Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.mysunland.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 201 posts

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

#91

Post by jcranmer »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #89
jcranmer wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are lots of people who use Excel spreadsheets as databases. Just as there are lots of people who use Word for nothing more than editing (sometimes rich) text.

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

#93

Post by na85 »

benibela wrote: post #34
joezydeco wrote: post #9

The motivation is different, that’s all. When we were kids we needed to learn to hack DOS and Windows because our games wouldn’t run without them. Hard drive crashes, SCANDISK, reinstalls, fucked up drivers... whatever it took. My kids can’t fix Win10 but now they know their way around web filters and how to hack Screen Time to bypass the shutoff. They’re trading pirated movies in gDrive and doing all kids of other s…

Literally hacking. Lots of shareware games wanted a registration code, but after changing the right offsets in the hex editor you could play them without registration code... People have no clue about computers, till they can manually convert between assembly and hex code

Actually, real programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand.

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

#94

Post by lopmotr »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #89
jcranmer wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tell that to LibreOffice Writer which calls its files "text documents". The .ODT extension stands for "OpenDocument Text". Just because it's not plain text, doesn't mean it's not text.

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

#95

Post by hinkley »

PeterisP wrote: post #36
Kluny wrote: post #30

"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." So teenagers do what teenagers have always done? I agree with the others - kids who need to figure stuff out will find a way.

Sure, kids who need to figure stuff out will find a way, but the issue is that since the need for kids to figure stuff out has largely disappeared, the technical proficiency motivated by this has also disappeared. If some time ago we could implicitly assume all kinds of things that everyone "technical-minded" would know because they inevitably would have needed it as a kid, we now need to teach the very basics of how…

Do we need more operating system maintainers or library writers if we have more developers? I propose that the number of low level people we need is logarithmic to the number of devs.

Uncle Bob proposed that the number of devs had been doubling every five years for the last couple decades. That means five times as many people are available to fill these critical spots.

If he’s right and I’m right, then if every 5-year generation of devs has 60% of the ratio of people interested in low level stuff as the one before, then we will have plenty of people to keep the wheels on.

Which if my math is right is 5% of the rate of gearheads we had in the dotcom boom.

Which honestly was not that high even then. I was using a lot more theoretical knowledge of hardware than nearly all of my coworkers would cop to.

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

#96

Post by baldfat »

Early Generation X Computer users will be the greatest generation of computer users because:

1) We had an easy time with simple CPU like the Z80 or Assembly for the C64. You could have the whole chip in your head.

2) Graphical Interfaces hides the nuts and bolts and we didn't have them.

3) We had to hack to do things because usually that was the only way to do something you wanted to do. We had to tweak and modify files and ram just so a game would launch. It was magical at the time.

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

#97

Post by jacobsenscott »

Breaking news: Teens don't have a clue about *! Also IT using a computer. IT hacking, etc. IT is a department in the basement of megacorp. I've been programing for 25 years and I don't have a clue about IT. I understand it involves getting Microsoft certifications.

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

#98

Post by awad »

rootsudo wrote: post #31

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…

This encapsulates my coming of age in computing perfectly, to an eerie level of specificity. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

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

#99

Post by danaris »

jcranmer wrote: post #85
tapland wrote: 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…

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…

> 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.

> 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.

I don't think your premise supports your conclusion.

In fact, what I think it supports is more of what I have observed: that millennials and on down (at least that subset of us who have chosen to go this route) recognize that experimentation is the way to learn about computers and similar things.

What I have observed about older generations (at least that subset that is technology-averse) is that for most of them, the reason they don't know how to do more with the computer is that they're scared of it—mostly, they're scared they'll break it.

You and I know a) that most general experimentation won't break it, b) how to actually break it, and c) how to avoid doing that, so we can poke around at the parts we don't understand enough to learn how to do pretty much everything we need to know.

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

#100

Post by tomc1985 »

porknubbins wrote: post #83
tmpz22 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed. Younger me used to customize everything to taste. Custom toolbars, custom keybindings for videogames, custom command prompt, custom everything.

Current me doesn't care so much that I ran my phone with the default ringtone and wallpaper for years.

After years of setting up everything to perfect only have it wiped out by disk failures, OS reinstalls, tinkering, hacking, and bad luck (to say nothing of how many environments a computer professional has to work with and re-customize), I just stopped caring. I absolutely hate having to customize shit now; much easier to learn to roll with the defaults.

Younger me would be so ashamed of me now

Post reply on HN