9 ms·
Gen Z Kids Don't Understand How File Systems Work
- wmf 5y agoThis is just the latest fallout from the "digital native" hypothesis that people will learn computers by osmosis and thus don't need to be taught. People don't understand computers? Teach them!
- naikrovek 5y agono one taught me, and I've spent my entire career working in professional roles teaching colleagues how to do what I do. I'm not a teacher, and I didn't go to college. I barely graduated high school. I just have a passion for being paid far less than anyone around me while doing the most work, I think.
- Gollapalli 5y agoBro I had computer courses in elementary school and middle school. Younger sibling did not, so we end up teaching them. You don't learn how to use computers by osmosis and I'm glad people are pointing it out. EDIT: I had typing classes too. It's astounding how many younger people I see who do not know how to type properly. I'm not even 30 and I'm already going "back in my day..."
- serverlessmom 5y agoI agree with you totally. It's really frustrating to me that we are often so impatient with people who struggle with computers. Both people from older generations and younger generations both suffer a lot of shame around asking for help with computers even though a lot of aspects of technology require a foundational knowledge that is often never taught in a formal manner.
- iab 5y agoShows the fundamental importance of search/indexing instead of categorization IMO. Feels like they are onto something.
- emptyparadise 5y agoWe built this future. We built platforms that do not allow using the file system. We built this mobile-first, file system-last world. We're to blame.
- yucky 5y agoThis is silly. You're telling the generation that built the technology where it never existed, that not hand holding the next generation is why they're technically illiterate? What happened to intellectual curiosity and wanting to learn for the sake of understanding how things work?
- emptyparadise 5y agoIt's fine if we were indifferent, but we're doing the opposite of hand holding - we are actively misleading and moving users away from general computing by forcing them into locked down apps and websites.
- yucky 5y agoI disagree. It appears that they are asking for the locked down simplified apps, and so the market is providing them.
- antifa 5y agoWhat's an example of somebody prefering to be locked down? I've never heard of somebody agreeing that being locked down was a great feature. It looks to me like nobody prefers that and it's being forced onto us.
- yucky 5y ago>It looks to me like nobody prefers that and it's being forced onto us. How is it being forced on you? Nobody forces you to use Apple products. Or Google services. Or FB/Insta. etc
- 5y ago
- FridayoLeary 5y agoSo what? I can imagine newspapers in the 1910s lamenting that children no longer know how to light a paraffin lamp. And articles from the 1930's complaining that modern children feel uncomfortable around horses. Times change. Also, i don't really believe that kids today are that unsavvy.
- seeEllArr 5y ago
- orf 5y agoI mean… good? Same with floppy disks. Removing a whole, often needless, level of abstraction from users of all kinds is a great thing.
- salawat 5y agoI'd rather that level of abstraction came off the top. Not the bottom tbqh. Not understanding filesystems is one of the biggest handicaps in terms of realizing that all a computer is is an address space management machine. Completely undermines the desktop metaphor, and leads to crap like Android, where you're not even looked at as the primary owner/operator of your own handset.
- armchairhacker 5y agoi also doubt kids don’t “get” folders, since basically any major file storage (desktop OS, mobile OS, cloud storage) has them in some form. They’re just not using them.
- midasuni 5y agoI know directories just fine, I’ve used them for 30 years, but 90% of the time I find files using “locate” rather than a hierarchal structure
- Barrin92 5y agonot being able to understand the concept of a folder structure or a file hierarchy goes way beyond some technical implementation detail. That's a fundamental concept that you find outside of digital systems (duh, given the folder metaphor) This isn't some legacy artifact, it's more like losing the ability to read an actual map or orient yourself because your navigation system tells you where to go next. Which is something that I've noticed increasingly as well with many people.
- midasuni 5y agoYou call it a folder, not a directory, seems you aren’t immune from the rot. Does anyone know why directories were renamed around the win95 time?
- dvngnt_ 5y agoback in 2012 there was a girl who asked me if I could see a file she uploaded online. I asked her for a link to which she replied "c://users/hername/documents/photo.jpg" I was in shocked especially considering she went to a private school costing over 20k in one of the wealthiest places in America
- karmakaze 5y agoDid she use the forward slashes? Makes it look valid: protocol 'c', host 'users' and whatever default port protocol 'c' uses. ;-)
- reincarnate0x14 5y agoMany Windows tools will convert to / if they're presenting a URL, I'd imagine there is some special case code that treats unqualified path-lookalikes as file:// minus the protocol specifier. In fact chrome produces exactly that result when I did it just now, and only if you expand the full address bar do you see a file:// preceding /c:/what/ever/path
- barbazoo 5y agoI'm not sure how the amount of money one pays for education is in any way I dicarive of their knowledge of how computers work.
- dvngnt_ 5y agoI don't think dicarive is a word? And it absolutely can. School with less funding often don't have the same access to technology. This school required a laptop purchase from each student, and there's probably a correlation between income and computer literacy.
- bigiain 5y agoFondly remembering wrapping my head around the "soup" way beck when I was programming my Newton...
- karmakaze 5y agoBuckets and pathnames, ahead of their time: Cloud-natives. And hopefully labels/tags.
- sergiomattei 5y agoAs a Gen Z folk studying alongside others… this is more of the typical “ha ha this generation is lost” BS. Come on, man, you notice a couple students don’t want to meticulously organize their files and… go on to write this? We know how to use folders. We use them. It’s not too hard to grasp. Sometimes things just aren’t worth the time organizing, especially with search getting so good. If anything, this is a testament to how far we’ve come: search is so good, that the inconveniences of the past are fading away. That’s progress, no?
- 0xdeadb00f 5y agoI'm on the border between gen z / millennial. In our space (tech) this does seem like a completely ridiculous claim. But out in the real world I have witnessed this, and if this article were completely accurate it would not surprise me. Is it accurate? I'm not sure, I have witnessed people in "gen z" do this sort of thing, but how widespread it is I can't say.
- 0des 5y agoThe post is not about folders, folders are but a small facet of a filesystem
- benreesman 5y agoEducate us about file systems. I’m a little unsure of whether or not I should trust out-of-tree ZFS. What’s the lowdown?
- letitbeirie 5y ago> especially with search getting so good This is kind of the crux of it here. The reason this is a "Gen Z thing" is because you really couldn't get away with just using search until relatively recently. I don't know of anyone my age (gen x/millennial) who even thinks to use Windows search because it was so tragically useless for so long.
- jrumbut 5y agoI'm a balding millennial and I've been "organizing" my files this way for a long time. I find I remember things based on time, so one long list is ideal and nested folders is just hiding things from myself. I organize physical spaces this way too, or more accurately I find spaces organized this way easiest to use but it tends to bother anyone I live with so I don't do it as much as I'd like.
- fullsend 5y agoPeople who write these articles will talk for an hour straight about their favorite window manager, why it should actually be called Gnu/Linux, or why it’s “free as in beer”.
- rnd0 5y agoand your point would be...what?
- goodguyamericun 5y agoIf you're not someone who can see that one class of window managers makes you much more productive than another, then quite frankly you're probably not a great programmer and just get by with some SO copy-paste, things might not be so good for you once the tech boom busts
- whymauri 5y agoIf this is not a copy-pasta, it should be a copy-pasta.
- astrange 5y agoDon't people who think this usually use Emacs and not any window managers?
- jppittma 5y agoI use vim. This is a bit of a troll, but the baseline feeling is that people who’ve used a tiling window manager (as a group) are probably more interested in computers than people who haven’t.
- astrange 5y agoPeople who like tiling window managers are the sort of people who think every year will be the year of Linux on the desktop for the last 3 decades, i.e., nerds, so I don't know how much their taste can be trusted. These are mostly systems they've come up with themselves rather than UI researchers actually studying it. Research finds things like that keyboard shortcuts aren't actually faster than mousing, people just experience them as faster because they take more focus.
- reincarnate0x14 5y agoThe filesystem concept has changed a lot over the decades so that's really not surprising. Almost any platform young people are using is going to have a UI abstraction over the storage that typically pre-groups files by the handling application or expect the user to search a potentially off-device storage pool like Google Drive or iCloud or Sharepoint or whatever via full text and metadata. I certainly wouldn't expect anyone born after about 1980 to have dealt with VMS filesystem concepts or various mainframe record storages, and it would likely be very difficult for today's students to synthesize the reasoning behind the Windows "drive letter" concept without hitting wikipedia to read up on why that trainwreck is still around.
- Gollapalli 5y agoHow else are you supposed to differentiate between hardware drives?
- chobytes 5y agoHad this experience working with a bright gen z early academic once. They didn't understand the difference between files in the cloud and on their own drive. Took me about a week before I could even comprehend what their issue was.
- shp0ngle 5y agoI also don't understand how filesystems work. They have like... b-trees? And inodes? Something like that. Or is inode a linux thing? No that's file descriptor... I guess? What is a journal? I don't know. Something that exists somewhere. Is it the same as systemd journal? I don't know. And I still don't understand why I need to use FAT32 from like 2000 to be able to work on Linux, OS X and Windows. Why is there no standard that works everywhere? What's the hard part there?
- rnd0 5y ago>What's the hard part there? Capitalism; IOW shareholder value and vendor lock-in. It's' difficult to get separate corporations to implement compatibility when their profits and lock-in rely on vendor lock-in.
- shp0ngle 5y agoThey already do on harder things like video codecs. Alliance for Open Media (AV1/VP9 creators) steam-rolled over MPEG; has everyone big on board (Apple joined recently); is open and works on Linux. Why not filesystems? But I guess as people move to cloud, it matters way less how to share USB flash drives.
- cholling13 5y agoMy first OS was CP/M. It didn't have directories either.