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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)

#171

Post by fmajid »

BubRoss wrote: post #112
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…

> 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. Over the course of the last 25 years, I've never heard that expectation anywhere. There was always a mentality that computers would keep getting easier to use, which is completely true. There was always the idea that kids would integ…

Books like "Growing Up Digital" by Don Tapscott (that introduced the term "Digital Natives" IIRC) were very influential.

Disclaimer: I own a copy from the office, but I never more than skimmed it. Like most business books, it's a couple pages' worth of insights diluted with anecdotes into a 300+ plus doorstop.

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

#172

Post by fmajid »

The whole computing experience is overwhelmingly complex compared to the Apple ][ I started with. My daughter just turned 8 and I am struggling with how to:

1) get her interested (she has been an iPad generation girl since 3)

2) ease her into it without the layers of complexity that I had the time to learn organically as they were introduced over the last 40 years.

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

#173

Post by Psyladine »

raxxorrax wrote: post #154
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…

The current Word UI isn't that much of an improvement to be honest and would look similar with such a low resolution. Some things are better, some things are worse, but I doesn't look like 20 years brought any deeper insights. The disadvantage kids today might have is that there aren't any buttons, because their systems are locked down to a large degree. You cannot do experiments this way so no knowledge can be gaine…

I knew someone who worked on the Word 2007 team. First day he was told to write a list of 10 features Word users needed. In his head he's thinking "word is fine as is?" but that's not what he was asked, so he and the rest put together their lists, and those lists were collated, and those features developed & executed, by and from college kids who had no practical business application experience.

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

#174

Post by arexxbifs »

Computers have evolved into commoditized entertainment appliances. Nobody who spends their time watching TV is expected to know how to fix their TV or even how it works: it just does, and everyone's happy.

It's not even a new thing. Granted, when computers were less common, it was of course more likely that someone who owned one also had an interest in it beyond the bare basics. Still, I had friends who didn't know anything more than how to plonk a disk into the drive of their Amiga 500 to start a game, or otherwise learned the bare minimum required to for example load a C64 game from tape. And let's not even talk about the Nintendo crowd. What a bunch of ignoramuses!

Those who are interested in how computers work will learn about it. The rest will treat it as the appliance it's intended to be and go about their lives, spending their time getting proficient in other areas and skills instead.

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

#175

Post by usrusr »

BubRoss wrote: post #112
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…

> 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. Over the course of the last 25 years, I've never heard that expectation anywhere. There was always a mentality that computers would keep getting easier to use, which is completely true. There was always the idea that kids would integ…

That expectation seemed so natural back then that nobody really talked about it much. It wasn't a radical prediction theory, like the paperless office (nope) or global warming (ouch), it was an everyday observation: young people, if they had access to computers, were universally way ahead of older people with access to computers. It was am absolute no-brainer to extrapolate from this that all young people would become super fluent at computing once they all had access. It would have been a radical prediction to expect that this would not happen, like it did (due to ever-increasing simplifications). But nobody made that prediction, at least not in a notable way.

People are generally very bad at predicting stagnation or even a reversal of trends. If you asked anyone to describe a 2020 communications device in early 2000, when cellphones had just recently evolved from bricks to the miniscule 8210, the prediction would have been a device the size of a keychain fob, not the pocket TVs we actually have.

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

#176

Post by nkrisc »

In my own experience, it has nothing to do with age or generation, it's simply down to one particular aspect of one's personality: curiosity. A lot of people just aren't that curious about the world around them. Ever notice that lots of tech and IT geeks are also very knowledgeable about completely unrelated fields? It's not a coincidence, I don't think. The type of people that are drawn to the tech field are often people that are simply curious about everything. Just so happens you can make a good living in tech, but not as easily in gardening or building RC planes.

I grew up in the late 90s and early 2000s and was very interested in computers, dabbling in C++ and Flash ActionScript and all sorts of things. It was just because I was curious about it. Most of my other friends just weren't. When they saw something and they didn't know how it worked, they didn't even think to care. I see this with people of all ages, young and old. My mother is like that, but my father is very curious.

As I've gotten older, I've gotten more curious about things and I just keep learning more and more. Some people just want to know how everything works and will take the time to figure it out.

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

#177

Post by trumbitta2 »

trumbitta2 wrote: post #148
watwut wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General experimentation does break tech quite often for adults. If they mess with settings, they are unable to later fix them. For example, they end up without internet working and have absolutely no way to figure out that proxy was set to something random. Or even something as simple as having all the fonts too small/too big and being unable to fix them back. Accidentally hiding toolbar you need. There are many ways…

That's not breaking it. If you can reinstall the OS, and it works afterwards, it's not broken.

Yeah, downvote at will. But those are the exact words I always tell to my 73yrs old mother, and they are never failed me nor her.

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

#178

Post by bashwizard »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #106
jimmux wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Completely agree. Kids these days ... :) I had my own Windows 95 PC (120 MHz Packard Bell) that I saved up lawn money for (my dad agreed to pay 50% for my first computer). I wanted to learn programming, but found the C and C++ books my parents bought me to be really dense. So I taught myself QBasic (and TI Basic on my TI-83). If I had had anything like the youtube videos, online tutorials, blogs, Stack Overflow, etc.…

I remember my dad being fed up with me asking "hey dad, can I play Woffenstone?" (yes, I pronounced it like that since I was a 11 year old kid from sweden back then) so he gave me the DOS 5.0 manual and said "here you go kiddo, you can play as much as you want when you've learned how to start the game by yourself).

That's where it all started for me and I was always on the computer whenever I could until my dad got fed up with me installing games and uninstalling his stuff so he password locked it in the BIOS.

So I had to figure out how to bypass the BIOS password which I eventually did by just guessing the password. Now I could play games and mess around on the computer whenever he wasn't at home but I had to hide all my games so that he didn't realize that I was using the computer whenever he wasn't at home. Eventually he did realize that so he changed the password and uninstalled all my games so once again I had to guess the password and this time I put my own BIOS password on it and all hell broke loose.

And that's where the hacker mentality started and sooner than later my dad bought a new computer and gave the old one to me.

Good times.

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

#179

Post by iudqnolq »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #118
jcranmer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed, I am a dev that codes Ruby on Rails and Python apps with PostgreSQL (and MySQL a while ago). I was reviewing a book and just used a Libreoffice spreadsheet for vocab terms. One column for the word, one column for the description. Wrote a macro and made a button on the spreadsheet to sort the words for me. A lot easier than making a CRUD interface ontop of a Base database. If I want to add a third column, cate…

> A lot easier than making a CRUD interface ontop of a Base database.

Making an interface for a few columns of a few hundred rows sounds like the classic NCIS hacker line "let me quickly code a GUI in Visual Basic to run that IP address check".

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

#180

Post by kyuudou »

red2awn wrote: post #103
na85 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I thought they use butterflies.

I actually got these somewhat obscure references immediately: https://xkcd.com/378/

still very funny

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