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Another instance of "middle-aged tech nerd makes fun of kids these days" I get it, you're not too old to be good at computers, but I don't see the need to put

Another instance of "middle-aged tech nerd makes fun of kids these days" I get it, you're not too old to be good at computers, but I don't see the need to put down the younger generation and act like their tech knowledge doesn't extend beyond "video streaming". Acting like kids are computer wizards is an exaggeration, but acting like young people know less about computing than this older generation is simply wrong.

oraphalous 5y ago
Yeah... I agree, and would argue further that there is a specific kind of mistake being made in this post that I see many in tech make... That of believing that living lower down the stack makes you superior somehow... Here's an example of someone I think is clearly fucking amazing but arguably lives much higher up the stack than this guy... https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/22370260/codemiko-twitch-interview-stream-technician https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Fixed link: https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/22370260/codemiko-twitch-interview-stream-technician https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/22370260/codemiko-twit...
teachingassist 5y ago
I have taught kids for 20 years. Young people (on average) know less about computing than they did. The author of this article says "floppy disks, or 'the save icon' as the young kids would recognize it" - except that they often wouldn't. Kids don't have any experience of saving and loading files.
- worker767424 5y ago
  > Young people (on average) know less about computing than they did. They know less about desktop computing.
  - teachingassist 5y ago
    I do disagree with the article: there are lots more opportunities for kids to deep dive into almost any field of tech that they choose to. But, on the other hand, I've met teenagers who lacked confidence even using a browser to navigate to an unfamiliar website. They've learned how to navigate particular apps as silos. This reminds me of my parents and grandparents' generation using computers. Comfortable with what they know and use regularly; no concept of what happens outside of that narrow window.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    And they know more about cultural computing. In the same way they'd be clueless when faced with a DOS prompt, many older people are clueless about how Insta etc work. You could argue that's not really computing, and in a very obvious sense it isn't. But it's certainly a form of application development, for a very specific kind of application. And the up side is that - unless AI takes over - people who can do nuts and bolts infrastructure computing will be rarer and in even higher demand than they are now.
  - brongondwana 5y ago
    Kids these days know less about cars than they used to. Lots of them drive, but they couldn't service the engine. Same energy.
    - falcolas 5y ago
      Tangent. I grew up with cars I could (and did) service. I still remember how to break down a drum brake, and adjust it so it worked again when re-assembled. I've used grease zerks on the auto I drove. I've helped troubleshoot a carburetor. Can't do that anymore, and it's only partially because the components don't exist, but because everything is so much more complicated you have to specialize in it to get much done. Tangent wrap-up. Maybe these "digital natives" have simply decided to specialize in something other than computers (and cars). Not all of them: I work with several folks who are decades younger than me, and they're perfectly comfortable with packet captures and bare metal databases.
- thefz 5y ago
  And I don't see any merit in being proficient in using any touchscreen device, which have been proven intuitive enough for a toddler or even an ape to understand. So you can tap, drag, scroll, swipe? Impressive digital nativity.
temp329192 5y ago
It's probably that older people growing up with computers needed to do something with them (could not just stream twitch) and hence when you had a computer, then you was what today would be called a power user. Today, just millions of normal people use computers, tablets, phones, appliances every day and they get along fine - but they are not power users, since you can spend your time on the computer with almost zero knowledge about it. A concrete example would be that it's totally fine today to not know, what a file or folder is - because all you see is a feed or an album.
- ghaff 5y ago
  For example, to run your game, you might very well have needed to go into your computer and make changes to your autoexec.bat and config.sys files. Do a lot of kids (above a certain age) actually not know what a file or folder is? Doing perfectly ordinary day-to-day stuff which is not at all technical in nature, I find I have to save and open files all the time.
rodgerd 5y ago
It's a common problem when people have tied up their sense of self-worth in tweaking with janky, broken stuff, rather than on the things you can create with that. See also bitter, mediocre photographers who revile folks for being "fauxtographers" because they're making a living from photography on Instagram instead of fucking around with expensive lenses and Photoshop. My kids know a lot less about the internals of a tech stack than I do, but they create a lot more things with the tools at their disposal than I do. Unlike the author, I think they're in a better place than I am.
Animats 5y ago
The complexity today is so great that understanding the entire system requires a vast amount of knowledge. The Commodore 64 was notable for being totally described down to the hardware and bit level in a 1 inch thick book. People who grew up with that could fully understand that little device. With a modest amount of effort, you could totally understand an AMPS phone, the last generation of analog cellular. It was a two-way FM radio controlled by a tiny CPU, no more complex than a Commodore 64. Understanding a modern phone is a huge job. Even at a general level. There's a 90s data center worth of compute power in there. About four radios. A GPU. A 6-axis inertial guidance system. Several cameras. A rather excessive amount of software. A web browser, which is itself overly complex. Voice codecs. Voice recognition. Quite possibly a machine learning system. That's a lot to understand. It is also not useful to the end user to understand it.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  > Understanding a modern phone is a huge job. I’ve tried (well maybe not phones, but other things). There’s a lot of stuff and large chunks of it are either undocumented, do not provide documentation unless you are in a contract with the company or are very superficially documented. On top I usually ended up finding I could not fully comprehend how A worked without comprehending B which required C which required D, etc.
- II2II 5y ago
  I suspect a better measure of technical proficiency is the ability to shape the technology to reflect your own needs. That could happen at a much lower level on the Commodore 64 since it was a much simpler machine, yet that should not invalidate the proficiency of a JavaScript programmer simply because they work at a much higher level. Put in other terms, even those who absorbed the Commodore 64 programmer's guide didn't truly understand the machine. They may have known how to write software for it and even how to exploit the various chips, but that manual only provided surface level details about the electronics.
- infoseek12 5y ago
  Is there anyone alive who completely understands a latest generation iPhone down to the bit level? It would be impossible for someone outside of Apple to have the access necessary. But even if everything was completely open source would it be within the realm of human ability to understand something so vast and complex in the way that it was possible to understand a Commodore 64?
wisty 5y ago
Gen Y / Millennials usually know a fair bit about computers. They grew up as internet connected desktops become a mainstream thing. Gen Z usually seem more like Boomers who can maybe do wonderful things with the video-telephone thingy but don't know a lot about it.
II2II 5y ago
Some speculation here: there is a certain percentage of people who are interested in technology for its own sake in any generation and it that percentage is relatively stable. So yes, I agree that treating kids as computer wizards is an exaggeration and claiming that they are ignorant is wrong. That being said, the "digital natives" claim really rubs me the wrong way even when it is confined to the subset of people who are genuinely interested in computers. It leaves the impression that the younger generation has little to learn from the older generation. The flow of knowledge should be going in both directions.

oraphalous 5y ago

Yeah... I agree, and would argue further that there is a specific kind of mistake being made in this post that I see many in tech make... That of believing that living lower down the stack makes you superior somehow... Here's an example of someone I think is clearly fucking amazing but arguably lives much higher up the stack than this guy... https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/22370260/codemiko-twitch-interview-stream-technician https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...

zozbot234 5y ago
Fixed link: https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/22370260/codemiko-twitch-interview-stream-technician https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/22370260/codemiko-twit...

teachingassist 5y ago

I have taught kids for 20 years. Young people (on average) know less about computing than they did. The author of this article says "floppy disks, or 'the save icon' as the young kids would recognize it" - except that they often wouldn't. Kids don't have any experience of saving and loading files.

worker767424 5y ago
> Young people (on average) know less about computing than they did. They know less about desktop computing.
- teachingassist 5y ago
  I do disagree with the article: there are lots more opportunities for kids to deep dive into almost any field of tech that they choose to. But, on the other hand, I've met teenagers who lacked confidence even using a browser to navigate to an unfamiliar website. They've learned how to navigate particular apps as silos. This reminds me of my parents and grandparents' generation using computers. Comfortable with what they know and use regularly; no concept of what happens outside of that narrow window.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  And they know more about cultural computing. In the same way they'd be clueless when faced with a DOS prompt, many older people are clueless about how Insta etc work. You could argue that's not really computing, and in a very obvious sense it isn't. But it's certainly a form of application development, for a very specific kind of application. And the up side is that - unless AI takes over - people who can do nuts and bolts infrastructure computing will be rarer and in even higher demand than they are now.
- brongondwana 5y ago
  Kids these days know less about cars than they used to. Lots of them drive, but they couldn't service the engine. Same energy.
  - falcolas 5y ago
    Tangent. I grew up with cars I could (and did) service. I still remember how to break down a drum brake, and adjust it so it worked again when re-assembled. I've used grease zerks on the auto I drove. I've helped troubleshoot a carburetor. Can't do that anymore, and it's only partially because the components don't exist, but because everything is so much more complicated you have to specialize in it to get much done. Tangent wrap-up. Maybe these "digital natives" have simply decided to specialize in something other than computers (and cars). Not all of them: I work with several folks who are decades younger than me, and they're perfectly comfortable with packet captures and bare metal databases.
thefz 5y ago
And I don't see any merit in being proficient in using any touchscreen device, which have been proven intuitive enough for a toddler or even an ape to understand. So you can tap, drag, scroll, swipe? Impressive digital nativity.

temp329192 5y ago

It's probably that older people growing up with computers needed to do something with them (could not just stream twitch) and hence when you had a computer, then you was what today would be called a power user. Today, just millions of normal people use computers, tablets, phones, appliances every day and they get along fine - but they are not power users, since you can spend your time on the computer with almost zero knowledge about it. A concrete example would be that it's totally fine today to not know, what a file or folder is - because all you see is a feed or an album.

ghaff 5y ago
For example, to run your game, you might very well have needed to go into your computer and make changes to your autoexec.bat and config.sys files. Do a lot of kids (above a certain age) actually not know what a file or folder is? Doing perfectly ordinary day-to-day stuff which is not at all technical in nature, I find I have to save and open files all the time.

rodgerd 5y ago

It's a common problem when people have tied up their sense of self-worth in tweaking with janky, broken stuff, rather than on the things you can create with that. See also bitter, mediocre photographers who revile folks for being "fauxtographers" because they're making a living from photography on Instagram instead of fucking around with expensive lenses and Photoshop. My kids know a lot less about the internals of a tech stack than I do, but they create a lot more things with the tools at their disposal than I do. Unlike the author, I think they're in a better place than I am.

Animats 5y ago

The complexity today is so great that understanding the entire system requires a vast amount of knowledge. The Commodore 64 was notable for being totally described down to the hardware and bit level in a 1 inch thick book. People who grew up with that could fully understand that little device. With a modest amount of effort, you could totally understand an AMPS phone, the last generation of analog cellular. It was a two-way FM radio controlled by a tiny CPU, no more complex than a Commodore 64. Understanding a modern phone is a huge job. Even at a general level. There's a 90s data center worth of compute power in there. About four radios. A GPU. A 6-axis inertial guidance system. Several cameras. A rather excessive amount of software. A web browser, which is itself overly complex. Voice codecs. Voice recognition. Quite possibly a machine learning system. That's a lot to understand. It is also not useful to the end user to understand it.

the_only_law 5y ago
> Understanding a modern phone is a huge job. I’ve tried (well maybe not phones, but other things). There’s a lot of stuff and large chunks of it are either undocumented, do not provide documentation unless you are in a contract with the company or are very superficially documented. On top I usually ended up finding I could not fully comprehend how A worked without comprehending B which required C which required D, etc.
II2II 5y ago
I suspect a better measure of technical proficiency is the ability to shape the technology to reflect your own needs. That could happen at a much lower level on the Commodore 64 since it was a much simpler machine, yet that should not invalidate the proficiency of a JavaScript programmer simply because they work at a much higher level. Put in other terms, even those who absorbed the Commodore 64 programmer's guide didn't truly understand the machine. They may have known how to write software for it and even how to exploit the various chips, but that manual only provided surface level details about the electronics.
infoseek12 5y ago
Is there anyone alive who completely understands a latest generation iPhone down to the bit level? It would be impossible for someone outside of Apple to have the access necessary. But even if everything was completely open source would it be within the realm of human ability to understand something so vast and complex in the way that it was possible to understand a Commodore 64?

wisty 5y ago

Gen Y / Millennials usually know a fair bit about computers. They grew up as internet connected desktops become a mainstream thing. Gen Z usually seem more like Boomers who can maybe do wonderful things with the video-telephone thingy but don't know a lot about it.

II2II 5y ago

Some speculation here: there is a certain percentage of people who are interested in technology for its own sake in any generation and it that percentage is relatively stable. So yes, I agree that treating kids as computer wizards is an exaggeration and claiming that they are ignorant is wrong. That being said, the "digital natives" claim really rubs me the wrong way even when it is confined to the subset of people who are genuinely interested in computers. It leaves the impression that the younger generation has little to learn from the older generation. The flow of knowledge should be going in both directions.