Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)
blog.mysunland.org
blog.mysunland.org
This post is a generalization and a subjective rant that absolutely doesn't hold up in real life.
>>>When you explain what happens under the hood, they will ignore you. When you tell them what a certain setting probably does, they will ignore you.
In my experience, although there may be some teenagers for which this is true, this is also true for people of all ages - those who aren't interested in learning the base technology simply won't.
>>>Green text with a black background is the norm, right? No.
This seems a diversion from the writer's point, that teenagers don't understand computers. Maybe it's meant to simulate what the writer believes teenagers think of the command line? If so, it's hopelessly off it's mark, like much of this post.
>>>All they want is a computer that works, and that runs their text messaging, anti-privacy and social media apps. They think that Linux is for hackers, that OS X is premium users and windows is what everybody else uses.
No. Just no. I don't know where the writer could have gotten such an idea - most people who use OS X at my school do so for dev, but there is definitely also a sizeable Linux population in addition to the Windows contigent. Personally, I have devices running Windows, OS X, and a few Linux distros.
Ultimately, however, the writer disproves his own point, that teenagers don't know how to use computers as well as their reputation deserves. Being at home with the development of computers is vastly different from actually using them - something at which, I counter, teens are actually pretty good. Yes, the majority of teens may not use the command line much. But the computer is much more than the command line - something other posters on this thread have noted well.
rc-5> Allow me to preface this by saying that I am, in fact, a teen [nearly completely disagrees with Zeyphros]
p1necone> [thanks to rc-5] I take everything written about teenagers from the perspective of anyone >~20 with a huge grain of salt
I read it as p1necone assuming Zeyphros is an out-of-date >20-year-old, which at least appears to not be the case (as of 2016, when the post was written).
Human beings, huh?
On the point of remembering being a teenager: it baffles me that so many adults seem to have forgotten what being a teenager is like. Adults often, at the same time, expect too much of teenagers, but also expect too little. It's quite bizarre.
As software developers we pull our hair out trying to architect around this issue... and we usually fail hard.
I could guess an infinity of potential causes, but if anyone has a concise answer to how to avoid the phenomenon please comment.
A large proportion of people don’t even optimize their bedroom, and probably a huge proportion for teens and young adults. It’s lack of caring about long term benefits and focusing on short term benefits. Or laziness. Or procrastination. Or whatever you want to call it.
You can spend some time now to make the future easier, or you can enjoy the time now and deal with the future later.
maybe they think they have more important things to worry about?
Current me doesn't care so much that I ran my phone with the default ringtone and wallpaper for years.
After years of setting up everything to perfect only have it wiped out by disk failures, OS reinstalls, tinkering, hacking, and bad luck (to say nothing of how many environments a computer professional has to work with and re-customize), I just stopped caring. I absolutely hate having to customize shit now; much easier to learn to roll with the defaults.
Younger me would be so ashamed of me now
Now I DGAF. Like, I spend all day doing IT and arguing about configs, far less desire to deal with it at home. Doubly so with a dog/wife/kids/friends/etc.
An example that should be relatable to a lot of people here is learning emacs. People who get over the steep learning curve argue that it is the best thing ever and how much more productive they can be with it. Considering how much time I spend writing code (both at work and at home), that would definitely net me a benefit. But I just don't care to put in all the work required to get over the learning curve, simply because the way I write my code now is good/productive enough to not care for putting that much effort into optimizing it much further (if the cost of doing so is as high as getting over the learning curve of emacs).
tl;dr: to answer your question in one sentence, people don't care for optimizing something if it takes some sort of a significant investment, as long as what they have now is "good enough".
People knew how to use websites and applications in the early 2000s as well, but with the advent of home computers, WWW and smartphones there was a widespread belief that, by nature of being surrounded by tech, young people would automatically learn how it worked under the surface and possess an inherent fluency in IT.
That didn't happen. It's still people interested in tech actually learning the tech and your average high schooler doesn't graduate able to write drivers, create software or hand-code websites and web servers.
It was a belief in the coming of a tech-utopia where every young person would know those things. But it doesn't just come automatically. There has been a huge surge in usage, driven by increased accessibility, standardization and user interfaces that don't require prior knowledge.
A lot of the older generation (probably mostly the less tech savvy ones) still believe we are getting there and have at least somewhat gotten there. We really haven't.
None of my classmates learned computer skills by osmosis. Every single one of them that did learn those skills put in intentional effort because they were already interested.
And even so, the schools were entirely stacked against us, intentionally or not. One kid (I still am not sure who) went through the computer lab and tweaked some settings to mess with everyone. Another kid (who definitely was innocent) stepped forward to help fix it, and got suspended for a week or two. Show any kind of competence with computers and you're a dangerous hacker. Fall in line and don't stand out or you will be punished.
Word processing, for example: if you expect a five-year-old to learn it as a matter of course on the way to do other things, they can and will.
There's probably a bunch of things like that. Little things. Kids know how to set reminders/create calendar events. Teens can intuit the usage of ACLs in multi-channel group chats like Discord servers. Nobody has to tell kids to google the text of an installation error for the game they were trying to install. Anyone born in the last 25 years will intuitively think to search for a video tutorial for any new micro-skill. Etc.
But many kids have difficulties adquiring a new skill that requires reading because videos are not enough
I'm not sure what kids you're referring to, but when I look at my 14 yo sister and her friends, nearly all they know how to do is start Snapchat. If they'd get a cryptical error they'd call a family member to fix it for them. I feel like millenials have broader knowledge of computers than the newer generations, because these days most things just work. And when iPhones don't work, you don't really get error messages or debugging tools, they just don't work.
When I was young, stuff didn't just work. I could tell by the sound of my dial up modem whether it would succesfully connect. I could modify the registry to fix problems, I could put more RAM in my PC if it became too slow and it would take hours to reinstall Windows. This is not true anymore. Kids these days use more computers that no longer allow this type of tinkering (Apple devices, Consoles, etc.). A small group though, still builds gaming PCs and buys a Raspberry Pi to tinker with. It's no longer a necessity to be able to get on the internet though, it's a choice.
The issue with your statement is that it generalizes. In the end, there are still lots of kids without a clue how things work and a bunch of them who do. It's kind of like car ownership. Most people will drive one, but most won't have a clue how to change a spark plug. You can't make a statement about this that applies to a whole generation, however.
And that's why people flat out didn't use them. You had tinkerers and non-users (which were the vast majority, as people conveniently forget :-) ).
In my experience (admittedly, that's a pretty narrow experience), kids are insatiably curious. They will do things and try things just to see what happens. And I suspect older people are more reluctant to try out options if they are uncertain about their effects. So, in general, I think you end up in a situation where children generally know how to use modern technology better than their parents, and that this is pretty timeless.
What happened to the millennials, though, is that about the time we started to hit that age of discovery, technology got a whole lot more featureful, and software developers did a very bad job of coaching users on how to use these features. Programmable VCRs gave you remotes with a dozen extra buttons with cryptic notes on them like "Counter/Remain", and people had no idea how to make the clock stop blinking "12:00". You had text editors with a hundred buttons labelled with seemingly esoteric iconography (quick, which button in the Microsoft Word image ran the spellchecker?). Adults didn't know how to use them, but kids knew a lot about them. And the conclusion that people mistakenly drew was that kids just fundamentally understood computers better than adults, when it was merely that we actually understood only the tools we used.
I was reviewing a book and just used a Libreoffice spreadsheet for vocab terms. One column for the word, one column for the description. Wrote a macro and made a button on the spreadsheet to sort the words for me.
A lot easier than making a CRUD interface ontop of a Base database. If I want to add a third column, categories, I can just enter the word and press enter for the next row. No need to jump between interfaces that need to save and error check.
Plus I can just export the data to a CSV and that a custom app, like a flashcard app, can test me randomly on.
Or can I just make a macro that does that for me?
Making an interface for a few columns of a few hundred rows sounds like the classic NCIS hacker line "let me quickly code a GUI in Visual Basic to run that IP address check".
I can understand that, but keep in mind; I add a new line at the end of the spreadsheet for every new vocab word that is highlighted by the book.
I had to look over to make sure I got everything so the words need to be sorted. So I had to select everything in the menu -> two clicks, then click sort->another two clicks. For every few words...
It was much easier just to make a button into the spreadsheet that does this for me. One click.
It was also a perfect excuse to learn about macros. If you ask 'what's the point?' for every fun little technology you learn about-you will become depressed fast.
> Adults didn't know how to use them, but kids knew a lot about them. And the conclusion that people mistakenly drew was that kids just fundamentally understood computers better than adults, when it was merely that we actually understood only the tools we used.
I don't think your premise supports your conclusion.
In fact, what I think it supports is more of what I have observed: that millennials and on down (at least that subset of us who have chosen to go this route) recognize that experimentation is the way to learn about computers and similar things.
What I have observed about older generations (at least that subset that is technology-averse) is that for most of them, the reason they don't know how to do more with the computer is that they're scared of it—mostly, they're scared they'll break it.
You and I know a) that most general experimentation won't break it, b) how to actually break it, and c) how to avoid doing that, so we can poke around at the parts we don't understand enough to learn how to do pretty much everything we need to know.
Or even something as simple as having all the fonts too small/too big and being unable to fix them back. Accidentally hiding toolbar you need. There are many ways how to break tech by experimenting it is quite hard to figure out what went wrong later.
To learn you need to be able to break things.
As a sidenote, we see that opposite for social skills. Tolerance for mistakes has gone way down, it's not safe for today's kids to experiment and fail so they don't learn them as well.
The disadvantage kids today might have is that there aren't any buttons, because their systems are locked down to a large degree. You cannot do experiments this way so no knowledge can be gained. Without disputing the VCRs or comparable technological artifacts had a bad UI. You are pretty limited if you use iOS or Android. Sure, some teens would figure out how to use them efficiently, but that would only be a small percentage.
Over the course of the last 25 years, I've never heard that expectation anywhere. There was always a mentality that computers would keep getting easier to use, which is completely true. There was always the idea that kids would integrate computers into their lives from the start, which is also true.
I never heard anyone say that kids born in the late 90s would somehow in general understand the inner working of computers.
There were certainly people who noticed this correlation and predicted, if every family had a home computer, almost every kid would do the same.
With hindsight, nobody was noticing the kids who had grown up with home computers but hadn't figured lots of things out on their own, or controlling for things correlated with having a home computer.
You can see a similar theme these days - like the theory [1] that TikTok and Snapchat are easier for young people to use, perhaps intentionally.
[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tiktok-snapchat-app-design
Disclaimer: I own a copy from the office, but I never more than skimmed it. Like most business books, it's a couple pages' worth of insights diluted with anecdotes into a 300+ plus doorstop.
People are generally very bad at predicting stagnation or even a reversal of trends. If you asked anyone to describe a 2020 communications device in early 2000, when cellphones had just recently evolved from bricks to the miniscule 8210, the prediction would have been a device the size of a keychain fob, not the pocket TVs we actually have.
e.g. Once upon a time automobile ownership involved knowing a thing or two about how to make repairs. Today, I bet a significant number of drivers would get lost trying to change a tire.
Your tech gets straightforward enough to use that humans adopt it as simply another tool to get done something they need. If I didn't know how offensive some of the nuts and bolts under the hood are these days (ads, tracking, the patchwork of ugly bugs and hacks in some of the software and drivers, etc), I'd call it a sign of success of the industry.
My dad refused to learn to use a pc for years (until he wanted to research some architecture and suddenly he got the point of it all). But he still hasn't made computers or the Internet part of his life in the way most 18 year olds have.
I grew up dialing into local BBS's because our ISP was a long distance phone call (hell, where I grew up, calling half of my classmates was a long distance phone call).
Through junior high/high school I was known as "the hacker" not because I was actually cracking system or anything, but merely because I knew how, and was comfortable with using a computer. I cut my teeth on DOS 3.0 on a 286 with a whopping 40 MB HD.
I once got suspended for a week because a teacher "saw me with a black screen", aka a DOS prompt, the week before the school network crash, and assumed it must be related (I actually had nothing to do with the crash, I merely knew the keyboard shortcut in WordPerfect 5.1 to temporarily exit to a DOS prompt - super hacker skills, right?).
Anyways, my parents and I didn't fight the suspension, because there was no evidence available to us that I didnt do it. My parents asked me point blank if I did it and I honestly replied no. Their response was: "well, youre going to learn how to". Thats how I got my first programming books.
Not that I needed the programming knowledge, but a year later I did own my school's network. More the social engineering route than anything. I got a copy of the remote access tool the sysadmin was using. I could remote in (no password required, this was the 90s, all I needed was the phone number, which was handily affixed to the modem). I just had to time it such that the network drive backup was complete, then I had sysadmin access (I reran the backup so he'd see the completed screen when he got in the morning). I forget exactly how many admin counts I had, but it was at least 5 in case one got discovered (this was all Novell Netware back in the day).
Admin access granted universal access. I could have changed grades (never needed to for myself and I didnt whore out my access). I could impersonate teachers over internal email and a precursor to IM.
Not super hacker skills. Mostly stumbling around and befriending the lab admin. At times, it did help that I could type faster than the admin.
Memories...
It's rather part of a tired genre of "kids these days" articles where modern technology has somehow poisoned them beyond comprehension. In fact, kids tend to do things in a pragmatic and rational way, and it is on the author to appreciate what they are and are not savvy about.
The typical pattern around new technology in my own life(30's Millenial) is that even within the generation you get people who develop a specialty, and their counterparts who learn to be good at asking for assistance. And intergenerationally the pattern magnifies as you get more and more dependencies on the group of true experts, and there's often a gap in the training of the next group - "no careers in this".
People perhaps 30 years older than me - the Boomers - would have come of age in the mid 70's, right as semiconductor ICs really started making waves. The probable focus of their attention with respect to technology would not necessarily be "computing" but "electronics," since so many consumer electronics suddenly became possible. But as consumers they would want service and support, and so the nature of the sales around this stuff was to promise that they could use the device in a very basic way and have someone take care of them if it broke.
The Gen X and cusp Millenial crowd, on the other hand, grew up with the devices ambiently around them and little marketing dialogue(what dialogue they had would be diverted towards toys and games consoles). Their incentive was to figure out enough to fix some yard sale or dumpster find; and modern notions of computer hacking derive from that romanticization. But the reality for many folks in these generations is that they can only be self-reliant in so many ways. It takes unusual persistence to reverse engineer your computer starting from nothing or only the most basic kind of information, and yet that is often the kind of story heard from people who "got into computers" around this tine.
As you get to the more Internet-connected era, it gets a lot easier to get directed to some kind of help or guidance, and that made for a substantial generational shift, although a lot of my memories of programmers on the early Internet is of the most arrogant, ego-centic types anxiously blasting anyone who dared challenge them. The word "toxic" had no parlance yet.
I believe the main challenge that is faced by the younger crowd now is what happens once the brightly paved road to knowledge drops off - there are lots of "friendly" 10-minute video tutorials for everything, but often the conceptual depth is missing, and so you have a cycle of learning and relearning with more rigor, while it would be more common in the past to jump from self-experiment straight to academia, simply because all the knowledge really was centralized there.
The generalization expressed in the long rant completely describes my teenagers. They can tap a screen like an elite ninja warrior but have no idea what to do with a physical keyboard. When the touch screen goes away they are hopelessly lost.
In fact in NYC, my elementary school had keyboard class where you'd learn to type and general proficiency w/ a computer.
In Florida, middle school photoshop, dreamweaver, fireworks and even access database.
High school had C++ class - from what I believe was a fired Compaq programmer, needless to say it sucked but gave me a foundation.
Meanwhile this was also the time where you needed to know a bit of HTML to modify your Geocities, Angelfire, Neopets (middle school days) to Myspace profile.
Facebook came in and removed that whole layer of customization - Windows XP was really stable and besides malware no one needed to really know how to fix their computer.
Then if you were into Video game culture, you had to learn how to solder to modify consoles with modchips, how to burn a CD, and generally modify and configure OS settings from IRQ to adding a DVDRW.
Same with pirating videos, there was no youtube - maybe you'd get lucky and find an FTP server that hosted videos but even then you'd had codecs. Default, Windows didn't include Divx, MPEG2, etc - just WMV/WMA.
Same with burning an MP3 to CD.
Nowadays I feel like a SRE/Sysadmin hack, but man then again I know my way enough a system, can program lazily and hold my own with people who consider themselves senior devs, architects etc from MSFT, NIST, SpaceX --
It's nice. Maybe I do know something.
I was lucky to have a computer at all to learn on. If I did anything remotely hacky, I would be warned about breaking an expensive and irreplaceable piece of equipment.
There was no help or documentation. No Internet to download the most basic of resources. If I didn't stumble upon HyperCard at 12 years old and figure out what it was through trial and error, I may never have got the spark of curiosity that put me on the path.
Some of the projects that exist now would have blown my little mind back then. People are reverse engineering my favourite old games and making them better! Insanity! And free 3D game engines!
Using a nicely configured IDE with autocomplete, format on save, linting, etc. allows the mind be so liberated from the tedious details and really focus on the actual problem. You can actually do interesting things in JavaScript. It's a world apart from when typing <blink> tags into Notepad was enough to impress your friends.
I had my own Windows 95 PC (120 MHz Packard Bell) that I saved up lawn money for (my dad agreed to pay 50% for my first computer). I wanted to learn programming, but found the C and C++ books my parents bought me to be really dense. So I taught myself QBasic (and TI Basic on my TI-83). If I had had anything like the youtube videos, online tutorials, blogs, Stack Overflow, etc. that modern folks have, high school would have been completely different.
I have a friend who taught himself the DOS prompt on his parents' computer when he was in early high school. He had no access to any materials (this was before the internet was available); he literally typed every possible combination of letters and discovered the commands (dir, cls, move, del, ren, etc.) and tried to infer what they did.
That's where it all started for me and I was always on the computer whenever I could until my dad got fed up with me installing games and uninstalling his stuff so he password locked it in the BIOS.
So I had to figure out how to bypass the BIOS password which I eventually did by just guessing the password. Now I could play games and mess around on the computer whenever he wasn't at home but I had to hide all my games so that he didn't realize that I was using the computer whenever he wasn't at home. Eventually he did realize that so he changed the password and uninstalled all my games so once again I had to guess the password and this time I put my own BIOS password on it and all hell broke loose.
And that's where the hacker mentality started and sooner than later my dad bought a new computer and gave the old one to me.
Good times.
There was a Windows for Workgroups computer lab at my high school. They had a DOS-based login, but accessing the DOS prompt from Windows was disabled. At one point, someone figured out that the login screen could be bypassed by pressing Ctrl+Break; the teacher found out and disabled that particular keystroke. But after hours of experimenting, I figured out that Alt+3 sends an ASCII character (0x3) that has the same effect. So we were back to playing games in the lab after hours -- they were often hidden in a folder named Alt+255 which looked like a space in DOS but was invisible to the File Manager in Windows. Good times :)
Apparently they disabled basically all keystrokes while the application ran so we could only use a trackball to navigate the job board web site and print.
I never figured out how to just enable keystrokes again so I just unplugged the power cord, booted up in safe mode and edited autoexec.bat and uncommented the line for the application to autorun on windows boot up and rebooted. Free fiber internet and a lot of IRC for weeks to come!
However one of the librarians came up to me one day and asked "aren't you a little too young to be looking for a job?" and I was just joking and replied "yeah well, it's rough times you know". She looked concern and then looked at the screen and said something like "What's your name? I don't think you're allowed to do that... I'm going to have to tell you to get up and leave now".
I was indefinitely banned from using the computers and job terminals.
I remember my grandparents had internet before we did at home so I had to cycle to their house and print out documentation to bring home and continue working.
I remember making a lot of in game currency for building out people's pages. I don't even remember any details about the core mechanics of the game but that part stuck with me.
When we were kids we needed to learn to hack DOS and Windows because our games wouldn’t run without them. Hard drive crashes, SCANDISK, reinstalls, fucked up drivers... whatever it took.
My kids can’t fix Win10 but now they know their way around web filters and how to hack Screen Time to bypass the shutoff. They’re trading pirated movies in gDrive and doing all kids of other stuff I have no clue about.
Nothing has changed. It’s just a matter of your point of view.
People have no clue about computers, till they can manually convert between assembly and hex code
still very funny
Most things just worked: Put the floppy inside, click on the correct icon [1], maybe type in one thing or click on the file with the correct ending/name that sounded like the game, and your game was running. I did not know what I was doing, just remembering what I was shown.
Later as a teenager, I was asked to help out by other teens much more than my mother asked me to help.
[1]: https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-hEMIuqfC17M/VRbHvgeiw_I/A...
As I result I didn’t get into programming before university.
Kids today have way less excuses. Between easier languages and libraries, better tools, way more resources available at their fingertips, much higher concentration of people knowledgeable around them, way more fun things they can do with computers, and a generally accepted idea that being good with computers is a good thing career wise (in the 90s it was often seen by parents as merely a sophisticated game console).
I think that’s the point. The whole promise of “digital native” generation is false.
I write assembly code that runs in supervisory mode. My kid couldn't write assembly code to save his life, but just taught me a new algorithm I'd never seen before. And he could learn assembly if he wanted.
I know this wasn't your point, but I'll nitpick anyway since that number felt too low, so I checked, and the number seems like it should be closer to 1 in 200.
There are 72M children [1] below the age of 18 in the USA today, so 1 in 100,000 would only be 720 and there's something like 40,000 dairy farms in the USA, and I'd bet every child on those farms older than 8 (probably younger) could manage to milk a cow.
The FFA has 700,000 members [2], and I'd bet that at least half of them could manage to milk a cow, so that's closer to 1 in 200.
This isn't quite a fair comparison since the article above was referring only to "teens", not "children", and the FFA numbers include members up to age 21 and includes members in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands).
[1] https://www.aecf.org/resources/the-changing-child-population...
I originally had typed "1 in 10,000" but that seemed too many kids....and it turns out I was utterly wrong!
Maybe 3 million kids would be expected to milk a cow, so maybe 1 in 20.
In some states, nearly a million people per year visit the state fair and most would experience the "milk a cow" booth so essentially all kids above a relatively low socioeconomic level have made a pitiful attempt at milking a cow. Under a very broad and unassuming tent, perhaps a third of kids could be considered able to "manage to milk a cow".
My minimal experience in cow milking is its hard to fail completely as long as you're not kicked in the face, but it is the kind of skill where experience and intelligence could pay off. Which brings us back around to an obvious comparison with the general public experience of mass market GUI user interfaces, LOL.
[1] for evidence, see my preceding post
“How many teens can milk a cow in the US?” is going to be my new favorite software interview question /joke
By the time my sister, who is 7 years younger than me, got to school that was mostly gone. It was cut back "because kids just know that stuff".
I grew up in the late 90s and early 2000s and was very interested in computers, dabbling in C++ and Flash ActionScript and all sorts of things. It was just because I was curious about it. Most of my other friends just weren't. When they saw something and they didn't know how it worked, they didn't even think to care. I see this with people of all ages, young and old. My mother is like that, but my father is very curious.
As I've gotten older, I've gotten more curious about things and I just keep learning more and more. Some people just want to know how everything works and will take the time to figure it out.
If they are clueless, that's good. There are much more important things a teen needs to learn.
I think the article is not very good, however its main point still stands.
Part of my activity is teaching basic word processing and basic html/css to non-IT students. And it's quite a struggle because most (I say most because of course there are exceptions) students don't know how to use their computer for the most basic tasks.
Most have no idea how files are organized on a computer, ignoring the concept of file system. They simply can't navigate their file system and end up stuck between their "Documents" and "Downloads" folder. They routinely "lose" their files.
Once they've been introduced to the notion of file system, most don't understand the difference between regular folders and files and zip archive. Arguably, Windows is to blame here since it tries to hide the difference. Then they try to edit the files directly from the archive and don't understand why they can't save them right away.
Most don't know how to use a keyboard. Basic shortcuts (ctrl+c/ctrl+v and the like) are ignored. Most rely on the mouse and the menus for everything, and of course are terribly slow to achieve their tasks.
So we have to explain all these things before we even start with our subject, to the point where I wonder if they've been exposed to desktop computer before. I think most have only been using phones and tablets.
So, from my point of view, the conclusion of the article is right: teachers and parents should not assume their children and students know how to use a computer, because it might not be the case.
The question is -- is that a bad thing? For the majority of people a computer is a means to end and the fewer implementation details exposed the better. Just as I don't really want or need to know how a car works in detail in order to get from A to B.
What I see happening is that computing knowledge becomes more and more the preserve of specialists and that's a good thing. When I started to learn programming I read about why the command line was so useful and people were saying things like "you can batch rename files really easily!". But the only times I've ever really had to do that are programming-related tasks such as log files etc. Most people simply don't need to do that often enough to justify learning how.
My answer is yes, because once you enter the job market, you probably won't be working with a phone or a tablet. And obviously if you can't use a keyboard you'll be slow at your task.
It constantly complains that modern teens barely touch anything underneath the surface in tech but ironically completely smears over any of the underlying issues.
Let's have a think...
Do any of the mainstream tech publications cover low level programming? No.
Are any low level computer skills taught in college or other mainstream programming courses? No.
Do big tech companies give a thought to the quality of their software as long they can foist it on people? No. (Although you could probably argue that that isn't a new phenomena)
Garbage in, garbage out. Someone failed to protect the tech industry and it isn't these teens' fault that real programming is completely obscured. The best chance they have is getting into retro games so they can stumble across David Murray or Clint Basinger or the like.
None of the local colleges teach either!
'Mainstream tech pubs with low level programming?' Depends on what you count as low level programming. The tech publications I check out sure contain information about, for example, C and C++ developments.
The previous "big one", Dobb's Journal was killed off circa 2014 (Although it was pretty much dead already by that point)
Frankly, I don't either. Most of the important know-how comes to servers or cloud service configurations. My personal and work computers just work, no thanks to my knowledge. Win10 is vastly better than all previous versions in terms of this. Even if I run into something, there's always Google/YouTube. I think most teens can handle Google.
You don't need to have this stuff memorized any more. That under-the-hood knowledge you're trying to get me to memorize? Just tell me what to search for and I'll go look it up if I want to learn about it. I can remember that search phrase easily. I'm not going to remember every detail you talk about.
When I can't google my way into 6 digit jobs, I'll start worrying. Until then, those under-the-hood people can rest easy knowing things are much more streamlined these days because of their work.
It's not just teens.
Turns out that today, in my humble experience, it’s very rare to find geeky (pre)teens unless they have geeky parents (and not even then). Computers became much more simplified, problem-free and in different forms to mostly consume content. So the curiosity that grew inside of me while solving daily computer problems is very difficult nowadays as most of the issues aren’t very challenging (which is very good for the average user).
Perhaps not having computers (or tech in general) as a child causes an enlarged interest when given access to computers?
So, I recommend getting a proper desk to co-op on and a learning plan if you don't have those setup already.
Also, I had a neighbor with lots of knowledge in electrical and software engineering. He taught me some of my first learnings with c++ and python. Shame that he was drinking a lot.
These things aren’t necessarily unrelated.
No one was complaining that mom and dad don’t know what defragmentation is, and why it doesn’t matter on an SSD. No one was sad grandma had no clue why changing the DHCP setting on her router made no difference when she was outside the house.
The issue was your mom calling for the 20th time asking how to rip a cd in iTunes, or dad not being able to attach a photo to an e-mail.
That issue seems more than solved by the current generation.
1) We had an easy time with simple CPU like the Z80 or Assembly for the C64. You could have the whole chip in your head.
2) Graphical Interfaces hides the nuts and bolts and we didn't have them.
3) We had to hack to do things because usually that was the only way to do something you wanted to do. We had to tweak and modify files and ram just so a game would launch. It was magical at the time.
Most people are not curious nor do they care to know things at that level of detail.
It's not even a new thing. Granted, when computers were less common, it was of course more likely that someone who owned one also had an interest in it beyond the bare basics. Still, I had friends who didn't know anything more than how to plonk a disk into the drive of their Amiga 500 to start a game, or otherwise learned the bare minimum required to for example load a C64 game from tape. And let's not even talk about the Nintendo crowd. What a bunch of ignoramuses!
Those who are interested in how computers work will learn about it. The rest will treat it as the appliance it's intended to be and go about their lives, spending their time getting proficient in other areas and skills instead.
But bottom line, none of this developed until I got into a career. Kids back in the day were just as clueless. And there are a few outliers, sure.
> Many teachers and parents believe the younger generation know more about technology and “computers” then their own generation. They believe the teens of today know more about computers because we grew up with them, we have always used them and use them for almost every task.
Ok, the entire article basically starts off with a subjective assumption. Great ...
By that logic my parents should know how analog telephones or TVs work, but I already have doubts that they have an idea of how 3.4 kHz sound like or even know what a kHz is. I doubt they ever heard of cathode rays either. So why should nowadays teens know how MIPI DSI works for example? Because they look at a 7" screen driven by that the entire day? The whole idea is just plain bogus.
So teenagers do what teenagers have always done? I agree with the others - kids who need to figure stuff out will find a way.
Uncle Bob proposed that the number of devs had been doubling every five years for the last couple decades. That means five times as many people are available to fill these critical spots.
If he’s right and I’m right, then if every 5-year generation of devs has 60% of the ratio of people interested in low level stuff as the one before, then we will have plenty of people to keep the wheels on.
Which if my math is right is 5% of the rate of gearheads we had in the dotcom boom.
Which honestly was not that high even then. I was using a lot more theoretical knowledge of hardware than nearly all of my coworkers would cop to.
The article title is correct in that teens don't know anything about that. Most management personnel don't, either.
Although the article contents seem to be that teens are somewhat worse than average at manipulation of UIs. Given stereotypical teen performance at automobile operation, culinary skills, operating romantic relationships, and muscular coordination in general, I'm not sure why anyone is surprised.
When I was a teen, I knew practically nothing about computers - I remember trying to use regedit to hack a server-side game because some friend told me to. I could type and play games and surf the internet, that was about it.
I wrote my first program in college, and I'm doing reasonably well in software (graduated 2017 with a SWE job at median wage for my area, job hopped for a 20% raise after a year, and just got put in for a promotion at my new job).
Speaking as a former teen, teens don't know much about sales and marketing, mechanical engineering, international politics, or basically any other aspect of the adult world. This is because they're teens.
I guess because they learn to use new technology faster it gives the impression that they know all about it. But I don't know why anyone would expect them to be an expert in operating system design or anything.
You will find computer literate in each generation, just as you will find the majority in each case completely oblivious to and uninterested in acquiring the knowledge to understand and troubleshoot non trivial issues.
> Using green text on a black background is not only obnoxious but also hard to read.
speak for yourself. :-)
> they don’t care. All they want is a computer that works,
This isn't actually an unreasonable ask. It's roughly identical to cars, phones, and other tools.
The author's original point - that teens aren't gurus - is quite excellent.
Hm. I use white-on-purple at work, and green-on-black at home. Anyone else use apparently-unusual terminal colors?
*green-on-black with occasional red, was part of a rotating color set I used to use. The Christmas colors were nice enough I kept them year-round.
I think we are getting smarter overall, but I don't expect it to be the norm, it requires a societal shift away from distracting platforms and entertainment that don't facilitate the need to explore and learn.
1) get her interested (she has been an iPad generation girl since 3)
2) ease her into it without the layers of complexity that I had the time to learn organically as they were introduced over the last 40 years.
What do you mean? Do they think it's boring, or that it's too complicated, or that it's useless, or something else?
Which I think is fine. I am talking to a population who didn’t lean toward engineering in their education and career choices. But my point is that their might be some curiosity, just not the appetite to pay the cost of understanding how the sausages are made.
Wanting technology to just work without having to deal with esoteric nonsense? How childish!
It's easy to gloss over the fact that for >99% of users the machine "just needs to work", and I don't think that's unreasonable. There will be a subset of kids that /do/ take an interest in this stuff, and will pick it up as the next generation of "IT magicians".
There is a wide spectrum of ability and interest (and the ages go from perhaps 8 or 9 to mid teens), but a large proportion of the kids get it and are off and happily programming away to make their flappy bird clone based on some basic instructions. Many say they already know Scratch from school. Many get bored and go rogue by ignoring the instructions and doing their own thing with the game and you start to see some bizarre mashups of what they're supposed to be making and what their imagination came up with. When we run those classes, the feedback is usually really really positive.
Sure - scratch is not "programming" as most of us would think of it, but it is programming.
Tl;Dr - give kids a break. There is interest and ability there if you give them the chance to express it.
It is very easy to judge.
Let me add: The parents that brought their kids to these occasions may have a technically background also? Then these parents know how to use a computer and may have passed this knowledge on, at least the positive attitude towards knowing how it works. Children are interested in what their parents do after all. Children are trained in consuming computers/content on computers, so some (maybe even the majority of what I observed) may have a negative attitude towards learning what computers actually do. After all, consuming rewards them with joy, learning is meh...
Was this written by a teen?
[Angry sysadmin will show himself out now]
My teen is a lot more interested in what she can use tools to do and create, not fucking around with installing hardware and operating system. I feel like this is a better use of her time, frankly.
This is like listening to people my parents' age rant about how no-one has to use their pantyhose to fix a broken fan belt, or adjust a carb to a richer or leaner fuel mix as you go skiing and come home.
The people seemingly feeling hurt by this - you do realize you're outliers, right?
The number of folks who genuinely understand computers has been rising at unprecedented rates. Just look at the number of employed programmers.
Does that mean most children understand it? Of course not, just like most adults don't. When Grandma is amazed that her grandkids manage to make Netflix work, I don't think there's any real expectation that they will become software engineers.
This is like bitching that kids from the 1920s don't know how combustion engines work. It's not productive.
Also: I really dislike that self-righteous "your're getting downvoted for..." thing you're doing.
I don't mind being downvoted when I know I'm correct ;).