“Kids who grew up on smartphones do not know how to do anything on a computer”

I think we were at a sweetspot around the 2000s... The windows XP era.

But this is most likely my own familiarity bias?

This is precisely why "we" know it and neither our parents or children do.

We were forced to do it just to make it work the way we wanted. It was necessary. Hell, even semi-regular routine of formatting [the hard-drive] and reinstalling Windows because it was getting slow; taught a lot of people the simple basics. All of that is lost today.

Factory reset -> input email & password -> sit back while everything reinstalls. What do you learn from that other then to make sure you had a backup of your data.

> anything more than run WordPerfect or SimCity (and often even then)

Oh for sure, this gave me nostalgia of cracking pirated SimCity ISOs I had downloaded on Kazaa or Limewire or whatever it was that week.

Cracking ISOs with key breakers, patching DLL files, etc... all taught me a lot about how programs worked at a really young age.

> Editing text configuration files, wrangling with file systems, memory layouts and protection, hardware drivers, even patching binary executables with hex editors sometimes!

These are terrible things to have to spend time on. This comment section reads like someone missing having to set dip switches on sound cards so they don't conflict with your printer.

Wouldn't it be the other way around?

As cars became more popular for transportation, people stopped learning how to take care of horses.

Not exactly analogous though. They didn't need to know how to fix their cars to get through high school assignments. How the hell did kids turn in essays and whatnot? I doubt they were printing them. Or was literally everything done in Google Docs?

Yes, it is different. With a car, no matter how modern, you still (used to) command where it drives you. In a smartphone, someone else makes this decision for you. (Or at least someone else limits your options.)

There is obviously a difference between not knowing what a URL is and not being able to read assembly. Both could be seen as "arcane details of computer knowledge" that enhance your autonomy when using a computer, but one is in principle accessible to 95% of the world's population without much effort, the other is a highly specialized technical skill.

Just because this is an older problem doesn't mean it's not a problem.

Yes, people that loved fixing up cars would have complained about "kids these days" not knowing how to fix a car. I was certainly one of those kids.

However seeing this happen with a field I know makes me realize those people complaining about people not knowing how to take care of their cars were right.

And while this is true of "any new tech", it's a relatively recent phenomenon as tech has only been advancing this rapidly in last 100 years or so.

It is a bad thing to be increasingly alienated from the tools you rely on for your day-to-day existence. Of course it's in part because cars and computers have both been increasingly designed by their manufactures to be difficult to take apart and understand. Tools that you don't understand increasingly control you rather than the other way around and I personally think this is a trend worth resisting.

It's good to point out that this is an issue and even better to encourage more people to be curious, and learn how things work. Another example that I'm surprised of is people's homes. I know a shocking number of home owners that cannot fix a single thing in their own home without calling a "professional" (and it's increasingly surprising how many professionals also don't understand what they're doing!) This was extremely evident during the freezing temperatures in Texas where many people didn't know how to shut off the water to their homes.

One of the best parts of the "hacker" mentality is to encourage people to not be scared of their tools and the things they own. While things have gotten more complicated, you can do a large amount of repair and modification on your own for almost everything. It honestly feels very liberating (not to mention saving you a lot of money) to snake a clog 12 ft deep in your drain, replace your car's serpentine belt, restore old hardwood floors, repair broken refrigerators from parts, etc.

It goes beyond even tech. Home repair especially. The pragmatic knowledge had by my grandparents generation was just astounding to me. My grandpa was so damn smart. He was an engineer for Alcoa working with drafting tables and a slide rule. His brain was just rooted in mathmatics. One time we had a roll of some tar paper for a project and we needed to figure out how many feet we had left on the roll to see if we should buy another roll. He just put a ruler across the diameter, stared at it for a while, stared at the sky with his mouth open for a second, then he had the correct length. Blew my mind when I went home and looked up the formula he worked out correctly in his head in about 30 seconds: 𝐿=𝜋∗(𝑅2−𝑟2)/𝑇

I'd need to pull out a calculator to do anything with pi.

I've been wondering why that is, why this older generation was so much more focused so to speak. It makes sense when you consider the cultural influences surrounding that. My grandpa grew up in the great depression and rebuilt china after the japanese occupation during WWII. It was a matter of survival and pride to focus and improve yourself for your family. My fathers generation, it was popular to ditch class to smoke weed in the woods rather than pay attention in class. My generation, it was popular to be on your phone all day rather than pay attention in class. If all the generations since my grandfathers were as focused as his was on learning things, my word, maybe their now wild predictions on the glorious would be future in the atomic age would have actually materialized.

I feel bad typing this because it’s just anecdotal but I do think the people just ten years younger than me seem far incapable of figuring really simple things out on their own. There’s no problem with asking questions but at least have some due diligence done.

I really struggle getting that point across too because they want to be spoon fed the answer (btw these are folks from top 20 CS schools) or complain that nobody is training them.

I guess that’s what being glued to a phone and social media for hours a day does to people.

Again just my opinion from my personal experience.

The flip side is that anyone who wants to become a programmer has a wealth of learning resources available to them that did not exist for earlier generations.

I had to spend hours scouring forums to piece together information that is available as a youtube video these days.

It’s definitely interesting to contrast my experience with that of my child. My parents were completely illiterate when it came to computers and electronics in general, so I basically taught myself how to take things apart and fix them when they broke, figured out how to get a modem set up to connect to the internet, etc. In some ways my experience with technology was driven by necessity as much as it was by curiosity.

Now the devices that my child uses can’t be easily taken apart and the solution when they break is to get a new one. They don’t have any reason to learn about the software internals, either, because everything “just works” as soon as they power a device on and the internet is always available.

I have a buddy who teaches technology to young kids.

He complains all the time about how he can't assume that kids know anything fundamental about computers.

Things such as manually saving files go above kids heads since the modern auto-save is so ubiquitous. Kids assume that all monitors are touch screen at first and will poke the screen before touching the KB&M.

File directories might as well be a magical black box. Good luck trying to get anyone to figure out how to print something if the default printer doesn't immediately work.

He wants to help, but is always shocked at how much kids simply do not know any of the primitives of a computer

The first-order effect of this seems to be a continuous shift towards high-level programming languages. I have a sibling around this age, and the technologically savvy kids seem to gravitate towards Python and Javascript libraries. When you can set up a server online for cheap and with simple installation instructions, these kids can avoid needing to learn a lot about how a computer actually works.

I think there's definitely a loss in some areas of tech, but there's corresponding gains in some other areas. We can see this type of growth with the development of many other technologies as well; how many large farmers do you think could fully care for their plants by hand? How many kids know how to write a letter, or use cursive? How much of a toilet could most people conceivably fix? Low-level knowledge is often "lost" because it's not needed to actually use an advanced technology.

I agree that it will be interesting to see what trajectory this takes. COBOL runs a huge amount of our financial infrastructure, and almost nobody knows how to update/fix it. It'll be fascinating to see what the next COBOL will be.

Older folks have been baskets of knowledge my entire career. You sit down with an old grey beard, you're going to learn something, and hear a great story. But they haven't always been valued to the extent they should.

I don't think this new phenomonom changes things. These kids are still smart, and their knowledge is infiintely practical. But they might not be up to speed how it works under the covers. That takes some expereince, and time. The kids have alot of value, and i'd hire them. But the old guys are still needed to keep the high level stuff functioning while the kids learn.

It's so weird that your kids have different interests than you. Are they equally baffled about your lack of interest in their hobbies?

> a generation that grew up with computers

They did grow up with sandboxed computers that has some whitelisted applications and nothing else. That isn't the full computer experience. To me it makes perfect sense that they don't understand much.

That's just Apple marketing though. Since day 1 their messaging would have you believe that "computing" is the domain of fusty old number crunchers, while Apple products are somehow beyond all that.

I appreciate Android more and more because from a design standpoint, it had "desktop" features on day 1. File explorers apps, or being able to choose which app to open a file with. Connect it to a PC and it becomes a USB storage device.

Yet somehow Apple, which required the god-awful iTunes software to do anything sync-related, won the MP3 player battle.

This reveals how the chasm between mobile operating systems (iOS, Android) and "desktop" operating systems (OSX, Windows) are impacting generations. The next generation live nearly their entire lives on smart phones and tablets. I think most almost never use a desktop computer unless they have to. And why should they? These mobile devices can do almost all conventional tasks that one would want out of a desktop computer. You mention that the concept of files is bewildering to them. And this makes sense when you consider the fact that mobile operating systems are "application based" while desktop operating systems are "file based". On a mobile OS, you never have to think about managing files. Everything is managed by the app. On desktops however, the user has more responsibility to properly manage files and have the appropriate application to run them.

I only recently learned the “long press on the space bar” feature of iOS. It’s still cumbersome to navigate the url but far less so than tapping, which seems intentionally designed to be infuriatingly difficult to navigate.

Mouse + keyboard + big screen computers aren't going anywhere anytime soon. When they start to migrate office workers to appstore devices rather than computers then I'd believe you, but todays appstore devices doesn't offer enough to replace computers.

The issue is that computers haven't been replaced. iPhones still use files and directories, people just aren't allowed to look at all of them. They're being kept ignorant of how the device they use actually works.

I have a theory about the Japanese and their relationship to the PC, having lived there for a bit in the mid 90s. This comes down to three things:

First, Japan had a mindblowing consumer electronics industry way before we did. There were special purpose devices for everything you could want. They were all user friendly and did not require understanding how the underlying system worked. They didn't need a PC since all their electronic needs were already met and met better.

Second, Japan is basically 99% urban living, as space is at an insane premium, and even when you are in the country the houses are built small due to culture and lack of open space, since if you're not in the city you're probably in the mountains. This means there was no physical place to even put a PC in most Japanese houses the way American houses might have a desk in a corner or even an office.

Third, and probably the most important, phone calls in Japan were always pay by minute, even for local calls. This meant that if you were online with a modem, you were paying the phone bill just sitting there. This meant that if a person even had a modem, the would rarely use the internet. Since America had monthly-billed phones, there was no problem staying up all night on AOL chatrooms, and AOL really was the killer app that pushed PCs into American houses.

IMO this is why the PC revolution that really took off in American homes, and by association a bunch of us who cut our teeth mucking about with bat files so we could play our DOS games and ended up learning useful skills out of necessity never happened in Japan.

It’s the same in Germany and the US from what I can tell. Seems technology has reached the point of “good enough for daily use” the same way cars have reached that point and people don’t need to understand how cars work.

I used to teach computer science first semesters a few years ago and I got tons of emails from people who couldn't manage to boot and/or install the linux distro we gave them on an introductory usb drive. These were intelligent kids with plenty of education and many of them couldn't figure out how to do basic networking or formatting stuff either.

My working class dad who had like 8 years of formal education in his entire life taught himself visual basic in the 90s through magazines and books. Getting emails from students who could theoretically just type stuff into google at 1 am was a genuine shocker to me.

(this is Germany in my case)

Japanese is worse because of smartphone environment. Most Japanese people use "Flick Input" to input Japanese and Alphabet characters on smartphone, that's totally incompatible to Qwerty. Meanwhile most Japanese people use (and be taught) Qwert Input to input Japanese and Alphabet character on PC. Flick input is really useful, but it's not good to be familiar with Qwerty input on PC.

Add to this, we tend to don't need PC for life (but is needed for office work). Nintendo and Sony is headquartered here (technically SIE is now HQ'd in the US but most people don't know) so PC gaming isn't a huge thing (but now it'S growing). Tax filling isn't needed for normal sararyman. Urban homes are tend to small. Schools are really behind for everything. People tend to not good at English.

I expected they would've been amazed at CD-Rs. Even back when I was in college the practice was to pass a USB stick around the class with notes, PDF of textbook, etc.

I just reread my own blog post and it makes me cringe a little, but nevermind. I was younger and angrier back then.

However my point still stands, that digital literacy is on the decline. Having said that, I've raised four children and two of them are quite comfortable striping a computer down, reinstalling an operating system, using a CLI and SSHing into a remote Linux server to run Minecraft and CSGO.

It's my current job to teach kids how to use computers, and I think we're making some progress.

I highly doubt that. These are people who have essentially never used a keyboard to do anything but type messages. If they can't type in a URL, I doubt they'll be able handle a terminal. All the younger people I know just click icons. Even if they want to move something, they drag-and-drop. No one's heard of cutting or file extensions or knows the layout of a file system. They would understand zero parts of `mv ~/Downloads/photo.jpg ~/Pictures/photo.jpg`.

The only way that would work is if your CLI is just a pipe to an improved version of Google Assistant or Siri that can generously understand natural language.

This isn't about individuals but about society. The past decades the number of computer literate adults has massively increased, which is a good thing. But the trend is reversing since the basics you learn when you use a phone isn't nearly as powerful as the basics you learn when using a regular computer.

There isn't much we can do about this trend, it will continue no matter if we want to change it or not. But talking about a trend and what consequences it will have is still interesting.