjust a carb to a richer or leaner fuel mix as you go skiing and come home.
imgabe 7y ago
I imagine the author shaking his fist at the sky while writing this. Speaking as a former teen, teens don't know much about sales and marketing, mechanical engineering, international politics, or basically any other aspect of the adult world. This is because they're teens. I guess because they learn to use new technology faster it gives the impression that they know all about it. But I don't know why anyone would expect them to be an expert in operating system design or anything.
- jheriko 7y ago
  i blame the parents and the education system... these things you mention are much more important in practical terms than the vast bulk of curriculum contents these days.
Izkata 7y ago
> Green text with a black background is the norm, right? No. Using green text on a black background is not only obnoxious but also hard to read. If at all the norm is white text on a black background or white on black. Hm. I use white-on-purple at work, and green-on-black at home. Anyone else use apparently-unusual terminal colors? *green-on-black with occasional red, was part of a rotating color set I used to use. The Christmas colors were nice enough I kept them year-round.
- kyuudou 7y ago
  yellow-on-black usually
VLM 7y ago
IT is about highly scaled standardized system level engineering of documented verifiable reliable processes in support of even more complicated business processes that theoretically make, or at least save, profit. The article title is correct in that teens don't know anything about that. Most management personnel don't, either. Although the article contents seem to be that teens are somewhat worse than average at manipulation of UIs. Given stereotypical teen performance at automobile operation, culinary skills, operating romantic relationships, and muscular coordination in general, I'm not sure why anyone is surprised.
the_jeremy 7y ago
Don't know how an unsubstantiated rant like this (from 2016, no less!) is trending, but I'll respond. When I was a teen, I knew practically nothing about computers - I remember trying to use regedit to hack a server-side game because some friend told me to. I could type and play games and surf the internet, that was about it. I wrote my first program in college, and I'm doing reasonably well in software (graduated 2017 with a SWE job at median wage for my area, job hopped for a 20% raise after a year, and just got put in for a promotion at my new job).
thrower123 7y ago
There's no golden age when people used to know how to use computers. It's always been a small percentage that had any idea how things actually worked. You used to have to have that type of obsessive, systemizing kind of mind to work things at all, so most people just didn't. For every one of us futzing around with autoexec.bat, there were a dozen or more who didn't care to frig with systems where troubleshooting was more complicated than turning it on and off and blowing dust out of the cartridge. Most people are not curious nor do they care to know things at that level of detail.
vsareto 7y ago
>They most likely won’t care about the operation of their system Frankly, I don't either. Most of the important know-how comes to servers or cloud service configurations. My personal and work computers just work, no thanks to my knowledge. Win10 is vastly better than all previous versions in terms of this. Even if I run into something, there's always Google/YouTube. I think most teens can handle Google. You don't need to have this stuff memorized any more. That under-the-hood knowledge you're trying to get me to memorize? Just tell me what to search for and I'll go look it up if I want to learn about it. I can remember that search phrase easily. I'm not going to remember every detail you talk about. When I can't google my way into 6 digit jobs, I'll start worrying. Until then, those under-the-hood people can rest easy knowing things are much more streamlined these days because of their work.
- maxDemianx 7y ago
  Sarcasm.
dang 7y ago
The article is rather silly but the thread is rather good, so let's try turning off the flags and letting it run. Current, former, and future teenagers welcome!
averros 7y ago
Majority of IT "professionals" do not have a clue about IT. News at 10.
kube-system 7y ago
Heck, I've worked with a lot of developers who would fall into the same camp.
jcims 7y ago
I'm less worried about teens than I am the folks we're interviewing with masters degrees in computer science that don't know what a subnet mask is or how to use a sniffer.
ratsmack 7y ago
I have three boys, two are engineers and one is a gamer. Guess who fixes their computer when things go awry? That's right, it's me, their 65 year old father that learned to code assembly back in 1976 on a Dec PDP. I tried to teach them something more than just the superficial shell visible to users, but they just weren't interested in learning what was inside.
- kovek 7y ago
  I am missing out on learning from my dad (who wants to teach me about the foreign exchange). Instead, I'm going down my own route. Otherwise, I'd have to sit on his bed and watch him explain things to me in an unstructured manner. So, I recommend getting a proper desk to co-op on and a learning plan if you don't have those setup already. Also, I had a neighbor with lots of knowledge in electrical and software engineering. He taught me some of my first learnings with c++ and python. Shame that he was drinking a lot.
  - lostlogin 7y ago
    > Also, I had a neighbor with lots of knowledge in electrical and software engineering... Shame that he was drinking a lot. These things aren’t necessarily unrelated.
RandomGuyDTB 7y ago
I hate that this is true. I've posted here before on the same topic[1] and although we know a lot of stuff about computers, we don't really grok them. Or at least, not a lot of my peers do, and I'm sorely missing some info myself. My friends just don't care. At all. About anything related to lower level computing. I explain things and they ignore me, even when I try to make it relatable (without being patronizing). I'm glad I'm not a teacher because I don't know how to get people interested in what I'm interested in. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21707864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21707864
- IIAOPSW 7y ago
  Bad news kid. As you grow up adults are on average just as averse to understanding anything on a deeper level, and even worse they get to vote and it counts the same as yours. Best thing you can do is self select into a profession where you're surrounded by people who do care and eventually you can forget what the average person is truly like.
what-the-grump 7y ago
And thanks to python... devs dont know anything about IT either... import ml, import scikit-learn, import pandas, why is my pc out ram when i try to load 4gb of text into a data frame? [Angry sysadmin will show himself out now]
learn_more 7y ago
Jonny can't troubleshoot.
baldfat 7y ago
Early Generation X Computer users will be the greatest generation of computer users because: 1) We had an easy time with simple CPU like the Z80 or Assembly for the C64. You could have the whole chip in your head. 2) Graphical Interfaces hides the nuts and bolts and we didn't have them. 3) We had to hack to do things because usually that was the only way to do something you wanted to do. We had to tweak and modify files and ram just so a game would launch. It was magical at the time.
jacobsenscott 7y ago
Breaking news: Teens don't have a clue about *! Also IT <> using a computer. IT <> hacking, etc. IT is a department in the basement of megacorp. I've been programing for 25 years and I don't have a clue about IT. I understand it involves getting Microsoft certifications.
TeaDude 7y ago
You want to know who's fault this is? Yours, whoever wrote this article. It constantly complains that modern teens barely touch anything underneath the surface in tech but ironically completely smears over any of the underlying issues. Let's have a think... Do any of the mainstream tech publications cover low level programming? No. Are any low level computer skills taught in college or other mainstream programming courses? No. Do big tech companies give a thought to the quality of their software as long they can foist it on people? No. (Although you could probably argue that that isn't a new phenomena) Garbage in, garbage out. Someone failed to protect the tech industry and it isn't these teens' fault that real programming is completely obscured. The best chance they have is getting into retro games so they can stumble across David Murray or Clint Basinger or the like.
- vengefulduck 7y ago
  Hate to break it to you, but I’m in college learning C and assembly right now, don’t know how much lower level you can get.
  - watwut 7y ago
    You can build it all from diodes, relays and other electronics.
  - TeaDude 7y ago
    Damn, you must be going to a good one then. None of the local colleges teach either!
- ketzu 7y ago
  The author of the article seems to be a teen themselves (cf. the first paragraph and usage of 'they' and 'we'). 'Mainstream tech pubs with low level programming?' Depends on what you count as low level programming. The tech publications I check out sure contain information about, for example, C and C++ developments.
  - TeaDude 7y ago
    What publications would you recommend for C and C++? The previous "big one", Dobb's Journal was killed off circa 2014 (Although it was pretty much dead already by that point)
mastrsushi 7y ago
"When you explain what happens under the hood, they will ignore you. When you tell them what a certain setting probably does, they will ignore you" Was this written by a teen?
lota-putty 7y ago
Sounds like grown-ups are failing to learn how to engage teen-minds during these tech-vibrant times.
voldacar 7y ago
I unironically find green text on a black background really nice to read, it contrasts well without being fatiguing on the eyes like dark text on light background. not sure what the author is on about
- rileytg 7y ago
  i don’t really like anything else... maybe it’s because we grew up on it?
- fl0wenol 7y ago
  I prefer beige/amber and black because I don't like too much color saturation and I feel it's a wee bit easier on the eyes. Like the default colors in CDE on Solaris.
  - asdff 7y ago
    turned my shell font color to a close approximate of the hn background beige and it's been great.
- kyuudou 7y ago
  For similar reasons I default to yellow text on black bg. High contrast but low-fatigue.
numlock86 7y ago
First paragraph: > Many teachers and parents believe the younger generation know more about technology and “computers” then their own generation. They believe the teens of today know more about computers because we grew up with them, we have always used them and use them for almost every task. Ok, the entire article basically starts off with a subjective assumption. Great ... By that logic my parents should know how analog telephones or TVs work, but I already have doubts that they have an idea of how 3.4 kHz sound like or even know what a kHz is. I doubt they ever heard of cathode rays either. So why should nowadays teens know how MIPI DSI works for example? Because they look at a 7" screen driven by that the entire day? The whole idea is just plain bogus.
mattlondon 7y ago
I've done a bunch of things at work for "bring your child to work" days etc where we run a class with the kids for an hour or two to make a game using Scratch on raspberry pis. There is a wide spectrum of ability and interest (and the ages go from perhaps 8 or 9 to mid teens), but a large proportion of the kids get it and are off and happily programming away to make their flappy bird clone based on some basic instructions. Many say they already know Scratch from school. Many get bored and go rogue by ignoring the instructions and doing their own thing with the game and you start to see some bizarre mashups of what they're supposed to be making and what their imagination came up with. When we run those classes, the feedback is usually really really positive. Sure - scratch is not "programming" as most of us would think of it, but it is programming. Tl;Dr - give kids a break. There is interest and ability there if you give them the chance to express it. It is very easy to judge.
- jakoblorz 7y ago
  Sound very supportive! Let me add: The parents that brought their kids to these occasions may have a technically background also? Then these parents know how to use a computer and may have passed this knowledge on, at least the positive attitude towards knowing how it works. Children are interested in what their parents do after all. Children are trained in consuming computers/content on computers, so some (maybe even the majority of what I observed) may have a negative attitude towards learning what computers actually do. After all, consuming rewards them with joy, learning is meh...
leokennis 7y ago
Even if the premise of this article is true...being able to fluently use computers (even if you don’t understand their inner workings) is already better than what their parents achieve. No one was complaining that mom and dad don’t know what defragmentation is, and why it doesn’t matter on an SSD. No one was sad grandma had no clue why changing the DHCP setting on her router made no difference when she was outside the house. The issue was your mom calling for the 20th time asking how to rip a cd in iTunes, or dad not being able to attach a photo to an e-mail. That issue seems more than solved by the current generation.
PeterStuer 7y ago
The article and many of the responses here to it sadly reflect the casual agist narrative that was long present but especially in the last few years has become more prevalent. It is not a productive model to reason from unless division is your goal. You will find computer literate in each generation, just as you will find the majority in each case completely oblivious to and uninterested in acquiring the knowledge to understand and troubleshoot non trivial issues.
deleted 7y ago
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guggle 7y ago
Hello, I think the article is not very good, however its main point still stands. Part of my activity is teaching basic word processing and basic html/css to non-IT students. And it's quite a struggle because most (I say most because of course there are exceptions) students don't know how to use their computer for the most basic tasks. Most have no idea how files are organized on a computer, ignoring the concept of file system. They simply can't navigate their file system and end up stuck between their "Documents" and "Downloads" folder. They routinely "lose" their files. Once they've been introduced to the notion of file system, most don't understand the difference between regular folders and files and zip archive. Arguably, Windows is to blame here since it tries to hide the difference. Then they try to edit the files directly from the archive and don't understand why they can't save them right away. Most don't know how to use a keyboard. Basic shortcuts (ctrl+c/ctrl+v and the like) are ignored. Most rely on the mouse and the menus for everything, and of course are terribly slow to achieve their tasks. So we have to explain all these things before we even start with our subject, to the point where I wonder if they've been exposed to desktop computer before. I think most have only been using phones and tablets. So, from my point of view, the conclusion of the article is right: teachers and parents should not assume their children and students know how to use a computer, because it might not be the case.
- bambataa 7y ago
  That's because the aim of computer design in the few decades has been to turn such things into implementation details. If your primary computing device is a phone or a tablet you have no idea, and /no need to know/, what your photo's filename is. It's just there in the app and can be easily shared, edited or printed from there. The question is -- is that a bad thing? For the majority of people a computer is a means to end and the fewer implementation details exposed the better. Just as I don't really want or need to know how a car works in detail in order to get from A to B. What I see happening is that computing knowledge becomes more and more the preserve of specialists and that's a good thing. When I started to learn programming I read about why the command line was so useful and people were saying things like "you can batch rename files really easily!". But the only times I've ever really had to do that are programming-related tasks such as log files etc. Most people simply don't need to do that often enough to justify learning how.
the_dripper 7y ago
this article has bad spelling. not to be a snob but i could do it better, as a non-english speaker. also i dont get why the youth always has to be represented in a bad way. i mean most uf us are kinda stupid, but not all of us.
cm2187 7y ago
I am trying to help juniors in a financial institution to pick up programming. What is interesting is that it is a skill a lot of people wish they had, and lots of people sign up. But very few follow through when they realise what it means in practice.
- giornogiovanna 7y ago
  > what it means in practice. What do you mean? Do they think it's boring, or that it's too complicated, or that it's useless, or something else?
  - cm2187 7y ago
    I think it’s a mix of it is hard work and not to their taste. Which I think is fine. I am talking to a population who didn’t lean toward engineering in their education and career choices. But my point is that their might be some curiosity, just not the appetite to pay the cost of understanding how the sausages are made.
newsgremlin 7y ago
Thinking back to my adolescence, there were few that were that proficient and similar observations could have been made, being able to use limewire and the office suite was about as technical as it got for my late millennial class. I think we are getting smarter overall, but I don't expect it to be the norm, it requires a societal shift away from distracting platforms and entertainment that don't facilitate the need to explore and learn.
mywacaday 7y ago
I don't know why there was ever an expectation that teens would know more. People that are interested in a topic know more, its not a factor of age. The same could be said of cars, boats, household appliances, anything! If you are interested you will learn and if your not you won't. Exposure and use on a daily basis does not imply that you will know whats going on under the hood, a literal old car metaphor for understanding whats going on out of sight. The majority of people drive or are driven in cars and only have a cursory knowledge of how they work and the thing is they don't need to and that's how it should be. We don't expect people to understand in detail how their cars/trains/elevators/coffee machine/hair dryer work, why should a computer be different?
fmajid 7y ago
The whole computing experience is overwhelmingly complex compared to the Apple ][ I started with. My daughter just turned 8 and I am struggling with how to: 1) get her interested (she has been an iPad generation girl since 3) 2) ease her into it without the layers of complexity that I had the time to learn organically as they were introduced over the last 40 years.
arexxbifs 7y ago
Computers have evolved into commoditized entertainment appliances. Nobody who spends their time watching TV is expected to know how to fix their TV or even how it works: it just does, and everyone's happy. It's not even a new thing. Granted, when computers were less common, it was of course more likely that someone who owned one also had an interest in it beyond the bare basics. Still, I had friends who didn't know anything more than how to plonk a disk into the drive of their Amiga 500 to start a game, or otherwise learned the bare minimum required to for example load a C64 game from tape. And let's not even talk about the Nintendo crowd. What a bunch of ignoramuses! Those who are interested in how computers work will learn about it. The rest will treat it as the appliance it's intended to be and go about their lives, spending their time getting proficient in other areas and skills instead.
nkrisc 7y ago
In my own experience, it has nothing to do with age or generation, it's simply down to one particular aspect of one's personality: curiosity. A lot of people just aren't that curious about the world around them. Ever notice that lots of tech and IT geeks are also very knowledgeable about completely unrelated fields? It's not a coincidence, I don't think. The type of people that are drawn to the tech field are often people that are simply curious about everything. Just so happens you can make a good living in tech, but not as easily in gardening or building RC planes. I grew up in the late 90s and early 2000s and was very interested in computers, dabbling in C++ and Flash ActionScript and all sorts of things. It was just because I was curious about it. Most of my other friends just weren't. When they saw something and they didn't know how it worked, they didn't even think to care. I see this with people of all ages, young and old. My mother is like that, but my father is very curious. As I've gotten older, I've gotten more curious about things and I just keep learning more and more. Some people just want to know how everything works and will take the time to figure it out.
RMPR 7y ago
Interesting article, although the absence of margins made the reading painful (at least for me)

122 points by herohamp 7y ago

zeku 7y ago

this is just a rant and not constructive.

tpmx 7y ago
An observation doesn't need to be constructive. I needs to be relevant and novel. This is a relevant and novel observation. The people seemingly feeling hurt by this - you do realize you're outliers, right?
- horsawlarway 7y ago
  You're getting downvoted because this is neither relevant nor novel. The number of folks who genuinely understand computers has been rising at unprecedented rates. Just look at the number of employed programmers. Does that mean most children understand it? Of course not, just like most adults don't. When Grandma is amazed that her grandkids manage to make Netflix work, I don't think there's any real expectation that they will become software engineers. This is like bitching that kids from the 1920s don't know how combustion engines work. It's not productive.
  - tpmx 7y ago
    The amount of people who can create things that have some value for someone at ever increasing abstraction levels have increased, for sure. Also: I really dislike that self-righteous "your're getting downvoted for..." thing you're doing. I don't mind being downvoted when I know I'm correct ;).
- joethebob 7y ago
  This is relevant and novel? There's really nothing here that hasn't been true for at least the last 20 years. It usually one of the first things you learn after discovering any aspect of technology is how few people actually look under the hood.
noicebrewery 7y ago
Lots of "they"s and generalisations. In the words of the people the author is mocking, "ok boomer"
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

8bitsrule 7y ago

When I was a teen, I couldn't have explained (in any detail) how a car engine worked either. Five years later, I'd quickly learned in order to keep my own running. Those who need to, and have the time, will figure it out. If they are clueless, that's good. There are much more important things a teen needs to learn.

jakoblorz 7y ago
That's so true. The question is if kids learn the tools to understand what computers do when needing self-study later.
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jtmcmc 7y ago

I use green text on a black background in my terminal.

arthurcolle 7y ago
Same here, with a little transparency I find it fantastic to read.
gburdell3 7y ago
You use a terminal?? Back in MY day, we used PUNCH CARDS! Kids these days...
imron 7y ago
I can't use a white background on my terminal. It'd be like looking at a light bulb all day. Dark mode FTW.
CivBase 7y ago
Same. The author calls it obnoxious, but I think the lower contrast between green and black is easier on my eyes.

joezydeco 7y ago

The motivation is different, that’s all. When we were kids we needed to learn to hack DOS and Windows because our games wouldn’t run without them. Hard drive crashes, SCANDISK, reinstalls, fucked up drivers... whatever it took. My kids can’t fix Win10 but now they know their way around web filters and how to hack Screen Time to bypass the shutoff. They’re trading pirated movies in gDrive and doing all kids of other stuff I have no clue about. Nothing has changed. It’s just a matter of your point of view.

tpmx 7y ago
The abstraction layers they are (typically) comfortable with have shifted 1 or 2 levels up.
- choward 7y ago
  Those level ups are pretty bad though. They take you from owning your data and devices to third parties having complete control.
  - dnpp123 7y ago
    Because we (as a society) failed to make those layers compatible with privacy and data ownership ?
    - asdff 7y ago
      Apple deserves a lot of blame imo. They could have shipped the iPhone with terminal and root access and opened the floodgates on some very unique ideas with the new technology, but instead forced the hacking community to be this kind of unsupported/illicit grey area that shrunk every time a jailbreak was patched.
vidanay 7y ago
I'd rather be like my kid and worry about making sure his Fortnite is updated than playing the HIMEM.sys jigsaw puzzle that I had to.

cuddlybacon 7y ago

When I was in school, there were computer classes from grades 6 until 12. It covered topics like typing, keyboard shortcuts, internet browsing, internet research, and basics in more advanced topics like Photoshop and programming. By the time my sister, who is 7 years younger than me, got to school that was mostly gone. It was cut back "because kids just know that stuff".

tuzakey 7y ago

From 2013: http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co... It's not just teens.

gumby 7y ago

They don't know what their car's choke would have been, or what a dwell tach is. So? They can still drive. Not one in 100,000 could milk a cow. I write assembly code that runs in supervisory mode. My kid couldn't write assembly code to save his life, but just taught me a new algorithm I'd never seen before. And he could learn assembly if he wanted.

Johnny555 7y ago
Not one in 100,000 could milk a cow. I know this wasn't your point, but I'll nitpick anyway since that number felt too low, so I checked, and the number seems like it should be closer to 1 in 200. There are 72M children [1] below the age of 18 in the USA today, so 1 in 100,000 would only be 720 and there's something like 40,000 dairy farms in the USA, and I'd bet every child on those farms older than 8 (probably younger) could manage to milk a cow. The FFA has 700,000 members [2], and I'd bet that at least half of them could manage to milk a cow, so that's closer to 1 in 200. This isn't quite a fair comparison since the article above was referring only to "teens", not "children", and the FFA numbers include members up to age 21 and includes members in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands). [1] https://www.aecf.org/resources/the-changing-child-population-of-the-united-states/ https://www.aecf.org/resources/the-changing-child-population... [2] https://www.ffa.org/our-membership/ https://www.ffa.org/our-membership/
- gumby 7y ago
  Thanks for the clarification! I originally had typed "1 in 10,000" but that seemed too many kids....and it turns out I was utterly wrong!
  - vidanay 7y ago
    Udderly
  - dismalpedigree 7y ago
    turns out I was UDDERLY wrong! Long day. I’ll be here all week!

theLotusGambit 7y ago

> Why do the teens of today think this? Because simply, they don’t care. All they want is a computer that works, and that runs their text messaging, anti-privacy and social media apps. Wanting technology to just work without having to deal with esoteric nonsense? How childish!

ryukafalz 7y ago
That “esoteric nonsense” is how all this stuff actually works, and if you don’t have a grasp on the basics, it’s hard to tell when you’re being taken advantage of. (And these days, it feels like everyone’s looking to take advantage of unsuspecting users.)
- hatsuseno 7y ago
  When I have a problem with my car, I take it to a dealer or a certified repairshop. I effectively know jack-all about the workings of that machine. I can be easily conned into paying for repairs that don't need doing. Do you wish to claim that no such context exists for you? It's easy to gloss over the fact that for >99% of users the machine "just needs to work", and I don't think that's unreasonable. There will be a subset of kids that /do/ take an interest in this stuff, and will pick it up as the next generation of "IT magicians".

kdamica 7y ago

I think there's a point to be made here that proficiency with UI is often conflated with technical understanding by nontechnical people, but I'm not sure the point about teens is well-founded. Specifically, while it's probably true that teens don't understand IT, neither do the vast majority of adults. I'd love to see some data on this.

yoz-y 7y ago
> Specifically, while it's probably true that teens don't understand IT, neither do the vast majority of adults. I think that’s the point. The whole promise of “digital native” generation is false.

rdiddly 7y ago

Kind of like every other demographic. But yeah definitely don't make the mistake of assuming tech knowledge is inversely proportional to age. Otherwise it'd be like we're all coming out the womb writing assembly language and by age 50 we can't even work a toaster.

pnathan 7y ago

I've observed this myself. A lot of the computer studies stuff for high schoolers in the 1990s was "How To Use Word", I don't imagine its gotten better since. > Using green text on a black background is not only obnoxious but also hard to read. speak for yourself. :-) > they don’t care. All they want is a computer that works, This isn't actually an unreasonable ask. It's roughly identical to cars, phones, and other tools. The author's original point - that teens aren't gurus - is quite excellent.

chrisco255 7y ago

It ought to be a dying trope that kids know tech better than adults. I think the author is correct in observing that tech has become so user friendly and ubiquitous that understanding the basics doesn't really mean much. It's certainly not going to help you get ahead in any field. And as Millenials and gen X gets older, they have been around technology for decades longer, and the tech is no longer changing the workforce as quickly as it was in the '90s and '00s and even early '10s.

Kluny 7y ago

"When you explain what happens under the hood, they will ignore you. When you tell them what a certain setting probably does, they will ignore you." So teenagers do what teenagers have always done? I agree with the others - kids who need to figure stuff out will find a way.

PeterisP 7y ago
Sure, kids who need to figure stuff out will find a way, but the issue is that since the need for kids to figure stuff out has largely disappeared, the technical proficiency motivated by this has also disappeared. If some time ago we could implicitly assume all kinds of things that everyone "technical-minded" would know because they inevitably would have needed it as a kid, we now need to teach the very basics of how stuff works 'under the hood' explicitly without this assumption.
- hinkley 7y ago
  Do we need more operating system maintainers or library writers if we have more developers? I propose that the number of low level people we need is logarithmic to the number of devs. Uncle Bob proposed that the number of devs had been doubling every five years for the last couple decades. That means five times as many people are available to fill these critical spots. If he’s right and I’m right, then if every 5-year generation of devs has 60% of the ratio of people interested in low level stuff as the one before, then we will have plenty of people to keep the wheels on. Which if my math is right is 5% of the rate of gearheads we had in the dotcom boom. Which honestly was not that high even then. I was using a lot more theoretical knowledge of hardware than nearly all of my coworkers would cop to.

rootsudo 7y ago

I am happy that I grew up in the golden age of computing - people say it was the 80's, but being a "90's" kid, we had classes from HTML w/ dreamweaver, how to modify/break windows 95/98 --- In fact in NYC, my elementary school had keyboard class where you'd learn to type and general proficiency w/ a computer. In Florida, middle school photoshop, dreamweaver, fireworks and even access database. High school had C++ class - from what I believe was a fired Compaq programmer, needless to say it sucked but gave me a foundation. Meanwhile this was also the time where you needed to know a bit of HTML to modify your Geocities, Angelfire, Neopets (middle school days) to Myspace profile. Facebook came in and removed that whole layer of customization - Windows XP was really stable and besides malware no one needed to really know how to fix their computer. Then if you were into Video game culture, you had to learn how to solder to modify consoles with modchips, how to burn a CD, and generally modify and configure OS settings from IRQ to adding a DVDRW. Same with pirating videos, there was no youtube - maybe you'd get lucky and find an FTP server that hosted videos but even then you'd had codecs. Default, Windows didn't include Divx, MPEG2, etc - just WMV/WMA. Same with burning an MP3 to CD. Nowadays I feel like a SRE/Sysadmin hack, but man then again I know my way enough a system, can program lazily and hold my own with people who consider themselves senior devs, architects etc from MSFT, NIST, SpaceX -- It's nice. Maybe I do know something.

non-entity 7y ago
I normally roll my eyes at "wrong generation" stuff, but holy shit it seems like it would have been really fun to have grown up or even worked in the industry during the golden age.
- jimmux 7y ago
  As someone who was messing around with computers back then, I'm jealous of kids who are getting serious about this stuff now. I was lucky to have a computer at all to learn on. If I did anything remotely hacky, I would be warned about breaking an expensive and irreplaceable piece of equipment. There was no help or documentation. No Internet to download the most basic of resources. If I didn't stumble upon HyperCard at 12 years old and figure out what it was through trial and error, I may never have got the spark of curiosity that put me on the path. Some of the projects that exist now would have blown my little mind back then. People are reverse engineering my favourite old games and making them better! Insanity! And free 3D game engines! Using a nicely configured IDE with autocomplete, format on save, linting, etc. allows the mind be so liberated from the tedious details and really focus on the actual problem. You can actually do interesting things in JavaScript. It's a world apart from when typing <blink> tags into Notepad was enough to impress your friends.

rc-5 7y ago

Allow me to preface this by saying that I am, in fact, a teen, and absolutely do not represent the majority of teenagers. This post is a generalization and a subjective rant that absolutely doesn't hold up in real life. >>>When you explain what happens under the hood, they will ignore you. When you tell them what a certain setting probably does, they will ignore you. In my experience, although there may be some teenagers for which this is true, this is also true for people of all ages - those who aren't interested in learning the base technology simply won't. >>>Green text with a black background is the norm, right? No. This seems a diversion from the writer's point, that teenagers don't understand computers. Maybe it's meant to simulate what the writer believes teenagers think of the command line? If so, it's hopelessly off it's mark, like much of this post. >>>All they want is a computer that works, and that runs their text messaging, anti-privacy and social media apps. They think that Linux is for hackers, that OS X is premium users and windows is what everybody else uses. No. Just no. I don't know where the writer could have gotten such an idea - most people who use OS X at my school do so for dev, but there is definitely also a sizeable Linux population in addition to the Windows contigent. Personally, I have devices running Windows, OS X, and a few Linux distros. Ultimately, however, the writer disproves his own point, that teenagers don't know how to use computers as well as their reputation deserves. Being at home with the development of computers is vastly different from actually using them - something at which, I counter, teens are actually pretty good. Yes, the majority of teens may not use the command line much. But the computer is much more than the command line - something other posters on this thread have noted well.

mntmoss 7y ago
I believe the original article is bad, but not simply for the reasons you state. It's rather part of a tired genre of "kids these days" articles where modern technology has somehow poisoned them beyond comprehension. In fact, kids tend to do things in a pragmatic and rational way, and it is on the author to appreciate what they are and are not savvy about. The typical pattern around new technology in my own life(30's Millenial) is that even within the generation you get people who develop a specialty, and their counterparts who learn to be good at asking for assistance. And intergenerationally the pattern magnifies as you get more and more dependencies on the group of true experts, and there's often a gap in the training of the next group - "no careers in this". People perhaps 30 years older than me - the Boomers - would have come of age in the mid 70's, right as semiconductor ICs really started making waves. The probable focus of their attention with respect to technology would not necessarily be "computing" but "electronics," since so many consumer electronics suddenly became possible. But as consumers they would want service and support, and so the nature of the sales around this stuff was to promise that they could use the device in a very basic way and have someone take care of them if it broke. The Gen X and cusp Millenial crowd, on the other hand, grew up with the devices ambiently around them and little marketing dialogue(what dialogue they had would be diverted towards toys and games consoles). Their incentive was to figure out enough to fix some yard sale or dumpster find; and modern notions of computer hacking derive from that romanticization. But the reality for many folks in these generations is that they can only be self-reliant in so many ways. It takes unusual persistence to reverse engineer your computer starting from nothing or only the most basic kind of information, and yet that is often the kind of story heard from people who "got into computers" around this tine. As you get to the more Internet-connected era, it gets a lot easier to get directed to some kind of help or guidance, and that made for a substantial generational shift, although a lot of my memories of programmers on the early Internet is of the most arrogant, ego-centic types anxiously blasting anyone who dared challenge them. The word "toxic" had no parlance yet. I believe the main challenge that is faced by the younger crowd now is what happens once the brightly paved road to knowledge drops off - there are lots of "friendly" 10-minute video tutorials for everything, but often the conceptual depth is missing, and so you have a cycle of learning and relearning with more rigor, while it would be more common in the past to jump from self-experiment straight to academia, simply because all the knowledge really was centralized there.

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jdofaz 7y ago

This is from 2016

dang 7y ago
Added. Thanks!

ImprovedSilence 7y ago

I mean, I didn’t have a clue about IT and only ever used windows until AFTER college. In high school I didn’t have the slightest care for any computer type stuff besides AIM, Napster and cracked video games. I had two programming classes in college. (Neither Of which I cared for too much or really learned much about the underlying machine)and they were both done on Windows computers. I guess I’m lucky my degree (EE) overlapped with comp eng, I got into some decent jobs that let my work overlap gradually into software land. I now I work on Linux machines all day, and have a very healthy hunger to continue to learn and pick up new knowledge. But bottom line, none of this developed until I got into a career. Kids back in the day were just as clueless. And there are a few outliers, sure.

outime 7y ago

When I had my first computer as a kid (~8yo) and no one to teach me about the inner workings, I still felt that I wanted to dig deep into it. As the years passed by and saw the evolution from dial-up to all-day-long available & fast connections, tons of material to learn online, videos on demand... I thought oh wow, the next generations are going to have so much IT knowledge very early! Turns out that today, in my humble experience, it’s very rare to find geeky (pre)teens unless they have geeky parents (and not even then). Computers became much more simplified, problem-free and in different forms to mostly consume content. So the curiosity that grew inside of me while solving daily computer problems is very difficult nowadays as most of the issues aren’t very challenging (which is very good for the average user).

rc-5 7y ago
This comment has somehow sparked an idea in me... I, too, dug into computers as a child (now a teen). But I got my first computer (a Chromebook) in 5th grade. Perhaps not having computers (or tech in general) as a child causes an enlarged interest when given access to computers?

rodgerd 7y ago

Gen X doesn't have a clue about punch cards. Boomers don't have a clue about steam engines. My teen is a lot more interested in what she can use tools to do and create, not fucking around with installing hardware and operating system. I feel like this is a better use of her time, frankly. This is like listening to people my parents' age rant about how no-one has to use their pantyhose to fix a broken fan belt, or adjust a carb to a richer or leaner fuel mix as you go skiing and come home.

imgabe 7y ago

I imagine the author shaking his fist at the sky while writing this. Speaking as a former teen, teens don't know much about sales and marketing, mechanical engineering, international politics, or basically any other aspect of the adult world. This is because they're teens. I guess because they learn to use new technology faster it gives the impression that they know all about it. But I don't know why anyone would expect them to be an expert in operating system design or anything.

jheriko 7y ago
i blame the parents and the education system... these things you mention are much more important in practical terms than the vast bulk of curriculum contents these days.

Izkata 7y ago

> Green text with a black background is the norm, right? No. Using green text on a black background is not only obnoxious but also hard to read. If at all the norm is white text on a black background or white on black. Hm. I use white-on-purple at work, and green-on-black at home. Anyone else use apparently-unusual terminal colors? *green-on-black with occasional red, was part of a rotating color set I used to use. The Christmas colors were nice enough I kept them year-round.

kyuudou 7y ago
yellow-on-black usually

VLM 7y ago

IT is about highly scaled standardized system level engineering of documented verifiable reliable processes in support of even more complicated business processes that theoretically make, or at least save, profit. The article title is correct in that teens don't know anything about that. Most management personnel don't, either. Although the article contents seem to be that teens are somewhat worse than average at manipulation of UIs. Given stereotypical teen performance at automobile operation, culinary skills, operating romantic relationships, and muscular coordination in general, I'm not sure why anyone is surprised.

the_jeremy 7y ago

Don't know how an unsubstantiated rant like this (from 2016, no less!) is trending, but I'll respond. When I was a teen, I knew practically nothing about computers - I remember trying to use regedit to hack a server-side game because some friend told me to. I could type and play games and surf the internet, that was about it. I wrote my first program in college, and I'm doing reasonably well in software (graduated 2017 with a SWE job at median wage for my area, job hopped for a 20% raise after a year, and just got put in for a promotion at my new job).

thrower123 7y ago

There's no golden age when people used to know how to use computers. It's always been a small percentage that had any idea how things actually worked. You used to have to have that type of obsessive, systemizing kind of mind to work things at all, so most people just didn't. For every one of us futzing around with autoexec.bat, there were a dozen or more who didn't care to frig with systems where troubleshooting was more complicated than turning it on and off and blowing dust out of the cartridge. Most people are not curious nor do they care to know things at that level of detail.

vsareto 7y ago

>They most likely won’t care about the operation of their system Frankly, I don't either. Most of the important know-how comes to servers or cloud service configurations. My personal and work computers just work, no thanks to my knowledge. Win10 is vastly better than all previous versions in terms of this. Even if I run into something, there's always Google/YouTube. I think most teens can handle Google. You don't need to have this stuff memorized any more. That under-the-hood knowledge you're trying to get me to memorize? Just tell me what to search for and I'll go look it up if I want to learn about it. I can remember that search phrase easily. I'm not going to remember every detail you talk about. When I can't google my way into 6 digit jobs, I'll start worrying. Until then, those under-the-hood people can rest easy knowing things are much more streamlined these days because of their work.

maxDemianx 7y ago
Sarcasm.

dang 7y ago

The article is rather silly but the thread is rather good, so let's try turning off the flags and letting it run. Current, former, and future teenagers welcome!

averros 7y ago

Majority of IT "professionals" do not have a clue about IT. News at 10.

kube-system 7y ago

Heck, I've worked with a lot of developers who would fall into the same camp.

jcims 7y ago

I'm less worried about teens than I am the folks we're interviewing with masters degrees in computer science that don't know what a subnet mask is or how to use a sniffer.

ratsmack 7y ago

I have three boys, two are engineers and one is a gamer. Guess who fixes their computer when things go awry? That's right, it's me, their 65 year old father that learned to code assembly back in 1976 on a Dec PDP. I tried to teach them something more than just the superficial shell visible to users, but they just weren't interested in learning what was inside.

kovek 7y ago
I am missing out on learning from my dad (who wants to teach me about the foreign exchange). Instead, I'm going down my own route. Otherwise, I'd have to sit on his bed and watch him explain things to me in an unstructured manner. So, I recommend getting a proper desk to co-op on and a learning plan if you don't have those setup already. Also, I had a neighbor with lots of knowledge in electrical and software engineering. He taught me some of my first learnings with c++ and python. Shame that he was drinking a lot.
- lostlogin 7y ago
  > Also, I had a neighbor with lots of knowledge in electrical and software engineering... Shame that he was drinking a lot. These things aren’t necessarily unrelated.

RandomGuyDTB 7y ago

I hate that this is true. I've posted here before on the same topic[1] and although we know a lot of stuff about computers, we don't really grok them. Or at least, not a lot of my peers do, and I'm sorely missing some info myself. My friends just don't care. At all. About anything related to lower level computing. I explain things and they ignore me, even when I try to make it relatable (without being patronizing). I'm glad I'm not a teacher because I don't know how to get people interested in what I'm interested in. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21707864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21707864

IIAOPSW 7y ago
Bad news kid. As you grow up adults are on average just as averse to understanding anything on a deeper level, and even worse they get to vote and it counts the same as yours. Best thing you can do is self select into a profession where you're surrounded by people who do care and eventually you can forget what the average person is truly like.

what-the-grump 7y ago

And thanks to python... devs dont know anything about IT either... import ml, import scikit-learn, import pandas, why is my pc out ram when i try to load 4gb of text into a data frame? [Angry sysadmin will show himself out now]

learn_more 7y ago

Jonny can't troubleshoot.

baldfat 7y ago

Early Generation X Computer users will be the greatest generation of computer users because: 1) We had an easy time with simple CPU like the Z80 or Assembly for the C64. You could have the whole chip in your head. 2) Graphical Interfaces hides the nuts and bolts and we didn't have them. 3) We had to hack to do things because usually that was the only way to do something you wanted to do. We had to tweak and modify files and ram just so a game would launch. It was magical at the time.

jacobsenscott 7y ago

Breaking news: Teens don't have a clue about *! Also IT <> using a computer. IT <> hacking, etc. IT is a department in the basement of megacorp. I've been programing for 25 years and I don't have a clue about IT. I understand it involves getting Microsoft certifications.

TeaDude 7y ago

You want to know who's fault this is? Yours, whoever wrote this article. It constantly complains that modern teens barely touch anything underneath the surface in tech but ironically completely smears over any of the underlying issues. Let's have a think... Do any of the mainstream tech publications cover low level programming? No. Are any low level computer skills taught in college or other mainstream programming courses? No. Do big tech companies give a thought to the quality of their software as long they can foist it on people? No. (Although you could probably argue that that isn't a new phenomena) Garbage in, garbage out. Someone failed to protect the tech industry and it isn't these teens' fault that real programming is completely obscured. The best chance they have is getting into retro games so they can stumble across David Murray or Clint Basinger or the like.

vengefulduck 7y ago
Hate to break it to you, but I’m in college learning C and assembly right now, don’t know how much lower level you can get.
- watwut 7y ago
  You can build it all from diodes, relays and other electronics.
- TeaDude 7y ago
  Damn, you must be going to a good one then. None of the local colleges teach either!
ketzu 7y ago
The author of the article seems to be a teen themselves (cf. the first paragraph and usage of 'they' and 'we'). 'Mainstream tech pubs with low level programming?' Depends on what you count as low level programming. The tech publications I check out sure contain information about, for example, C and C++ developments.
- TeaDude 7y ago
  What publications would you recommend for C and C++? The previous "big one", Dobb's Journal was killed off circa 2014 (Although it was pretty much dead already by that point)

mastrsushi 7y ago

"When you explain what happens under the hood, they will ignore you. When you tell them what a certain setting probably does, they will ignore you" Was this written by a teen?

lota-putty 7y ago

Sounds like grown-ups are failing to learn how to engage teen-minds during these tech-vibrant times.

voldacar 7y ago

I unironically find green text on a black background really nice to read, it contrasts well without being fatiguing on the eyes like dark text on light background. not sure what the author is on about

rileytg 7y ago
i don’t really like anything else... maybe it’s because we grew up on it?
fl0wenol 7y ago
I prefer beige/amber and black because I don't like too much color saturation and I feel it's a wee bit easier on the eyes. Like the default colors in CDE on Solaris.
- asdff 7y ago
  turned my shell font color to a close approximate of the hn background beige and it's been great.
kyuudou 7y ago
For similar reasons I default to yellow text on black bg. High contrast but low-fatigue.

numlock86 7y ago

First paragraph: > Many teachers and parents believe the younger generation know more about technology and “computers” then their own generation. They believe the teens of today know more about computers because we grew up with them, we have always used them and use them for almost every task. Ok, the entire article basically starts off with a subjective assumption. Great ... By that logic my parents should know how analog telephones or TVs work, but I already have doubts that they have an idea of how 3.4 kHz sound like or even know what a kHz is. I doubt they ever heard of cathode rays either. So why should nowadays teens know how MIPI DSI works for example? Because they look at a 7" screen driven by that the entire day? The whole idea is just plain bogus.

mattlondon 7y ago

I've done a bunch of things at work for "bring your child to work" days etc where we run a class with the kids for an hour or two to make a game using Scratch on raspberry pis. There is a wide spectrum of ability and interest (and the ages go from perhaps 8 or 9 to mid teens), but a large proportion of the kids get it and are off and happily programming away to make their flappy bird clone based on some basic instructions. Many say they already know Scratch from school. Many get bored and go rogue by ignoring the instructions and doing their own thing with the game and you start to see some bizarre mashups of what they're supposed to be making and what their imagination came up with. When we run those classes, the feedback is usually really really positive. Sure - scratch is not "programming" as most of us would think of it, but it is programming. Tl;Dr - give kids a break. There is interest and ability there if you give them the chance to express it. It is very easy to judge.

jakoblorz 7y ago
Sound very supportive! Let me add: The parents that brought their kids to these occasions may have a technically background also? Then these parents know how to use a computer and may have passed this knowledge on, at least the positive attitude towards knowing how it works. Children are interested in what their parents do after all. Children are trained in consuming computers/content on computers, so some (maybe even the majority of what I observed) may have a negative attitude towards learning what computers actually do. After all, consuming rewards them with joy, learning is meh...

leokennis 7y ago

Even if the premise of this article is true...being able to fluently use computers (even if you don’t understand their inner workings) is already better than what their parents achieve. No one was complaining that mom and dad don’t know what defragmentation is, and why it doesn’t matter on an SSD. No one was sad grandma had no clue why changing the DHCP setting on her router made no difference when she was outside the house. The issue was your mom calling for the 20th time asking how to rip a cd in iTunes, or dad not being able to attach a photo to an e-mail. That issue seems more than solved by the current generation.

PeterStuer 7y ago

The article and many of the responses here to it sadly reflect the casual agist narrative that was long present but especially in the last few years has become more prevalent. It is not a productive model to reason from unless division is your goal. You will find computer literate in each generation, just as you will find the majority in each case completely oblivious to and uninterested in acquiring the knowledge to understand and troubleshoot non trivial issues.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

guggle 7y ago

Hello, I think the article is not very good, however its main point still stands. Part of my activity is teaching basic word processing and basic html/css to non-IT students. And it's quite a struggle because most (I say most because of course there are exceptions) students don't know how to use their computer for the most basic tasks. Most have no idea how files are organized on a computer, ignoring the concept of file system. They simply can't navigate their file system and end up stuck between their "Documents" and "Downloads" folder. They routinely "lose" their files. Once they've been introduced to the notion of file system, most don't understand the difference between regular folders and files and zip archive. Arguably, Windows is to blame here since it tries to hide the difference. Then they try to edit the files directly from the archive and don't understand why they can't save them right away. Most don't know how to use a keyboard. Basic shortcuts (ctrl+c/ctrl+v and the like) are ignored. Most rely on the mouse and the menus for everything, and of course are terribly slow to achieve their tasks. So we have to explain all these things before we even start with our subject, to the point where I wonder if they've been exposed to desktop computer before. I think most have only been using phones and tablets. So, from my point of view, the conclusion of the article is right: teachers and parents should not assume their children and students know how to use a computer, because it might not be the case.

bambataa 7y ago
That's because the aim of computer design in the few decades has been to turn such things into implementation details. If your primary computing device is a phone or a tablet you have no idea, and /no need to know/, what your photo's filename is. It's just there in the app and can be easily shared, edited or printed from there. The question is -- is that a bad thing? For the majority of people a computer is a means to end and the fewer implementation details exposed the better. Just as I don't really want or need to know how a car works in detail in order to get from A to B. What I see happening is that computing knowledge becomes more and more the preserve of specialists and that's a good thing. When I started to learn programming I read about why the command line was so useful and people were saying things like "you can batch rename files really easily!". But the only times I've ever really had to do that are programming-related tasks such as log files etc. Most people simply don't need to do that often enough to justify learning how.

the_dripper 7y ago

this article has bad spelling. not to be a snob but i could do it better, as a non-english speaker. also i dont get why the youth always has to be represented in a bad way. i mean most uf us are kinda stupid, but not all of us.

cm2187 7y ago

I am trying to help juniors in a financial institution to pick up programming. What is interesting is that it is a skill a lot of people wish they had, and lots of people sign up. But very few follow through when they realise what it means in practice.

giornogiovanna 7y ago
> what it means in practice. What do you mean? Do they think it's boring, or that it's too complicated, or that it's useless, or something else?
- cm2187 7y ago
  I think it’s a mix of it is hard work and not to their taste. Which I think is fine. I am talking to a population who didn’t lean toward engineering in their education and career choices. But my point is that their might be some curiosity, just not the appetite to pay the cost of understanding how the sausages are made.

newsgremlin 7y ago

Thinking back to my adolescence, there were few that were that proficient and similar observations could have been made, being able to use limewire and the office suite was about as technical as it got for my late millennial class. I think we are getting smarter overall, but I don't expect it to be the norm, it requires a societal shift away from distracting platforms and entertainment that don't facilitate the need to explore and learn.

mywacaday 7y ago

I don't know why there was ever an expectation that teens would know more. People that are interested in a topic know more, its not a factor of age. The same could be said of cars, boats, household appliances, anything! If you are interested you will learn and if your not you won't. Exposure and use on a daily basis does not imply that you will know whats going on under the hood, a literal old car metaphor for understanding whats going on out of sight. The majority of people drive or are driven in cars and only have a cursory knowledge of how they work and the thing is they don't need to and that's how it should be. We don't expect people to understand in detail how their cars/trains/elevators/coffee machine/hair dryer work, why should a computer be different?

fmajid 7y ago

The whole computing experience is overwhelmingly complex compared to the Apple ][ I started with. My daughter just turned 8 and I am struggling with how to: 1) get her interested (she has been an iPad generation girl since 3) 2) ease her into it without the layers of complexity that I had the time to learn organically as they were introduced over the last 40 years.

arexxbifs 7y ago

Computers have evolved into commoditized entertainment appliances. Nobody who spends their time watching TV is expected to know how to fix their TV or even how it works: it just does, and everyone's happy. It's not even a new thing. Granted, when computers were less common, it was of course more likely that someone who owned one also had an interest in it beyond the bare basics. Still, I had friends who didn't know anything more than how to plonk a disk into the drive of their Amiga 500 to start a game, or otherwise learned the bare minimum required to for example load a C64 game from tape. And let's not even talk about the Nintendo crowd. What a bunch of ignoramuses! Those who are interested in how computers work will learn about it. The rest will treat it as the appliance it's intended to be and go about their lives, spending their time getting proficient in other areas and skills instead.

nkrisc 7y ago

In my own experience, it has nothing to do with age or generation, it's simply down to one particular aspect of one's personality: curiosity. A lot of people just aren't that curious about the world around them. Ever notice that lots of tech and IT geeks are also very knowledgeable about completely unrelated fields? It's not a coincidence, I don't think. The type of people that are drawn to the tech field are often people that are simply curious about everything. Just so happens you can make a good living in tech, but not as easily in gardening or building RC planes. I grew up in the late 90s and early 2000s and was very interested in computers, dabbling in C++ and Flash ActionScript and all sorts of things. It was just because I was curious about it. Most of my other friends just weren't. When they saw something and they didn't know how it worked, they didn't even think to care. I see this with people of all ages, young and old. My mother is like that, but my father is very curious. As I've gotten older, I've gotten more curious about things and I just keep learning more and more. Some people just want to know how everything works and will take the time to figure it out.

RMPR 7y ago

Interesting article, although the absence of margins made the reading painful (at least for me)