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Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

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Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#61
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An observation doesn't need to be constructive. I needs to be relevant and novel. This is a relevant and novel observation. The people seemingly feeling hurt by this - you do realize you're outliers, right?

You're getting downvoted because this is neither relevant nor novel. The number of folks who genuinely understand computers has been rising at unprecedented rates. Just look at the number of employed programmers. Does that mean most children understand it? Of course not, just like most adults don't. When Grandma is amazed that her grandkids manage to make Netflix work, I don't think there's any real expectation that…

The amount of people who can create things that have some value for someone at ever increasing abstraction levels have increased, for sure.

Also: I really dislike that self-righteous "your're getting downvoted for..." thing you're doing.

I don't mind being downvoted when I know I'm correct ;).

Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#62
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this, I take everything written about teenagers from the perspective of anyone >~20 with a huge grain of salt, because I'm not old enough to forget yet how completely and utterly out of touch adults were about my generation of teenagers when I was younger.

The opening paragraph indicates the writer is a teen though.

(I think that's p1necone's point about why they're taking rc-5 seriously.)

Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#65
post #32

Allow me to preface this by saying that I am, in fact, a teen, and absolutely do not represent the majority of teenagers. This post is a generalization and a subjective rant that absolutely doesn't hold up in real life. >>>When you explain what happens under the hood, they will ignore you. When you tell them what a certain setting probably does, they will ignore you. In my experience, although there may be some teena…

Thanks for this, I take everything written about teenagers from the perspective of anyone >~20 with a huge grain of salt, because I'm not old enough to forget yet how completely and utterly out of touch adults were about my generation of teenagers when I was younger.

That particular sword is double edged - it took me a long time to realize how myopic we were about older generations, too.

Human beings, huh?

Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#66
post #59

>They most likely won’t care about the operation of their system Frankly, I don't either. Most of the important know-how comes to servers or cloud service configurations. My personal and work computers just work, no thanks to my knowledge. Win10 is vastly better than all previous versions in terms of this. Even if I run into something, there's always Google/YouTube. I think most teens can handle Google. You don't nee…

Sarcasm.

Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#67

I am happy that I grew up in the golden age of computing - people say it was the 80's, but being a "90's" kid, we had classes from HTML w/ dreamweaver, how to modify/break windows 95/98 --- In fact in NYC, my elementary school had keyboard class where you'd learn to type and general proficiency w/ a computer. In Florida, middle school photoshop, dreamweaver, fireworks and even access database. High school had C++ cla…

I normally roll my eyes at "wrong generation" stuff, but holy shit it seems like it would have been really fun to have grown up or even worked in the industry during the golden age.

Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#68
post #13

They don't know what their car's choke would have been, or what a dwell tach is. So? They can still drive. Not one in 100,000 could milk a cow. I write assembly code that runs in supervisory mode. My kid couldn't write assembly code to save his life, but just taught me a new algorithm I'd never seen before. And he could learn assembly if he wanted.

Not one in 100,000 could milk a cow. I know this wasn't your point, but I'll nitpick anyway since that number felt too low, so I checked, and the number seems like it should be closer to 1 in 200. There are 72M children [1] below the age of 18 in the USA today, so 1 in 100,000 would only be 720 and there's something like 40,000 dairy farms in the USA, and I'd bet every child on those farms older than 8 (probably youn…

Damn, Johnny. Remind me not to post unsubstantiated statistics around you.

Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not one in 100,000 could milk a cow. I know this wasn't your point, but I'll nitpick anyway since that number felt too low, so I checked, and the number seems like it should be closer to 1 in 200. There are 72M children [1] below the age of 18 in the USA today, so 1 in 100,000 would only be 720 and there's something like 40,000 dairy farms in the USA, and I'd bet every child on those farms older than 8 (probably youn…

Damn, Johnny. Remind me not to post unsubstantiated statistics around you.

Heh, well I was just thinking "Hmm....well I know I could milk a cow, as could at least 2 of my immediate coworkers and we're all geeks [1]... 1:100000 sounds low" so I looked for some data.

[1] for evidence, see my preceding post

Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)

#70
post #56
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are missing where the author is coming from. People knew how to use websites and applications in the early 2000s as well, but with the advent of home computers, WWW and smartphones there was a widespread belief that, by nature of being surrounded by tech, young people would automatically learn how it worked under the surface and possess an inherent fluency in IT. That didn't happen. It's still people inte…

Right - of course, I don't really know the cultural background, having not been around when those expectations were developing.

I was around when those expectations were developing, and my frustration with trying to get any kind of computer education from school taught me early on that it was up to me to dig in.

None of my classmates learned computer skills by osmosis. Every single one of them that did learn those skills put in intentional effort because they were already interested.

And even so, the schools were entirely stacked against us, intentionally or not. One kid (I still am not sure who) went through the computer lab and tweaked some settings to mess with everyone. Another kid (who definitely was innocent) stepped forward to help fix it, and got suspended for a week or two. Show any kind of competence with computers and you're a dangerous hacker. Fall in line and don't stand out or you will be punished.

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