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Comment by squeaky-clean | Hacker News Reader

I was at a Walgreens a little while ago, and there was a lady buying some sort of cable for a camera. I remember her literally asking the store clerk, "Will this work with a laptop, or does it have to be a computer?"

I bring up this anecdote whenever someone else asserts "<simple technological skill> is common sense, no one could be confused by it".

Help your parents with tech support at least once a year (or your friends' parents if yours are technologically competent). It helps you keep a healthy perspective of how other people see our trade :P

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> Help your parents with tech support at least once a year

I did that for a while, then once, when she had a basic problem with her printer, we spent a rather tense evening while I walked her through how I think through technical problems piece by piece and google stuff I don't know. She ended up figuring out a solution that I was unaware of.

She told me several weeks later she'd been able to solve a bunch of (to me) tiny problems and how proud she was.

In my experience, it seems like often the biggest thing standing between people like her, and technology is their own believe in their inability and tendency to give up.

Some of that falls on us, every time we step in a solve a problem for them in (to them) an incomprehensible manner rather than helping them find the information the need to understand and solve the problem themselves, we help reinforce that belief.

I used to work support for an agricultural telemetry company, and on helping a user with a laptop-based problem over the phone, he said "lucky we have you smart guys, I'm so dumb". To which I said "I know about computers, but I couldn't concrete in a post. The stuff you find trivial around the farm is stuff I'd struggle with"

I meant every word, too. I mean, I could describe the basic actions of concreting in a post, but I'd do a terrible job of it from both lack of interest in building and lack of practice. If you want a farm to fall apart, give it to me to maintain :)

The difference, of course, is that the vast majority of the population never has to concrete in a post, but they do have to use computers.

It's not like we're expecting people to have a specialized skill in technology. They don't need to program.

Basic technical literacy should be treated like basic literacy: treated as a basic requirement of being a functioning adult and as something you would never outsource to others.

Maybe not "concrete in a post" specifically, but doing basic construction and home maintenance tasks are very useful skills for almost anyone, and I'm totally helpless at them. So I try to have empathy for anyone lacking "basic technical literacy".

> She told me several weeks later she'd been able to solve a bunch of (to me) tiny problems and how proud she was.

My mother does this sometimes too, it's really nice. She'll call me and tell me how she needed to add an additional email to her iPad. "Wait, needed? Past tense?" "Yes, I figured it out. I went into settings, then Mail, then..."

PCs never stuck with her. I still to this day have to explain the difference between left-click, right-click, and double-click. Why you need to double click on the desktop, or in a folder, but only single click from the Start Menu or quick-launch bar. Etc... But since getting her an iPad, she plays with it, and explores it the way I remember doing when we got our first computer with Windows 3.1.

Thanks for saying this! I work with phones and it's sad to hear people talk about the ever-widening gap technology places between them and their children.

Too many people from younger generations make fun of their parents for being technically illiterate. I spend an hour a week at least bringing my mom up to speed on Google Photos, iOS content management, etc.

It feels good seeing somebody learn how to do things for themselves, and you should hear your parents brag about you for your minor assistance.

I work with phones and it's sad to hear people talk about the ever-widening gap technology places between them and their children.

Meh. It's not an age issue. Anybody who's the parent of a contemporary teenager is probably a gen X'er themselves and when we were teenagers people said the same shit. Except back then it was "parents can't program their VCR's but the teenagers can". It was bullocks then and it's bullocks now.

It's an attitude / interest / personality thing (or something like that) not age. Remember, the oldest generations still hanging around include people who built the first computers in existence, and slightly younger ones include the people who created UNIX, VMS, C, etc.

Some people are interested in technology and have a natural inclination to poke around and figure out how shit works, and some don't.

Indeed. My parents never had to use computers much, and only got a smartphone 2 years ago, but by now they can send GPG encrypted mail, can install apps — and understand why an app requesting permissions it shouldn't need isn't trustworthy, etc.

If you want to, you can always learn.

Most people just don't want to learn.

Sort of parallel to mindcrime's comment: the thing that makes me sad is not necessarily the knowledge gap, but the pride people take in it. "I'm just not a computer person" is too often said happily, when being able to usefully interact with a computer is already a must-have skill for most decent jobs.

Forget about tech supporting your parents to see the gap.

I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to explain to my wife (elementary school teacher) why I need to spend much of my spare time on my laptop to try to keep up in the IT/tech industry. She just can't understand how I can 'train' myself new, marketable skills when she just has to go to official training sessions in class/lecture settings a few times per year.

Pretty frustrating.

Its important to point out that school teaching is a churn and burn field. 17 to 19 years of training followed by a half life of 6 years in the classroom. Not a recent problem either, goes back decades. If your career is shorter than a pro football player, no need for continuous development on a large level, or "most teachers sit in a classroom for a day" is enough if most of them will be out of the field in a couple years regardless.

The career structure, much like the rest of the country, is extremely pyramidical. So teaching in the slums requires a clean(ish) criminal record and frankly not much else, at least to get hired. On the other hand, civilized low crime areas are hyper competitive. So training and advanced degrees translate into nicer working environment.

There will be survivors even 3 or 4 half lives out in teaching, much like programming, but use em up and throw em away as a national policy does not encourage serious system wide training efforts.

When I was in college I had a top-ranked CS major ask me if the Borland compiler would work on her laptop as well as on a desktop. I told her it would. Her response was, "But isn't there a special chip in the desktop that compiles the program for you? Does my laptop have that too?"

Clearly it was a concern about CPU architecture differences.

People think like this because of companies like Apple who make proprietary everything. Confusion is a natural byproduct of this practice

Perhaps somewhat, but I think the main factor is that computers change much faster than these people expect. "No [family member], this Bluetooth mouse isn't going to work with your XP era desktop."

Sorry to have to tell you this, but Bluetooth mice worked fine with Windows XP.

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