Comment by kkielhofner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kkielhofner | Hacker News Reader

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I have a similar story as many on HN do. I had been stringing 10BASE2 coax around my "home lab" for years before I realized people will actually pay me to play with my toys. Of course I then sunk all of that money into more toys for the home lab.

I now have a lot of friends with kids and some of them are teenagers. I've had some concern in my mind for a while now - their total knowledge of tech comes down to asking for a wifi password and watching prank videos (or whatever) on an app. When you ask them what they want to do when they grow up they say "influencer"... The most technical thing they know how to do is reboot "the router" when the internet is down. The second diagnostic step is to yell that the internet is down.

They're great kids and I'm not criticizing them but I've had some concerns that there might not be anyone around to keep the lights on when our generation is gone. In our day using a computer and getting on the internet had huge barriers to entry but that came with the benefit of an explosion in tech talent.

My point is it's great to hear there are still some nerdy kids out there getting under the covers!

People with the interest and skill to debug technical systems have always been a tiny minority

That's funny -- when my familiy was planning to move to a home that was being built, my Dad got out there before they put the drywall up and ran telephone and cable television to every bedroom. I followed in behind him with my punch down tool and put a shiny, new Ethernet port in every room, too.

This was 1993. There was no broadband. We almost went 10-BASE2 due to cost. I remember we had a Netware server and two computers. It was kind of overkill but it was fun!

> They're great kids and I'm not criticizing them but I've had some concerns that there might not be anyone around to keep the lights on when our generation is gone. In our day using a computer and getting on the internet had huge barriers to entry but that came with the benefit of an explosion in tech talent.

I mean, thinking back to the '80s, I was probably one out of maybe 3 kids in my entire class who even had a home computer, let alone knew how to do anything more than play games.

Back to the '90s, many more classmates had computers, but only a tiny, tiny few of us knew how to program and edit CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT.

Back to the early 2000s, I was the only person I knew with greater than a dial-up Internet connection or who knew the difference between a local and public IP address.

99.5% have always been laypeople, and that's OK. For every 200 kids today who only know how to ask their mom for the WiFi password, there's one who is setting up a home lab, and that's enough for the world's tech needs in twenty years.

Is this not how the generation before us felt about our inability to repair our cars and radios?

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