I have three boys, two are engineers and one is a gamer. Guess who fixes their computer when things go awry? That's right, it's me, their 65 year old father that learned to code assembly back in 1976 on a Dec PDP. I tried to teach them something more than just the superficial shell visible to users, but they just weren't interested in learning what was inside.
Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)
81–90 of 201 posts
Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well when I was a kid, I had to program my own games on the C64. Walked uphill to school both ways, too.
Typing 4000 hex values printed in 6 point font from Byte magazine.
Mine were all printouts from the library from microfiche. I remember a stock trading simulator, a lemonade stand game and 3D sine wave program that was mostly in machine code.
Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)
#83Allow 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…
While I agree with your summary I think the OP brushes against another point I think is really important: a large number of users do not care to optimize their own experience for ~some~ reason, even when the lack of optimization has a significant opportunity cost. As software developers we pull our hair out trying to architect around this issue... and we usually fail hard. I could guess an infinity of potential cause…
I never change default settings like remapping keys on IDEs and things, of course I use plugins but I always learn the defaults because its way too much of a pain to re-customize every version between all my machines at work home and VMs, if I can even remember the settings.
Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)
#84They 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…
Thanks for the thorough reasoning!
“How many teens can milk a cow in the US?” is going to be my new favorite software interview question /joke
Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)
#85Allow 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…
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…
Probably any millennial will recognize this picture: https://www.flickr.com/photos/deanwhitney/3926151592/ -- it's Microsoft Word of the late 90s, with every single toolbar enabled. I'm sure all of us, at one point or another, will have discovered how to enable every toolbar and then do so for pure entertainment value.
In my experience (admittedly, that's a pretty narrow experience), kids are insatiably curious. They will do things and try things just to see what happens. And I suspect older people are more reluctant to try out options if they are uncertain about their effects. So, in general, I think you end up in a situation where children generally know how to use modern technology better than their parents, and that this is pretty timeless.
What happened to the millennials, though, is that about the time we started to hit that age of discovery, technology got a whole lot more featureful, and software developers did a very bad job of coaching users on how to use these features. Programmable VCRs gave you remotes with a dozen extra buttons with cryptic notes on them like "Counter/Remain", and people had no idea how to make the clock stop blinking "12:00". You had text editors with a hundred buttons labelled with seemingly esoteric iconography (quick, which button in the Microsoft Word image ran the spellchecker?). Adults didn't know how to use them, but kids knew a lot about them. And the conclusion that people mistakenly drew was that kids just fundamentally understood computers better than adults, when it was merely that we actually understood only the tools we used.
Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)
#86I have three boys, two are engineers and one is a gamer. Guess who fixes their computer when things go awry? That's right, it's me, their 65 year old father that learned to code assembly back in 1976 on a Dec PDP. I tried to teach them something more than just the superficial shell visible to users, but they just weren't interested in learning what was inside.
I am missing out on learning from my dad (who wants to teach me about the foreign exchange). Instead, I'm going down my own route. Otherwise, I'd have to sit on his bed and watch him explain things to me in an unstructured manner.
So, I recommend getting a proper desk to co-op on and a learning plan if you don't have those setup already.
Also, I had a neighbor with lots of knowledge in electrical and software engineering. He taught me some of my first learnings with c++ and python. Shame that he was drinking a lot.
Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)
#87I 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.
As someone who was messing around with computers back then, I'm jealous of kids who are getting serious about this stuff now.
I was lucky to have a computer at all to learn on. If I did anything remotely hacky, I would be warned about breaking an expensive and irreplaceable piece of equipment.
There was no help or documentation. No Internet to download the most basic of resources. If I didn't stumble upon HyperCard at 12 years old and figure out what it was through trial and error, I may never have got the spark of curiosity that put me on the path.
Some of the projects that exist now would have blown my little mind back then. People are reverse engineering my favourite old games and making them better! Insanity! And free 3D game engines!
Using a nicely configured IDE with autocomplete, format on save, linting, etc. allows the mind be so liberated from the tedious details and really focus on the actual problem. You can actually do interesting things in JavaScript. It's a world apart from when typing tags into Notepad was enough to impress your friends.
Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)
#88I hate that this is true. I've posted here before on the same topic[1] and although we know a lot of stuff about computers, we don't really grok them. Or at least, not a lot of my peers do, and I'm sorely missing some info myself. My friends just don't care. At all. About anything related to lower level computing. I explain things and they ignore me, even when I try to make it relatable (without being patronizing). I'm glad I'm not a teacher because I don't know how to get people interested in what I'm interested in.
Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)
#89Earlier 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…
Probably any millennial will recognize this picture: https://www.flickr.com/photos/deanwhitney/3926151592/ -- it's Microsoft Word of the late 90s, with every single toolbar enabled. I'm sure all of us, at one point or another, will have discovered how to enable every toolbar and then do so for pure entertainment value. In my experience (admittedly, that's a pretty narrow experience), kids are insatiably curious. They…
Word is not a text editor. Neither is Excel a list editor or a database. The inscrutable features of these tools have an actual purpose for the minority of users that need them.
Re: Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016)
#90And thanks to python... devs dont know anything about IT either... import ml, import scikit-learn, import pandas, why is my pc out ram when i try to load 4gb of text into a data frame?
[Angry sysadmin will show himself out now]