Strong disagree here.

>What it actually means is that these generations operate at higher levels of abstraction. That may be true, but I don't think it's necessarily a good thing. In the analogy of a car driver, if you don't know how the car works aside from driving it, then you are worse off in many respects. If it behaves oddly, you have no idea what is wrong, no idea how to fix it, and (in my experience) are a lot more likely to pay significantly more to do so.

For many today, computers are a complete mystery - indeed I'd hazard that proporptionally far more people know nothing concrete about how computers work than did when I was a kid. They have become magical devices that seem beyond comprehension for many, and I think that's to the detriment of everyone.

>And anyway, in the "old days" you spent at least as much time looking after your system as actually using it

Also not true. Didn't spend -any- time looking after my ZX Spectrum. Just turned it on and either started writing software straight away, or loaded a game up. Maintenance was not a thing.

>But kids these days have too many important things to do

That has certainly not been my experience as a parent. They have lots of things to do, but I don't think much of it is important. It's just attention-grabbing.

Nowadays? Not so much."

Yeah, I call BS on that. This bubble us techie live in it paints this sort of boring. Try go on the country side or in another industry and suddenly you are looked upon as some sort of god - it's almost cringy they way they treat you when you spend 5 minutes fixing something that half the village tried to fix it in past year and then they gave up.

I don't think it's this, and I don't think programming is so hard (it's the business logic that is hard when you have to specify it exactingly, to reference the thread.) I think that the manufacturers of the various computers we use make it unbelievably difficult and scary to touch anything, and cast quite a bit of suspicion on you for even wanting to change anything.

> 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.

I suspect it is the same progression as any other new technology that undergoes mainstreaming. Take automobiles for example. In the early days if you owned a car you either made yourself something of an expert (and if you were an early buyer you were probably kind of an enthusiast already) or you hired one. Today outside of enthusiast circles they are just an appliance: you get in, turn it on, and go do whatever it is you need to do.

It doesn't need to be universal. The need for personal computers wasn't universal when Steve Jobs was running around Silicon Valley selling the Apple I in the 70s. They didn't even understand email in the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg.

Look at us now.

> The vast majority of the general population is nowhere near this level of technical proficiency.

Right. Just like all technology, that's our responsibility as "the nerds." We take something that's complex and distill it down into something that's easily digested by people with limited or no technical aptitude.

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I find it deeply alarming that the supposed technical elite that wander this site are so averse to something that can liberate and help so many people, worldwide. Even if they have the capacity to understand it, it's clear that many here haven't done their homework and are relying on second or third-hand knowledge (or at best, outdated information) to form their opinions.

Despite their hubris and narcissism, they're no better than "the general population" on understanding this.

As a genx'r Ill tell you this is not true.

The desperate need to have assess in seats + money brought a lot of folks to software who arent INTO it. The nerds of ye olden days were different, you were into computers cause you were a geek.

GenZ still has geeks (probably fewer of them, computer labs, and computing teachers went away like shop class for this generation). They are just as good as the geeks of previous eras. In fact I would say that the gen z geeks are better off for their age.

THe mark the author did miss is that we have decades of tooling. The in it for the money group just adds packages till things work, and that set has been around since 2000 (gen x). Its just that in 2000 they were writing HTML and today they are downloading leftpad (and its decendents). Its only worse because we supercharged their productivity (destructivity).

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 integrate computers into their lives from the start, which is also true.

I never heard anyone say that kids born in the late 90s would somehow in general understand the inner working of computers.

The average day-to-day work is menial, for example investigating a production issue. That isn't something that people get into as a hobby, that's work in a very unromantic sense. Maybe having good systems background can help in those situations, but it's a little more subtle

I do think though that it works the other way: people who actually care about computers don't care if tech is no longer a money field, they just want to work on computer stuff. And maybe earlier it wasn't as much of a money field. But that doesn't imply that the enthusiasts are better at fulfilling work responsibilities. A lot of work stuff is business specific and not very dependent on systems background

So yeah, I don't think the part about over-hiring is necessarily wrong, but this sort of "I'm better than you" attitude isn't very becoming. Maybe you should give this [0] a read, just to see a different perspective

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante

I think this is unnecessarily infantilizing. There are a great many very complex things in the modern world, and people must employ abstractions for most of it.

I think with the rise of multi form factor computing, there is more basic literacy about the nature of computers these days. People don’t think that a phone god makes their phone work and a laptop god lets them work on their document.

Until years later we have fewer people interested in learning how computers work, because the only devices they ever owned were locked down walled gardens.

Maybe these people don't even know what they're missing, because they've never even seen it?

Previous generations? How many generations back do you imagine widespread computer use to go?

Jerry Pournelle was considered cutting edge for using a word processor to write as early as 1977. Adobe Illustrator is from 1987 and Photoshop is from 1990.

There haven't been a whole lot of generations in the 41 years since the Apple II was released (about 2 generations, given 20 years per generation).

I can tell you that kids from my generation (baby boomers) had almost no computer literacy. Most of us never even touched a computer until adulthood (if then).

You think that 10 and 20 year olds growing up with computers and even smartphones available for all of their life, know less of computers than people in the past?

Even a 7 year old that plays games can almost run circles around a 1980s propellerhead computer programmer in using a GUI. Compared to regular people (e.g. office workers) from 40 years ago that just used DOS and some word processor or POS or accounting program, there's just no comparison.

> If anybody is a digital native, it is me. I did not just grow up with computers, I grew up alongside them.

Yes, this. I grew up and grew with technology as a member of the Oregon Trail Generation. Of course, kids these days will learn to operate with the greatest and latest abstractions and will continue to awesome things. The folly is calling the whole generation "digital natives." Just because you are exposed to (consumption based) technology, it does not mean you understand it at some foundational level. It is similar with cars - I've driven cars all my life, but working on them? I'm terrible at it.

I feel like tech companies are constricting their future talent pools by doing this. But maybe they want to kill their future competition too. You already get university students now who don't know what files and folders are, which they need before moving into the basics of navigating a command line or source tree.

Usable and accessible computers are great. But locking them down to the point of eliminating user agency and learning seems really shortsighted.

Not in the world I inhabit. Tons of people have serious trouble doing things with computers.

I think the flat stuff is ridiculous.

But that's how every generation since computers existed has mostly viewed them; tinkerers have been a small minority, even if young tinkerers-of-computers were an iconic image associated with the first generation in which that was a possible thing. That wasn't because they were common, but because it amazed (mostly older) people that they existed at all.

I hate this rhetoric that old people are stupid and are intrinsically incapable of understanding modern technology.

Computers and cell phones didn't pop into existence overnight. The first home computers entered the market in the late 70's and became commonplace in the 80's. If your grandma is in her 80's now, she was in her 40's back then.

None of us had to learn these things overnight and tech was much simpler back then. All she had to do was keep up with what was happening in society. If anything, all this is more complicated for kids as they weren't eased into it like us older folks were.

Same goes for cellphones. They got common in the 90's and it took decades for them to get to the point that they are basically supercomputers you can put in your pocket.

This is nothing like asking your grandma to start using a new language she doesn't understand. This is more like your grandma stubbornly refusing to learn the meaning of new words introduced into the English language since the 80s. This is about being wilfully disconnected from society. This is not about an inability to learn but an unwillingness.

This is not an age thing, to get to the point where switching cellphone OSes is an impossible task you had to have checked out decades ago. It has nothing to do with age and everything with apathy and laziness.

Have you ever had to do tech support for non-technical users? People will make poor tech choices and fault the manufacturer for it.