Between Eras: How Bad Tech Teaching May Have Screwed over Millennials

I consider myself lucky. Mine was the last year that taught computer courses on QNX in my high school. We learned boolean math, and introductory programming with languages such as Cobol, Pascal, Logo, C, etc. We also got into some early sort of virtual assistant thingy and AI with a talking interface that looked like a cartoon woman (sorry I forget her name).

The year before, we learned some assembler to compare with BASIC's PEEK and POKE commands on a CBM (I still remember the glee experienced when learning a POKE location that turned the screen into a virtual cylinder, freaking the teacher out with concerns we'd burn the screen edges...)

The years that came after my attendance learned solely on Microsoft Windows. They learned way more about spreadsheets than anyone that isn't an accountant should ever care about. The only language they learned to code in was Turing, and they only barely got into Boolean operations (surprisingly).

Or in other words, is there going to be a knowledge divide between people who grew up learning programming and those who grew up when IT was Microsoft Office 101?

My worry is that there may be, and that those in the latter group may struggle to compete for tech related jobs with those in the former one.