6 ms·

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 s

by 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.
- sheepybloke 7y ago
  I agree about the video point wholeheartedly. As someone who wants to do more complex projects, it can be really difficult to go beyond the beginner projects. I believe we live in a time where there are tons of beginner and expert projects and walk throughs, but not a lot of middle ground to help people advance to become experts.
p1necone 7y ago
Thanks for this, I take everything written about teenagers from the perspective of anyone >~20 with a huge grain of salt, because I'm not old enough to forget yet how completely and utterly out of touch adults were about my generation of teenagers when I was younger.
- rc-5 7y ago
  Haha - it's a perennial issue.
- Izkata 7y ago
  The opening paragraph indicates the writer is a teen though.
  - neonate 7y ago
    (I think that's p1necone's point about why they're taking rc-5 seriously.)
    - Izkata 7y ago
      Zeyphros> 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. rc-5> Allow me to preface this by saying that I am, in fact, a teen [nearly completely disagrees with Zeyphros] p1necone> [thanks to rc-5] I take everything written about teenagers from the perspective of anyone >~20 with a huge grain of salt I read it as p1necone assuming Zeyphros is an out-of-date >20-year-old, which at least appears to not be the case (as of 2016, when the post was written).
- ska 7y ago
  That particular sword is double edged - it took me a long time to realize how myopic we were about older generations, too. Human beings, huh?
- Mirioron 7y ago
tmpz22 7y ago
While I agree with your summary I think the OP brushes against another point I think is really important: a large number of users do not care to optimize their own experience for ~some~ reason, even when the lack of optimization has a significant opportunity cost. As software developers we pull our hair out trying to architect around this issue... and we usually fail hard. I could guess an infinity of potential causes, but if anyone has a concise answer to how to avoid the phenomenon please comment.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  > a large number of users do not care to optimize their own experience for ~some~ reason, even when the lack of optimization has a significant opportunity cost. A large proportion of people don’t even optimize their bedroom, and probably a huge proportion for teens and young adults. It’s lack of caring about long term benefits and focusing on short term benefits. Or laziness. Or procrastination. Or whatever you want to call it. You can spend some time now to make the future easier, or you can enjoy the time now and deal with the future later.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    “A large proportion of people don’t even optimize their bedroom, and probably a huge proportion for teens and young adults. It’s lack of caring about long term benefits and focusing on short term benefits. Or laziness. Or procrastination. Or whatever you want to call it.” maybe they think they have more important things to worry about?
  - egypturnash 7y ago
    How exactly does one optimize their bedroom anyway?
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      I meant keeping it organized or clean.
- porknubbins 7y ago
tapland 7y ago
I think you are missing where the author is coming from. People knew how to use websites and applications in the early 2000s as well, but with the advent of home computers, WWW and smartphones there was a widespread belief that, by nature of being surrounded by tech, young people would automatically learn how it worked under the surface and possess an inherent fluency in IT. That didn't happen. It's still people interested in tech actually learning the tech and your average high schooler doesn't graduate able to write drivers, create software or hand-code websites and web servers. It was a belief in the coming of a tech-utopia where every young person would know those things. But it doesn't just come automatically. There has been a huge surge in usage, driven by increased accessibility, standardization and user interfaces that don't require prior knowledge. A lot of the older generation (probably mostly the less tech savvy ones) still believe we are getting there and have at least somewhat gotten there. We really haven't.
- rc-5 7y ago
  Right - of course, I don't really know the cultural background, having not been around when those expectations were developing.
  - reificator 7y ago
    I was around when those expectations were developing, and my frustration with trying to get any kind of computer education from school taught me early on that it was up to me to dig in. None of my classmates learned computer skills by osmosis. Every single one of them that did learn those skills put in intentional effort because they were already interested. And even so, the schools were entirely stacked against us, intentionally or not. One kid (I still am not sure who) went through the computer lab and tweaked some settings to mess with everyone. Another kid (who definitely was innocent) stepped forward to help fix it, and got suspended for a week or two. Show any kind of competence with computers and you're a dangerous hacker. Fall in line and don't stand out or you will be punished.
    - asdff 7y ago
      The only cs experience even available to me growing up was a summer camp in town at a local college, where we spent three weeks making a four function calculator in java. I didn't write another line of code for years after that experience, which was pretty unfortunate.
hermitdev 7y ago
I'm old enough to be on the border of the millennial generation, but I certainly dont identify with it. I grew up dialing into local BBS's because our ISP was a long distance phone call (hell, where I grew up, calling half of my classmates was a long distance phone call). Through junior high/high school I was known as "the hacker" not because I was actually cracking system or anything, but merely because I knew how, and was comfortable with using a computer. I cut my teeth on DOS 3.0 on a 286 with a whopping 40 MB HD. I once got suspended for a week because a teacher "saw me with a black screen", aka a DOS prompt, the week before the school network crash, and assumed it must be related (I actually had nothing to do with the crash, I merely knew the keyboard shortcut in WordPerfect 5.1 to temporarily exit to a DOS prompt - super hacker skills, right?). Anyways, my parents and I didn't fight the suspension, because there was no evidence available to us that I didnt do it. My parents asked me point blank if I did it and I honestly replied no. Their response was: "well, youre going to learn how to". Thats how I got my first programming books. Not that I needed the programming knowledge, but a year later I did own my school's network. More the social engineering route than anything. I got a copy of the remote access tool the sysadmin was using. I could remote in (no password required, this was the 90s, all I needed was the phone number, which was handily affixed to the modem). I just had to time it such that the network drive backup was complete, then I had sysadmin access (I reran the backup so he'd see the completed screen when he got in the morning). I forget exactly how many admin counts I had, but it was at least 5 in case one got discovered (this was all Novell Netware back in the day). Admin access granted universal access. I could have changed grades (never needed to for myself and I didnt whore out my access). I could impersonate teachers over internal email and a precursor to IM. Not super hacker skills. Mostly stumbling around and befriending the lab admin. At times, it did help that I could type faster than the admin. Memories...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Zeyprhros 7y ago
While I do agree that the article is written in an ill-conceived manner, I do believe that much of the discussion regarding it is fairly biased.The user base on hackernews is not comprised of people who are unfamiliar with development or "figuring things out themselves". The problem resides in how highschools are not staying current with the science curriculum. All of the highschools I've visited, in the past 4 years, both in Ireland and in the Netherlands have not offered any sort of computer science education, which I myself would believe to be fairly important in a modern education. Of course it shouldn't be a mandatory class, just like how the other sciences are not mandatory. It should simply be a subject which is available to be chosen. While we did have an "IT" class in Ireland, it was solely about teaching the kids about typewrite. This doesn't give the students a chance to learn about the world of Computer science in school. I study computer science now despite this, but many students never decide to study something irrelevant to school in their free time.
austincheney 7y ago
> This post is a generalization and a subjective rant that absolutely doesn't hold up in real life. The generalization expressed in the long rant completely describes my teenagers. They can tap a screen like an elite ninja warrior but have no idea what to do with a physical keyboard. When the touch screen goes away they are hopelessly lost.

by rc-5 7y ago

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.

sheepybloke 7y ago
I agree about the video point wholeheartedly. As someone who wants to do more complex projects, it can be really difficult to go beyond the beginner projects. I believe we live in a time where there are tons of beginner and expert projects and walk throughs, but not a lot of middle ground to help people advance to become experts.

p1necone 7y ago

Thanks for this, I take everything written about teenagers from the perspective of anyone >~20 with a huge grain of salt, because I'm not old enough to forget yet how completely and utterly out of touch adults were about my generation of teenagers when I was younger.

rc-5 7y ago
Haha - it's a perennial issue.
Izkata 7y ago
The opening paragraph indicates the writer is a teen though.
- neonate 7y ago
  (I think that's p1necone's point about why they're taking rc-5 seriously.)
  - Izkata 7y ago
    Zeyphros> 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. rc-5> Allow me to preface this by saying that I am, in fact, a teen [nearly completely disagrees with Zeyphros] p1necone> [thanks to rc-5] I take everything written about teenagers from the perspective of anyone >~20 with a huge grain of salt I read it as p1necone assuming Zeyphros is an out-of-date >20-year-old, which at least appears to not be the case (as of 2016, when the post was written).
ska 7y ago
That particular sword is double edged - it took me a long time to realize how myopic we were about older generations, too. Human beings, huh?
Mirioron 7y ago

tmpz22 7y ago

While I agree with your summary I think the OP brushes against another point I think is really important: a large number of users do not care to optimize their own experience for ~some~ reason, even when the lack of optimization has a significant opportunity cost. As software developers we pull our hair out trying to architect around this issue... and we usually fail hard. I could guess an infinity of potential causes, but if anyone has a concise answer to how to avoid the phenomenon please comment.

lotsofpulp 7y ago
> a large number of users do not care to optimize their own experience for ~some~ reason, even when the lack of optimization has a significant opportunity cost. A large proportion of people don’t even optimize their bedroom, and probably a huge proportion for teens and young adults. It’s lack of caring about long term benefits and focusing on short term benefits. Or laziness. Or procrastination. Or whatever you want to call it. You can spend some time now to make the future easier, or you can enjoy the time now and deal with the future later.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  “A large proportion of people don’t even optimize their bedroom, and probably a huge proportion for teens and young adults. It’s lack of caring about long term benefits and focusing on short term benefits. Or laziness. Or procrastination. Or whatever you want to call it.” maybe they think they have more important things to worry about?
- egypturnash 7y ago
  How exactly does one optimize their bedroom anyway?
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    I meant keeping it organized or clean.
porknubbins 7y ago

tapland 7y ago

I think you are missing where the author is coming from. People knew how to use websites and applications in the early 2000s as well, but with the advent of home computers, WWW and smartphones there was a widespread belief that, by nature of being surrounded by tech, young people would automatically learn how it worked under the surface and possess an inherent fluency in IT. That didn't happen. It's still people interested in tech actually learning the tech and your average high schooler doesn't graduate able to write drivers, create software or hand-code websites and web servers. It was a belief in the coming of a tech-utopia where every young person would know those things. But it doesn't just come automatically. There has been a huge surge in usage, driven by increased accessibility, standardization and user interfaces that don't require prior knowledge. A lot of the older generation (probably mostly the less tech savvy ones) still believe we are getting there and have at least somewhat gotten there. We really haven't.

rc-5 7y ago
Right - of course, I don't really know the cultural background, having not been around when those expectations were developing.
- reificator 7y ago
  I was around when those expectations were developing, and my frustration with trying to get any kind of computer education from school taught me early on that it was up to me to dig in. None of my classmates learned computer skills by osmosis. Every single one of them that did learn those skills put in intentional effort because they were already interested. And even so, the schools were entirely stacked against us, intentionally or not. One kid (I still am not sure who) went through the computer lab and tweaked some settings to mess with everyone. Another kid (who definitely was innocent) stepped forward to help fix it, and got suspended for a week or two. Show any kind of competence with computers and you're a dangerous hacker. Fall in line and don't stand out or you will be punished.
  - asdff 7y ago
    The only cs experience even available to me growing up was a summer camp in town at a local college, where we spent three weeks making a four function calculator in java. I didn't write another line of code for years after that experience, which was pretty unfortunate.

hermitdev 7y ago

I'm old enough to be on the border of the millennial generation, but I certainly dont identify with it. I grew up dialing into local BBS's because our ISP was a long distance phone call (hell, where I grew up, calling half of my classmates was a long distance phone call). Through junior high/high school I was known as "the hacker" not because I was actually cracking system or anything, but merely because I knew how, and was comfortable with using a computer. I cut my teeth on DOS 3.0 on a 286 with a whopping 40 MB HD. I once got suspended for a week because a teacher "saw me with a black screen", aka a DOS prompt, the week before the school network crash, and assumed it must be related (I actually had nothing to do with the crash, I merely knew the keyboard shortcut in WordPerfect 5.1 to temporarily exit to a DOS prompt - super hacker skills, right?). Anyways, my parents and I didn't fight the suspension, because there was no evidence available to us that I didnt do it. My parents asked me point blank if I did it and I honestly replied no. Their response was: "well, youre going to learn how to". Thats how I got my first programming books. Not that I needed the programming knowledge, but a year later I did own my school's network. More the social engineering route than anything. I got a copy of the remote access tool the sysadmin was using. I could remote in (no password required, this was the 90s, all I needed was the phone number, which was handily affixed to the modem). I just had to time it such that the network drive backup was complete, then I had sysadmin access (I reran the backup so he'd see the completed screen when he got in the morning). I forget exactly how many admin counts I had, but it was at least 5 in case one got discovered (this was all Novell Netware back in the day). Admin access granted universal access. I could have changed grades (never needed to for myself and I didnt whore out my access). I could impersonate teachers over internal email and a precursor to IM. Not super hacker skills. Mostly stumbling around and befriending the lab admin. At times, it did help that I could type faster than the admin. Memories...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Zeyprhros 7y ago

While I do agree that the article is written in an ill-conceived manner, I do believe that much of the discussion regarding it is fairly biased.The user base on hackernews is not comprised of people who are unfamiliar with development or "figuring things out themselves". The problem resides in how highschools are not staying current with the science curriculum. All of the highschools I've visited, in the past 4 years, both in Ireland and in the Netherlands have not offered any sort of computer science education, which I myself would believe to be fairly important in a modern education. Of course it shouldn't be a mandatory class, just like how the other sciences are not mandatory. It should simply be a subject which is available to be chosen. While we did have an "IT" class in Ireland, it was solely about teaching the kids about typewrite. This doesn't give the students a chance to learn about the world of Computer science in school. I study computer science now despite this, but many students never decide to study something irrelevant to school in their free time.

austincheney 7y ago

> This post is a generalization and a subjective rant that absolutely doesn't hold up in real life. The generalization expressed in the long rant completely describes my teenagers. They can tap a screen like an elite ninja warrior but have no idea what to do with a physical keyboard. When the touch screen goes away they are hopelessly lost.