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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

I often help younger developers with problems that involve absolute vs. relative paths - their code doesn't work because they're invoking it with the wrong working directory. It's immediately obvious to me because I grew up using the command line, where files and paths are elemental. They're usually _really_ interested in properly understanding what's actually happened here, but they've been so intentionally shielded from the fundamentals of files and directories that they need quite a bit of time to let it all sink in. The solution, of course, is to teach things bottom up, but I have some sympathy for beginners who lose patience with spending so much time dealing with something that doesn't even _look_ like a computer from their perspective.

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It has been very eye opening watching young and brilliant programmers who have grown up with mobile devices struggle when it comes to traditional environments. Many struggle with things that seem basic, like file systems, processes, memory management, how to use desktops and even mice, etc. However, once you solve or abstract away those things, many are able to churn out complex software at an impressive rate, particularly when they are able to assemble tool chains and frameworks together like legos. Then they go back to the struggle bus when something in that chain fails or functions unexpectedly.

Differences in the types of environments and how they interact with them between age groups makes sense in a pretty boring sort of way, and at any rate is solvable through simple experience. It’s more interesting to me that this observation is another point of correlation in the notion that the industry has aligned itself with productivity over any other metric. While productivity is important, this unbalanced favor has introduced fragility and unsustainability into the industry and end user market.

So much of the modern computing environment goes incredibly far out of its own way to hide information from the user. It's getting difficult just to see the URL in mobile browsers, and in some fairly general-purpose computing environment (iPads, etc) the concept of a "filesystem" has become very abstract and increasingly difficult to ascertain.

It doesn't surprise me that people half my age have difficulty with some of these - it's much harder for them to play with and explore the concepts.

> They're usually _really_ interested in properly understanding what's actually happened here

Most jr devs these days aren't like this.

I see kind of a mix of wonder and frustration - I don't know if I'm projecting, but I kind of suspect they're secretly accusing me of making things seem more difficult than they need to be.

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