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Comment by kossTKR | Hacker News Reader

This makes me wonder if the older generations with tech careers should feel less pressured by the newer generations as it seems there is actually a huge drop in knowledge - but this may be superficial knowledge that's easily learned?

Does the younger generations actually need to know how a computer or the internet works, and is the pool of knowledge actually growing just not at a comparable rate to the entire population?

I know many of us wether we are programmers, designers or STEM people in general all started tinkering by ourselves or with friends on a computer, in terminals, in Photoshop, with HTML or with games and modding on anything from Commodore 64's to Arduinos today - what is going to happen when kids aren't doing this anymore, or maybe they are but just in new ways?

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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

> Kids assume that all monitors are touch screen at first

That happened to me with my 2 year old at the local library. I spent a few minutes showing him how to use the mouse. Then he touched the screen… and it worked. FML, the computer had a touch screen and a mouse.

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."

Alfred North Whitehead

I'm sure Alfred North Whitehead wasn't advocating stuff like not teaching the fundamentals of the why and how we can make these abstractions.

> I'm sure Alfred North Whitehead wasn't advocating stuff like not teaching the fundamentals of the why and how we can make these abstractions.

I’m sure he wasn't advocating it so much as recognizing that it was inherently, inevitably, and universally a consequence of progress.

In 2nd-6th grade school in late 80s we had to learn to program (logo) which was great fun. We had to get a perfect on a 100 question computer test to graduate 6th grade. RAM vs ROM vs Disk drive sort of questions. Not fun. At the time I complained endlessly because I kept getting 97 or so.

Wow did that set me up for success in the future.

This was private Christian grade school. Way ahead on the tech curve compared to most schools.

100% is ridiculous.

But perhaps maybe tests like that can get people to stop referring to non-volatile storage as "memory".

I don't much agree with the RAM = "memory" thing. "Memory" colloquially is for remembering things. RAM and storage are both for the computer to remember things, so it's natural to think they are both memories. It adds to the confusion that there are "memory cards" that employ "flash memory", the same tech that powers SSDs, which is nowadays a primary way of doing storage.

If you think about it, RAM is short term memory, and storage is long term memory, no?

Is that wrong ? Often I see RAM refered as memory with nonvolatile memory being reffered as storage.

Also there are old (ferite core) and new (NVRAM) technologies that are more or less both, further blurring the distinction.

> Is that wrong ?

Yes.

> Often I see RAM refered as memory with nonvolatile memory being reffered as storage.

That would be the correct nomenclature.

> Also there are old (ferite core) and new (NVRAM) technologies that are more or less both, further blurring the distinction.

The distinction isn't based on how it's built, but the use case and volatility. Memory is volatile and only intended for storing data for actively running programs.

SSDs and NVMe drives are storage, despite them looking like RAM chips, because they are non-volatile. When you remove power, they still have the data. A mobile device's "flash memory", which despite being called "memory", is storage.

Tell IBM in 1955. "Magnetic cores are attractive as memory elements because they are small, fast, and they provide non-volatile storage."[1]

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US2778005A/en

In my school (3rd world country, but expensive school), we had to draw the flag of our country (stripes, circles) with QBasic in MS-DOS.

This would have been around 1997. I remember complaining because I had an older sibling at the same school, and all they had to do was draw the flag in MS Paint.

I have a friend who teaches classes at a technical college. During the day one of the classes is a programming class for high schoolers. He said that none of the kids knew what a file was when he tried to get them to open or save something.

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.

Haha I'm only in my early 30's and I feel like an absolute dinosaur when we have an internet outage and I tell the kids that there was a time when we didn't always have internet access, and even a time when we didn't have internet at all!! It's unfathomable to them.

The same happened with cars. There was a generation before cars, then a generation with cars that needed a lot of maintenance, and now we have cars where it’s not necessary anymore to know how they work.

It's not like cars are dramatically more or less reliable to be fair. It's that they've gotten more complicated to the point where what used to be simple garage fixes anyone could do by following along the haynes manual now require a mechanic to take off the entire front end of the car and hours more labor as a result, and no one has the time, much less the tooling like engine lifts on hand to do that themselves (see most fixes for Audis since the 2000s).

Modern cars are way more reliable than maybe 30 years ago. When I started driving a car with 100000km usually started falling apart. Now you can easily get 200000 and more they also rust way less.

Repairability of modern tech like phones and computers has gone the same way that cars have gone. It used to be pretty easy to open a laptop and even phones but now everything is often glued together.

And I don’t think it’s because they are more complex. I think they are making manufacturing cheaper at the expense of making repair more complex.

When did you start driving? Only getting 60k miles doesn't fit my experience driving japanese cars since the 90s. Our family had a 2000 subaru that clocked 350k miles before the engine finally blew up and we scrapped it. My uncle drives old volvos from the 80s since he can wonk on them in his own garage, and he gets numbers like that too. You look up user forums and you will find the same experiences with these decent old cars.

I started in the 80s and my first few cars were from 70s or early 80s. Back then most engines lasted around 100000km and cars rusted pretty badly after 10 years. That has improved enormously since then. Engine management has also become more reliable. Carburetors needed constant maintenance once they got older, so did the ignition systems back then.

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.

Not only that, but you have access to cheap powerful home machines with the ability to run virtual machines to tinker on.

In the past a lot of the appeal for hacking was to just get exposure to exotic machines, whereas now you can run the same stuff everyone else does locally.

You were lucky to have forums. An older generation had to resort to books and magazines :-)

Nothing beats manually copying hundreds of lines of b&w code from a book and missing some syntax and having no idea why.

Actually, punch cards beat this.

> Nothing beats manually copying hundreds of lines of b&w code from a book and missing some syntax and having no idea why.

That's why Neil J. Rubenking's and Jim Seymour's stuff in PC Magazine had checksums at the end of each line you typed in. Those were the days.

I had the worst of both worlds in the late 2000s when I was trying to learn on my own.

There were printed books where the code didn't work. There were also message board posts that described my exact problem. The only response would be from the OP himself, usually a "never mind, figured it out" thing, with no further details given.

You were lucky if you didn't have to learn a whole 'nother language first too, just saying. :-)

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.

> these kids can avoid needing to learn a lot about how a computer actually works

That sounds like progress. Don't worry, plenty of kids will still be interested in how computers work at lower levels.

Problem is that plenty of those kids will wont have the opportunity to explore that interest since they wont have a computer to access. Even poor homes used to have a computer at home since it was such a useful device, but then they switched to smartphones and having a computer is becoming a class issue again.

For those that are interested, PCs are much more affordable these days.

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.

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.

In some of the discords I'm in for programming as a hobby, I see people who are 10+ years below me that are far more motivated, knowledgeable, and competent that I was at that age (and some moreso than I am now).

I doubt there's any significant differences between the populations.

This makes me think of my grandfather, a master mason who worked with thousands of other masons to build large parts of my city.

That skillset is nearly forgotten. Sure there are great instructional youtube videos and instagram masons who are brilliant but the vast talent pool is gone. We struggled to find someone to patch a giant rock wall earlier this year. I understand why people don't want to learn it and haul rocks and bricks everyday but that knowledge base is on it's way out.

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