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Comment by santoshalper | Hacker News Reader

100% this. Also, I have been making software for over 30 years. There was never a time in my life when end users were more competent and understood the systems better. In fact, for baseline technical literacy, you really can't beat Gen Z. They are by far the most technical generation of users I have seen.

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> for baseline technical literacy, you really can't beat Gen Z

I disagree pretty strongly with this. I think Millennials were kind of the sweet spot in technical literacy. They grew up in a time when they still needed to understand computers, and tinkered around with them a lot out of necessity (computer viruses all the time, Napster/Limewire, etc..). They also saw the start of the internet and cell phones becoming ubiquitous, which provided a lot of forced-learning opportunities.

Gen Z'ers, in my experience, have had almost no computer experience. They are great at using the apps on their phones, but phones have become so polished and easy from an end user perspective that they haven't done any tinkering. They've often never downloaded an mp3 file, torrent, fixed internet issues, etc.. because things just work now. Obviously there are exceptions to this, and really technical Gen Z'ers (like with every generation). But in my experience, that isn't the norm.

Exactly my experience as well. Gen Z are super good at "finding an app for that" or showing you how to do something on your phone, but give them a mouse and keyboard and many start to resemble Boomers. (Of course there are tons of exceptions, this is generational lumping after all).

The hacker mindset just doesn't seem to be present in Gen Z like it was for Millenials and some Gen Xers. We took crap apart as kids to see how it worked, and we could still. Now things are so integrated and miniaturized, it's much harder to do that.

Add on top of that how Gen Z is almost all iPhone users and actually looks down on Android (the platform where you can dig in if you want to), it's no wonder the default is only an inch deep. Their tech providers and advisors have been telling them their whole lives how scary the world outside of the walled garden is and putting technical controls in their way to prevent them should they decide they want to.

We absolutely could have had the Gen Z that is more technical than Millenials, but we ruined it. It's not their fault, any generation raised like them would have been the same way.

Side note: If you're a Gen Z hacker (of which I've known a few and they are super impressive), I consider you a gentleperson and a scholar.

> phones have become so polished and easy from an end user perspective that they haven't done any tinkering

I don’t get the complaint, as a dev myself. Everything being easy and just working is what we intended for. The future! It’s here.

> Everything being easy and just working is what we intended

The problem being that if it doesn't just work, people just shut down.

To me it's almost a double edged sword. If I have to make something work, I learn about how it works, and I can solve problems if they happen.

If it just works, it's magic, and I have no idea why the magic stopped.

I wasn't raising a complaint. Just an observation and a side effect. I love that my phone just works! But that doesn't mean a phone that just works is the best way to learn about how phone's work.

Well, yes, but that wasn't the point. It's not a complaint, just disagreeing with the premise of Gen Z being the most technologically competent.

The difference between a tool and a mere appliance is whether you can make it do unplanned things. Whether it offers a payoff for being smart.

Yes, it's nice that everything is easy and just works. But now we can't even look under the hood on phones to tweak things.

I have a grandma and I absolutely think Apple has done the right thing with the so-called “walled-garden” aka App Store and the lack of tweaking ability/a terminal/root access. Tech-literate people like us drastically underestimate the harm scams have (and would have if tweaking was allowed) on people. I am in college, and Gen Z is scared to install anything on their Windows laptops. Except they do anyway when a scammer tricks them. They are in a hurry and they need to do this specific thing. install_more_ram.exe, bam. Pay $X to unlock your hard disk.

Don’t get me wrong, it also hurts me that I need to install an app to ssh to my server on my iPhone. Or when I can’t have a long-running process in the background. Or when I can’t automate things with shell scripts. It really does hurt. But this appliance form is really how things should be, at least until the day each and every user understands their devices, a day which will never come. Because why? They are tools. They are a means to a real life end. It’s a waste of human time to make everyone “tech-literate”. Users should not have control over their devices, because social engineering and scams will always be a thing. No matter how many “DON’T ENABLE THIS UNLESS YOU ARE A SOFTWARE ENGINEER” warnings you put grandmas will continue to be scammed.

Then what can let me have a native shell with root access on my iPhone, without jailbreaking? I don’t know, maybe a small on-device software knowledge exam to prove you are a software developer and understand what you are doing by Apple? Separately sold root access enabled devices for devs? Putting a big red warning in front of the root access “IF YOU ARE NOT A SOFTWARE ENG. YOU ARE %100 BEING SCAMMED RIGHT NOW” which is read by TTS ten times until one can dismiss it?

Or just get the Linux on mobile to feature parity with iOS and we won’t be beholden to corporations. Not saying it’s easy obviously. Still I’d like to see one organized FOSS mobile Linux project instead of a hundred desktop and a dozen mobile distros going on at the moment. OS lacks organization. Enormous amounts of available skilled human time wasted. Sad.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

Complete opposite of my experience. What field are you working in today? They know their way around apps, might know how to side load, but other than that have no deeper understanding of how things work under the hood, nor the desire to find out, because the phone itself usually works well enough and doesn't completely roll over every couple months like Win9x did back in the day. There is absolutely no incentive nowadays to dig into this for people other than tech enthusiasts. Their knowledge about computers is often close to non-existent, to the point where they get visibly confused by more involved user interfaces of professional software.

Can you expand on the last point from experience? My gut reaction is to disagree, thinking about the level of familiarity required to adopt and deeply leverage an early 80s PC vs a modern smartphone. Do you mean higher average level of google-fu? Do you mean lower likelihood of collecting an egregious number of viruses?

Interesting. I used to think along the lines of most of the other responders, but seeing the ritualized nature of the response I'm starting to think this is our generation's "you don't know how to use a band saw".

If someone said "Millenials are the best generation of band saw users this world has ever seen" I would completely expect the resounding response to be something along the lines of "..uh.. what?". There isn't anything ritualistic about that.

In other words, there is a big difference between disagreeing with a statement that doesn't match what you've observed in reality at all, and being entrenched in your ways and insisting that the rising generation isn't "up to snuff". I don't see anyone dunking on Gen Z or insisting that they get their act together because they didn't have as many opportunities to dig into computers growing up.

I think there is a real argument to be made that nobody will ever need to be technically savvy again if AGI ever becomes a reality.

Edit: Gonna plug the book Scythe if anyone wants a fun read about an AGI run future that isn't the typical "evil AI" trope.

The difference in examples here is scope; you'd probably raise an eyebrow if the band saw thing was followed by 'millennials are bad at building things'. They might be more likely to use a 3d printer than a lathe but that wouldnt lead to being bad at the category.

And thats what I think I'm seeing here, inexperience with what we consider to be technology basics being extrapolated to 'bad at technology'.

I think the argument you hint at could be interesting and have merit but to tie it back to this comment chain; I don't see any evidence of it here.

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