Older generations (my parents) were totally technologically inept. Most wouldn't even try. Problems that would be solved by clicking a bit left and right to try

Older generations (my parents) were totally technologically inept. Most wouldn't even try. Problems that would be solved by clicking a bit left and right to try and find the solution would get them blocked. A few among them were working in the technology sector, back when you pretty much had to install whatever OS you needed yourself, and before the internet could give you a (bad) answer to any questions you have. Most were tech wizards, simply because that was the only way to survive in the tech industry. Newer generations of devs had more exposure to technology, and so some of the fundamentals like not getting scared because stuff has a screen, or searching a bit for options. But no shit, Facebook and tiktok don't make you a tech wizard. With tech having evolved you don't need to do as much tinkering, and why would you develop a muscle for that then? When I was a kid, the only way to play with the home computer was to spend 1/2h copying code from a magazine, so of course I learned a couple of things on the way, because I didn't have a choice. I will wager and say that installing a game by clicking on a button is a better thing. You can still play with code if you want to, and lots of people do, it's just not the only way, and so playing with the computer does not equate to knowing how it works in the way it used to because of necessity. I do feel like a lot more devs than before can't solve a medium complexity non-code related problem, like restoring a broken dev environment or installing an OS. I think it has got less to do with age or any true generational aspect, and more with the increased size of the group. 1) dev used to be a geek job, and that's not true anymore, 2) if you started dev recently, whatever your age, the toolsuite is much better than it used to be, requires less of you, gives more attention to usability, with the downside that you don't exercise random tech skills as much as was needed in the old days. If everything you do is webdev on node, why would you need to know much about networking, OS and even compilers. Those are skills that are less useful in proportion than they used to be for "dev" because "dev" is much more diverse than it used to be, and naturally people who don't need them will not acquire them. That's my perspective, based on personal anecdotal evidence, so it's worth nothing. It's hard talking about that without sounding like an old fart.