Comment by LameRubberDucky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LameRubberDucky | Hacker News Reader

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LameRubberDucky

I think that many people you seem to think are tech savvy are really not. I'm 51 and I've been programming since 13, getting paid for it since around 20 years old. My kids are 21 and 19, they both use smartphones, so do my wife and I, I just picked up a OnePlus 7 Pro 5G.

My kids know how to use the latest social media apps sure, but they don't know how anything behind that phone and computer work at all. I can write Android apps all day long but they wouldn't even know where to start.

I had to teach my son how to punch a hole through the firewall to run a Minecraft server for his friends 5 or 6 years ago. After watching me build a few computers, he has now built his own top of the line rig. But he didn't just "know" that stuff because he's young, he had to have an interest and learn, from an old dude no less. It's just like people that drive cars, most of them do not know how cars work but they can still drive. I can also take a car apart and put it back together. I can do a ton of other technical things as well. It's not age, but interest in my opinion, that makes a person tech savvy.

Please don't lump all people over 50 together. Many of us designed and built the tech that you are so proud of now. We stood on the shoulders of giants and so do you. Your time is coming as and "old person." Always remember that.

Also, there is a real aspect of "old age," where cognitive function declines, taking savvy with it. It might be known as "dementia" or "senility" when it is very advanced, but subtle changes can happen for years or decades prior for some people. It's been painful watching an ~80 year old relative---definitely tech savvy for most of his life---as he slowly loses his upper-hand on his own technology.

This is someone who worked on radar systems, cryptographic systems, computers, power electronics, control systems, and measurement systems in the military and civilian worlds from the 1960s to early 2000s. He built his own kit electronics for home audio and later a ZX-80 computer. He followed the whole PC revolution from the CP/M and DOS days to Windows 7. He participated in BBS systems in the 1980s and used the Internet since around 1991. He exposed his children and friends to science and tech.

He followed countless changes from minicomputers and teletypes, to PCs with CRTs and text CLIs, to window-based GUIs. Then, he started to struggle with the abstractions of these same GUIs as well as web sites. He struggles to identify the boundaries between different programs and content, like some novice user who never understood how it was all put together. Worse, he is aware of this struggle and of his losses. I can see that it frustrates him daily. Once in a while, I'd say it terrifies him.

The longer you live the more likely something will go wrong. That is true but at the same time not all that interesting.

Similar problems come up with very young people. Not only can dementia itself exhibit itself in the young, but people can become tuned out to anything outside their interests and expertise and lose interest in learning through play and experimentation. When this happens people become locked in their modes and may not move forward.

To add some anecdata I know people who were prolific programmers with perl CGI scripts but were never able to make the jump to modern application programming, not even the relatively easy transition to "modern perl". At the same time I know some older programmers who have contributed to modern apps while working on both embedded devices and machine learning and love being at the forward edge of everything.

There are many aspects to work in technology and age is a minor factor especially compared to attitude and interest. This reminds me of how Victor Frankl describes in Man's Search for Meaning that people expected the strong and healthy to endure life in concentration camps and yet many died within days while some who were weak and sick endured because they had something that kept them going through the greatest challenges. Age and experience are factors, but it is how they are framed and leveraged that actually matters.

No doubt, it does occur. Do I feel as sharp at 51 as I did at 25? No. It seems to take longer to pick-up new things. I'm struggling a bit with Rust but I picked up Python the last few weeks with no problem. Clojure, I still can't grok the functional paradigm. Maybe BASIC did ruin me. Programming a PIC in assembly, no problem. I learned early in my career that you must continually study. I take online training a couple of times a month and read and practice a lot. That is key I think, if you wish to stay in programming, and not move into the management track.

I’m not generalizing anyone, I’m intentionally describing only my personal experiences. I’m genuinely sorry if I made you feel generalized, and I fully recognize that I stand on the shoulders of giants.

Whether my time is coming or not is irrelevant though, I’m specifically targeting a unique generation that grew up without computers being a normalized aspect of their lives, and ruminating on the implications of that.

I also think the definition of “tech savvy” is a bit loose here, for me it’s that you can figure out how to navigate an interface like say Facebook and perform some task they rarely do (change their password maybe) without additional assistance. It’s a low bar

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