We are the bridge generation.
We know and saw a world without the internet and we experienced it when it first came to be.
We saw the first mass produced computers and computer devices which broke often, didn’t work the way we wanted them to, they weren’t fast and they didn’t have much memory in any way. We were the first generation to see all this. Our parents were too old and busy to figure it out but we were young enough to be curious about it all. We also kept wanting to have the newest fastest hardware and software so we had no choice but to either buy, beg or steal these things to get them. We learned to swap parts, add parts, remove parts, install an OS, uninstall the OS, run backups, store data and learn it all on our own because there was no easy internet social media community to help you. Software was constantly changing and we had to keep up by either buying expensive titles or we learned about Linux and open source software or we became digital pirates or both.
Now the digital landscape has changed. Younger generations prefer handheld devices so to them everything is solid state … they never can imagine changing the RAM, HDD, SSD, CPU, GPU or the PSU or even bothering to learn what those things are. Because everything is built in and no one (or very few) people bother with fixing or tinkering with anything. There are fewer people who learn about software and about how or where to find it, install it, configure it and run it. To new generations who only know the digital world through locked devices, there was less incentive to learn or even have access to know how these things worked.
We are the bridge generation. We got to see the world without the internet and the world with one. No one before us got to see what we saw, no one after us will experience what we went through. Our civilization dramatically changed during our lifetime and we got a front row seat.
The PSU is the only thing you can change easily. I love that everything is USB-C and that I can plug in everything, everywhere.
But I’m kind of happy everyone uses handhelds, I got really tired fixing everything for my entire family and friends.
“My printer seems to be defectiv…”
Entschuldige, ich kann kein Englisch. Muss weg, keine Zeit. Bye!
I work in Tech and this is my mantra: printers are Of the Devil.
My buddy worked tech support for a fairly large facility. They got tired of getting calls for a busted printer, only to walk all the way across the facility to discover it was out of paper. It got to the point that if someone called about a printer, they would wait an hour before responding. If nobody else called within that hour, they assumed the issue was resolved on its own.
I’m sure they got to us because they were too evil for hell and the devil itself got tired of them.
In healthcare IT there’s often a person who specializes in just printers. My friend makes a lot of money doing that.
It’s like all the old geezers who cum into carbeurators but like, shouldn’t they be happy that fuel-injection is a million times better and more reliable? I work on my own car and I can handle that shit in my driveway easy but these people seem to want more work to do. Yes, Fred, carbs make more sense for dirtbikes but oh my god otherwise shut up.
As for printers yea what the fuck. They all work differently even within the same company when all they need to do is take the exact same control module, maybe two versions of it, and slap it onto different bodies. But, instead, it’s just a giant fucking mess.
The PSU might be easy in practice but all those cords are daunting to the novice. Much easier to swap the RAM or even to take out and put in a new GPU.
I love that everything is USB-C
Well, maybe things are easier now. My 12 year old PC build has a modular PSU with a bunch of different cords.
The comp for an older generation is cars. Cars saw similar growth and adoption in the 50s-80s. And they had similar growing pains, reliability and maintenance issues were common place. So being able to perform maintenance and having an understanding of how they work was far more wide spread than just hobbyist and professionals.
As cars advanced the need to perform field maintenance and ad hoc repairs became less required so future generations (on average) became less knowledgeable and skilled at various car repair (and modification) activities, because cars just work now so there’s really no need to worry about learning how to fix minor issues, because they’re just not a common problem.
Case in point: I drive an EV and I don’t think there’s a damn thing I personally can do to fix it other than maybe change a tire. It doesn’t even have a spare and I wouldn’t even know how anyway.
My god, I’m the iPad kid of cars.
It’s a deliberate choice by companies because they sell you the thing, and the service to fix the thing.
There’s a lot you can still do. All the suspension, battery cooler pump, brakes, wheel bearings, a ton of things to do with the electrical system and lights, fuses and relays, window and lock motors, blinker arms and switches, fluid changes, hvac and ac components, the traction motors themselves…generally the only thing hard for a shade tree mechanic is the battery itself. They’re really heavy and hard to remove.
Now some components are going to be hard to get a hold of because there isn’t any third party companies making replacements, but eventually as need arises, they’ll get made. Until then there’s places like pick n pull where you can go take used parts off used vehicles or buy used and tested components from ebay if the manufacturer won’t sell you something. I bought a new oem hybrid battery just a couple years ago from a Toyota dealership and installed it myself.
You also can’t wrench on a car anymore in the way you used to. It’s all computerized and you need special software to access and configure parts.
I can’t replace my airbags without special pairing software that cost tens of thousands of dollars. It’s unlikely that I’ll learn by performing the repair because the tools are no longer available.
Eh…that’s still pretty doable. Many things actually got easier for auto work. A $12 bluetooth obdII dongle and a $4 piece of software on your phone will give you most all the trouble codes you need to diagnose problems, and that’s it it doesn’t outright tell you the issue. Almost no car parts are parts paired and thanks to the internet there’s guides that are way better than a Haines manual to show you how to fix things, as well as a dozen different places to order parts from.
In the past 15 years the only time I’ve used a mechanic was to replace a clutch.
Here I am at 41 and know how to screw with everything. I stayed inquisitive and stayed a tight ass. I think I’ve paid for a professional to do something twice in the past 20 years. I didn’t want to take on the task of replacing a clutch on a front wheel drive suv on the ground in my driveway.
The difference is that you don’t need to be car savvy not to get into an accident. But you do need to be tech savvy not to be at risk of cyberthreats.
Drivers truly don’t need to know how a car works, software is not like that.
Also, you can get by without a car, whereas most people need at least an email address.
Edit: I don’t understand the downvotes. Do people think that you need to know about how engines work to drive a car. Or do people don’t think you need to understand file structure to manage excel files?
My 13 y o niece had no idea how to uninstall a program on a PC. I was a little stunned.
My government teacher in 12th grade got hit with an RIAA suit for seeding thousands of hours of music on Kazaa. When she found out that it was “illegal pirating” she deleted the icon off the desktop and thought she was done.
She never had to deal with a 4GB hard drive running out of space :-/
Defragmenting often to free up some precious megabytes. I felt like the king of the world upgrading from 4 to 20 GB.
Now I treat a few gigabytes the way I used to treat a few megabytes (like they’re nothing)
Great write up
Very eloquently put.
It’s not like your bridge generation is the only one that know how to use a computer. To me it seems that there are a few ‘experts’ in each generation and the others don’t bother learning it. This is pretty normal and called specialization, the thing that civilization allows us to do.
I grew up with computers, there was no strict need to change OSes or even hardware (of you got prebuilts). Even so, it’s amazing what unrestricted Internet access and an interest in videogames can lead to. And I know a lot of others who either have at least the basic skills, or are studying Computer science together with me.
Perhaps there are trends in each generation, but acting like it’s just one generation that can do computer things is just wrong.
Poverty is also a driving force. I’ve never had a lot of money so I had to be creative in order to do a lot of things. I know how to fix repair and even build my own house. I know how to fix and maintain most things with all my vehicles. I know how to build fix and maintain my own computer systems because I could never afford expensive devices or to pay anyone to fix things for me.
Because I couldn’t afford much, I’ve instead had to spend most of my time doing things myself.
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That’s my biggest gripe to be honest with modern OSs. My files in my folders are organized like I organize my house. I live in and around that. I hate the idea of a “Downloads” and other stuff with “automatically in the cloud backup for this app”. Give me a file to save you stupid app.
Yeah ya stupid app!
tell em!
Android has taken away a lot of the manual usage shit when it comes to doing what you want of it on behalf of security protections. Well fuck you, if I want a program to have certain access to things I should be allowed to do it, whether you like it or not. My N20U still can’t have a full and proper root.
I don’t mind that they simplify it. It makes it easier for more users. Its the fact that even advanced users can’t access it. Not a problem with a perfect app on a perfect operating system with perfect interoperability. None of those exist.
A colleague was trying to share a 365 file with me last week. I didn’t have permission to open it. I was begging them to just save a “physical” copy to disk and email it to me. I hate the cloud.
Genuinely, Microsoft onedrive/365 share sucks ass. It just does. I got 365 Family since my family doesn’t know how to use anything else besides office apps so I just got the subscription that also gives you onedrive. So, I’ve been using that cloud storage if it’s available and god dammit, why is it so hard to share, find and search files in there.
Kids? Try being a manager trying to hire for entry level data work.
I got maybe one out of five people who even knew how to do basic things like opening windows explorer and navigating through folders. And from that slim margin, finding someone who actually knows how to use software like excel or outlook or word, it makes me want to reword the listing to say that we need people with 5 five years experience. For entry level.
I have become that which we hate. I am demanding experience for entry level work, simply because the entry-level work pool has zero knowledge how things work. You have spent all your time browsing and none of your time challenging yourselves to install software yourself, to copy and move files, or tried even opening your “settings” panel to adjust things. When I started working a lifetime ago, I took some free lessons in learning how to navigate excel and other popular programs. Using that TINY bit of training, I went on to make formulas and automated several of the systems at my first job. I went from counting screws in the warehouse to an eventual VP position.
You can get much, much further ahead of the curve if you actually try to learn a little more about the things you use every day, and you will grow your opportunities more than you can imagine.
“Get off my lawn kids. And god forbid we train people.”
The common man won’t go out of their way to learn a software they don’t even know they will use. Why is it somehow worst for young people?
The personal computer as we grew up with is long gone, but somehow, companies and hiring managers expect everyone to be like it is still the case.
And let’s be real, the vast majority of people don’t know how to use excel even if they work with it every day. For them, it’s a database with a UI and a chart module.
So yeah, ask for 5 years experience for an entry level data entry position, that’ll fix it for you.
For them, it’s a database with a UI and a chart module.
As someone in the generation mentioned in the OP meme I can confirm, most people in my generation don’t know how to use Excel either, didn’t know it when we were younger and that is mostly because it is largely used in professional settings for a narrow range of jobs for its actual purpose and everyone else in a slightly wider range of jobs would be better off using a web app with an actual database.
My last job still had an access app for generating task lists
I’ve met software developers who didn’t know how to use Excel properly (in the sense of not even knowing they could use formulas).
I think that’s very much for the reason you state: they “won’t go out of their way to learn a software they don’t even know they will use”.
It’s not just a “common man” thing, it’s an everybody thing - there’s just too much stuff and not enough time to learn it all, so even software developers might never find themselves in a situation were they have to understand Excel enough to know such simple things as how to use functions in the cells, how to use references to other cells or how to make some references be relative to a cell’s position and other absolute.
Mind you, they’ll probably learn it way faster than “common” people simply because so much of its advanced usage follows “programmer logic”, but that still requires them to be forced to actually use it long enough and often enough that they put the effort into learning it.
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I am demanding experience for entry level work, simply because the entry-level work pool has zero knowledge how things work.
And they don’t need to, that’s not what entry level means.
If a skill isn’t needed in day to day life anymore and is needed for the job you’re putting out, it’s no longer a common knowledge skill.
When the talent pool changes, so should expectations.
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Kids aren’t well organized and file structures take time and practice to understand. No idea why anyone would assume a 10 year old who has been using a computer for maybe two or three years would be as experienced as a 30 year old who’d been doing the work for over 20.
Also, no shortage of Millennials who don’t know how computers work. I deal with them every day.
iOS is literally designed for toddlers to be able to use it. “iPad kids” aren’t especially gifted, “iPad adults” are especially stupid.
But on the bright side, those same groups think they “know computers” because they can press large, brightly colored buttons - so they walk around with unearned confidence in their abilities and impatience/lack of appreciation for the people that actually have to fix things.
It’s also why a large swatch of these same fucking idiot, drains on humanity loudly challenge the validity of voting tech infrastructure without any factual basis to their argument - they just “feel” like they get it.
My boss very confidently proclaimed that all serious IT professionals use a Mac. Said Linux “is for programmers and nerds”
So, programmers != IT professionals, huh…
IT professionals are more the folks that install and maintain large scale computer systems and networks, like a company’s IT department or MSP. Programming is closer to engineering. Software engineering.
“IT professional” does typically lean more towards that yes, but it also encompasses software developers.
If they work professionally in IT, then they’re by definition “IT Professionals”.
Absolutelly, the definition of “IT Professional” starts at lower (or maybe the correct term would be “more generic, maintenance-oriented and less specialized”) levels of domain expertise than “Software Developer” and most people out there’s contact with an “IT Professional” won’t include a software developer (even in the average business, which is unlikely to directly use Programmers but will almost certainly use the services of System Administrators and Network Engineers), but saying they’re not IT Professionals would be a bit like saying that the people who design cars aren’t Auto Industry Professionals, only Car Mechanics are.
Mind you, I don’t disagree that Programming is closer to Engineering: my point is that Engineering IT Systems is still a profession in IT, just like car design (in the technical sense) is both an Engineering practice and a profession in the Auto Industry.
I work in devops…
Linux is for programmers and nerds
…and your ideal system administrator is neither of those?
I’m in IT, from my experience, most people who use Macs either use it for media, because it is easy to use for the common man, or it is the most expensive option.
Also most people who use Macs need help from their Linux using coworkers to get anything moderately difficult done on their systems.
I’ve been in IT for over 20 years the most of the people who use Macs do so because there’s supported business software written for it while still being Unix under the hood.
I too been in IT for over 20 years and most people I’ve seen using Macs were Graphics Designers and Marketing types.
I’ve seen but a handfull of IT Professionals using them and I’ve seen significantly more IT Professionals using Linux for work than Macs.
My experience covers a couple of countries and various industries since I’ve worked as a contractor (a kind of Freelancer) for most of the time so moved around a lot more than people working as permanent employees would.
Maybe one or two people I’ve seen using Macs cared about it being Unix under the hood and I think all of those were the above mentioned IT Professionals who used Macs.
People doing Graphics Design and other such digital media work (which is how Marketing types commonly ended up using it) really loved them because they were easy to use, had proper color calibration together with really great quality high resolution screens (the first properly supported 4K computer screens were Mac), plus the whole Adobe Suite as well as pretty much all other top professional design and media work software has full native Mac versions. These people were, however, not computer experts in the IT Professional sense of the word (even the Graphics Designers working on Tech Startups were tech users, not tech experts) and did not at all value the “Unix under the hood” characteristic of Macs.
Mine was mainly at startups that did big data and open source software, and the only folks in the org who used Windows were generally the accountants.
Yeah, during my period in Tech Startups I did see a bit more of usage of Macs than in other places (such as Finance, Software Products, Software Consultancy and even Publishing), but always felt it was driven by the whole halo of “fashionability” around Apple Products, which isn’t really a rational reason.
In my experience Mac use is also more likely in people doing Frontend work than Server-side work, maybe because the latter is not at all about visuals and most server-side work targets Linux so it’s way simpler to just have Linux in your workstation.
Then again I’ve been using Linux since the 90s so maybe I’m biased ;)
A big study by IBM showed that Mac users are more productive and cost less to support than Windows. A company won’t buy things for their foot soldiers that is “fasionable” like they will for the execs. But they’ll definitely do it if it means they need to hire fewer IT support staff.
In my experience the backend guys are more likely to use Linux compared to other folks, but a lot of them still used a Mac because they didn’t need to do a bunch of work to get Zoom or Teams working.
As an IT professional, Macs are used by people that couldn’t figure out Windows. Linux is for people that understand enough about Windows to live in constant fear of the next newsworthy workday.
Macs are for people who want a high performance laptop with great battery life and build quality. Hardware and driver issues are extremely rare. An out of the box Unix environment and great desktop applications for everything round it out. Macs are for people who want a to get actual work done and not lose time babysitting or tinkering with their computer.
Windows usability has become worse since 7 and it’s now filled with crap and ads. The different settings applications are an embarrassment and insult to users.
couldn’t figure out windows
Decided their time is too valuable to spend it on dealing with Windows‘ bullshit.
did apple pay you to write this
Ha! I totally agree! But I also can’t resist defending Mac a little bit.
Maybe I’m just weird, but I grew up on Commodore, then DOS + Windows, then Windows (when it became all-in-one and not just a GUI shell over DOS). I got into Linux desktops and servers in college and will only ever do a server on Linux, of course. Throughout all of this, both software consumption and development have been constants for me.
Right now, I greatly prefer MacBooks for productivity, and I have been keeping a Windows PC going for flight simming, though I’m tempted to switch that to Linux ever since MS declared it too old to run Windows even though it’s still perfectly capable of doing everything I care about–MS just insists on “trusted platform” hardware now.
Anyways, the point I’m going for is that Mac is also for nerds, especially ones who understand Windows and Linux and just enjoy a nice workstation that combines the best of both worlds. Windows is trying to catch up with WSL, but it’s still a bolt-on, whereas Mac is BSD under the hood. I’ve been hearing about nice Linux laptop options and hope it will get to an equally nice experience, but, for now, Mac, for me, is like a new car. Sure, I used to do my own maintenance and some repairs on my old cars, but now I have a job and can pay for something that usually just works, that allows me plenty of ways to tinker, and that I can pay to have fixed when I don’t want to spend my time grinding on something unfulfilling.
IMHO,
Windows has completelly stopped its trend of becoming less shit over time and has actually started going backwards.
Modern Macs (having used both, I would say they aren’t really direct descendants of the original Macs but rather they’re major redesigns) already started at a point when usuability could be done better, kept improving for longer and, even though they stopped improving in terms of usability, unlike Windows they haven’t gone back.
Linux is the only one that still keeps on improving (though usuability-wise it started ever further back than Windows), though slower than the others and often in a two-steps-forward-and-one-back fashion, so it’s about to go past Windows (one might stay that it has already done so in usability and is only the large number of Windows-only applications that keeps Windows ahead) and hopefully will eventually pass Macs too.
Whilst what I expect for Linux has a big dollop of hopefulness, for the rest I think it’s pretty obvious that Windows has never surpassed Macs in terms of usability and will never do.
the point I’m going for is that Mac is also for nerds,
Don’t you find them extremely restrictive and hard to repair? I know they want the walled garden, and absolutely don’t want anyone opening up a Mac/iphone and changing hardware other than a Apple tech. That removes all the fun from tinkering with and customizing your stuff.
Fair point! I don’t know what I’ll do whenever I eventually have to replace mine. I was lucky (I guess) to get the last model that had a removable drive and the keyboard I ended up loving. I upgraded my storage to 2 gigs and felt that covered everything I cared to change on this one.
But I’ll have to seriously reconsider on future models, as I am enticed by the newer Apple chips but have certainly heard the uproar about the relatively small amount of ram offered. And now that we’re on the subject, I’m not thrilled about the idea of Apple dropping OS support (i.e., security updates) for older models. I want to upgrade when I’m ready for an overhaul in performance, not just because they want to sell more.
I guess I need to be more specific about “nerd.” I find it great for software nerdiness, but I have to admit the only physical use case nowadays is plebian: “just take my money and make it work.”
As an IT professional that uses a Mac and runs multiple Linux boxes, Windows is for people who don’t know about computers. MacOS and Linux are for people who do. Some Windows people should be the other two, but live on Windows because they’ve learned enough to deal with it.
all serious IT professionals
programmers and nerds
TIL, not the same group.
If you laugh, even once, they throw you out of the serious IT group.
Which group do programmer socks put me in?
I say… where is your top hat, Sir! This is not stone story of a layabouts IT group! Have you no decency, Sir!
people like your boss are awesome. managing their macs pays so stupid well, it feeds my linux home sever upgrade habit.
Looks like a win win situation.
He’s not wrong. There is a lot more money in selling hype and style, than functionality and substance. Pro’s need pay.
So what do they make of people like me who who use Linux on a Mac, with e.g. Colima or Rancher desktop - doing cloud/kubernetes/python development? I moved to a Mac a couple of years ago after 20 years of using Linux as my daily driver because frankly Bluetooth audio on Linux sucks and because I was tired of getting endless different video conference / screensharing solutions working at short notice for interviewing.
Dunning-Kruger
Yes. 100%
”iPad adults” are especially stupid.
Does this mean a specific type of adult, or adults who use iPads? Cause…I consider myself pretty technically gifted, I’m a software developer, previously worked IT…and I love my iPad (for the things it’s good for).
Not OP but I suspect they mean adults that struggle with normal technology but thrive on ipads (can remember the button they use to open sodoku)
Nothing at all wrong with making technology easy to use for the masses, but this can create problems.
Even the “problems” are only really a problem for those who value understanding how Tech works and hence see a lack of it as a problem (welcome to Lemmy!).
I’m not so sure that, in the greater scheme of things, not understanding the innards of Tech is a “problem” anymore than not knowing how to fix your own car is a “problem”.
The only way I can see that it might be a problem in a more general sense of the word is if that’s helping enabling enshittification because people don’t understand Tech enough to be able to avoid or more away from enshittified options.
I like the size and heft of the ipad - I never sit at a desk with a computer anymore outside of work, and feel like I thoroughly earned the right to that. But as a productivity device it feels like a straitjacket.
Love my iPad for making art with Procreate, reading, playing media, as a universal remote for home automation, games, showing photos to friends, looking up stuff of the internet, reading, for DJing.
There are no messengers, calendars, or communication apps configured on it. So there are no notifications.
I sometimes try it for productivity, but run into limitations quickly. It’s okay for editing a document for a bit, but managing files is already torture.
Yes. We are.
We are young with to have learned tech at an early age, but old enough that the tech wasn’t user friendly when we were kids, so we needed to understand it better than people do in the smartphone generation.
Installing a new game on my PC in high school was a multi-hour, sometimes multi-day ordeal.
Plugging in a secondary hard drive involved putting jumpers on pins to keep the system from trying to boot off it.
Assigning ports on peripherals involved understanding how to count in binary so you could assign addresses on dip switches.
Installing a printer involved unholy alliances with formless beings.
Every 2-3 years, I still wake up wearing black robes in a strange room in Romania, blood on my hands and a lingering scent of cordite in the air. I’m fairly certain that’s related to the Canon BJC driver issues I had upgrading my AST to Windows 95.
Random BSOD from changing… absolutely fucking nothing, then spending 2 days trying to recover, before saying fuck it and reinstalling windows, so you can play WC1 or D1…good old days.
Also printers can suck it. 20 years ago maintaining a fucking print server was bullshit… I’d rather deal with BES for another 100 years.
I’d rather deal with BES for another 100 years.
Cool it, Mario… oh, the menus -shivers-
Lol I might have to take that back…BES was a pile of epic smoldering shit…even the engineers would tell me it was shit. I’m pretty sure I reinstalled that damn thing a thousand times. It was like winning the lottery when the CEO finally wanted and iPhone and then forced the reset of the company to android or iPhone… myself and my junior admin had beers in the office when we got the last user off it and got to shut it down on a Friday. Best day ever.
Installing a printer is still often a deal with the devil
Yeah. I’ve had to return printers that wouldn’t let me install drivers without also agreeing to install spyware.
More likely from soundcard settings than printer settings. If you’re channelling, its due to wrong number of channels selected.
That’s the weird thing. I used Soundblaster cards, and those blackouts were usually preceded by nightmares of an anthropomorphic goat. It was handy because you could make arrangements to feed the dog and stuff.
I had a boot floppy I needed to use when I wanted to play Sim City 2000 because my PCs usual configuration didn’t have enough free conventional memory.
I had another one for Zone66 because its memory management was incompatible with EMM386.
I’m fairly certain that’s related to the Canon BJC driver issues I had upgrading my AST to Windows 95.
I had the biggest flashback right now. I had a Canon BJC 4000 that would only print all the pages if you had two or more empty pages at the end of the document. Never figured that one out, but every so often I open an old Word Doc and find extra empty pages and remember…
Installing a printer involved unholy alliances with formless beings.
Lol so true
It’s funny because we always thought that the next generation’s technical knowledge would utterly eclipse ours, but instead they only know how to edit a short video to seem to loop infinitely.
Well in regards to editing short videos that loop, they have definitely eclipsed my skill (and willingness to learn)
I fix my parents’ computers. I fix the computers of the super old people in the neighborhood. I fix my kid’s computer. I fix my friends’ computers.
I don’t think it’s generational.
When your car breaks down, do you fix it? At what point do you take it to a mechanic?
At what point do you call an electrician or plumber? Who biopsies their own cysts?
It’s all the same shit. We live in a society of specialists because there’s simply too much potential knowledge for everyone to be able to do everything.
And if we start arguing about what things people “ought to be able to do themselves”, we turn into a bunch of old farts lamenting about the good old days.
“DIY” is a thing because many strive to understand enough of multiple relevant basic disciplines needed as an adult to be able to cover the first 15% or so of common jobs before they see their limitations and call the specialists.
I believe the expressed frustration here is around the fact that acquiring that first 15% type skill is no longer seen as a responsibility/point of pride for folks to gain as they grow.
I think it depends. Even if I knew a bit about the subject, I would definitely want to hire someone who actually knows what they are doing for something like a gas pipe, where a mistake could be deadly. But people should know things like replacing a light switch, replacing a thermostat and pumping up a car tire.
Yes, you’re making the same point - gas is that “knowing when you reach your limitation” part. But also, being able to push just up against that line and the curiosity/work invested to understand if you’re able to do so is important, and very rewarding. There’s a chance that people are losing that general curiosity to find that line and realize their capabilities are more than they thought prior to trying.
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It’s like we just happened to grow up at the right time where everyone was raised to be a mechanic, and we wonder why our kids don’t fix their own cars.
It is less that and more that we are tired of using baby talk to describe the computer equivalent of “the driver’s side door” or “the steering wheel”.
100% agree.
I’m 50 years old and I am the IT guy for people of all ages. Not because I am part of some gifted generation that understands computers, but because I have a genuine interest and took the time to learn these things.
My 16yo son also has a keen interest in computers and I am passing on my knowledge where I can.
I somewhat feel that attributing computer knowledge to a generational thing in some way diminishes the effort and time it took to get the knowledge and experience that I do have.
You don’t have to have hung around with Henry Ford to be a car guy, or Nikola Tesla to be an electrician.
Yes
Yes.
Yes…
When I was six years old, my dad brought a computer home from work. It had Windows 3.1 on it. I had to learn how to use the DOS command prompt in order to play my favorite game, Q-bert. When I was a teenager, a new computer of middling quality could run north of $3000 from the Best Buy. But my friends introduced me to a catalog where I could buy the parts to assemble one from scratch. They let me borrow their copy of Windows 95 to install. Then we all had to learn how to use dial-up in order to connect to the internet, or how to build out a LAN network to play games together in person. We took classes in touch-typing at school, using the computer lab. I went to computer camp during the summer. I went to college and took more advanced classes on programing.
I have spent tens of thousands of hours learning to use the computer, practically from the inception of the PC to the modern day.
Now my friends have kids, and I talk about how they use the computer. Everything is out-of-the-box. Installing something is as simply as clicking an icon. You can buy a mini-computer off the shelf for under $200 and it runs better than anything I could have built thirty years ago. Periodically, they will come to me with a more advanced computer program, which has to do with a very particular OS configuration or some weird networking bug that only someone with 10+ years of experience would think to look for. I typically find the answer online, because I don’t remember it off the top of my head. I teach the kid and the kid learns, and then the kid knows as much as I do on that particular subject.
In twenty years, I’m sure they’ll know more than me, just because I’ll be retired and they’ll be in the thick of it.
Also, please nobody ask me how a car works. That was something my parents’ generation learned. I’m clueless.
Since you mentioned cars, here is a theory my coworker told me that I think makes a lot of sense.
Our parents were the last generation to learn about cars because back then you needed to know how a car worked in order to own one. Cars are too simple now and you couldn’t fix one even if you wanted to since they are so locked-down.
We are the last generation to learn how computers work since we needed to know how a computer worked in order to use it. Now computers are too simple to use and you couldn’t fix one even if you wanted to since they are so locked-down.
Obviously not saying nobody today knows how cars or computers work, but it is a lot less common. Anybody who learns about cars or computers today do it because of personal interest, not because of necessity.
Cars are too simple now and you couldn’t fix one even if you wanted to since they are so locked-down.
Yes, same thing between computing hardware (I’m not gonna say computers, because for a lot of people nowadays, their only device is their smartphone) and cars. It used to be that things were more complicated to use, but easier to repair, so a large percentage of users could also repair their things.
Nowadays, you don’t even need to know how to check your oil level because the car will tell you if it’s low. You might not even have a dipstick. And with service intervals being 25000km and more, how much are you REALLY saving by doing your own oil change and stuff? I still do it, but
Similarly - as a kid, I had to fix small issues that popped up with Windows XP ALL the time. Couldn’t connect to any website? Flush the DNS cache. No connectivity at all? ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew. Mouse stopped working AGAIN? Use the keyboard to navigate to devices, reinstall mouse driver.
If I was growing up right now, I’d have no idea how things work, because they JUST DO. So you don’t learn a lot anymore. As for cars, I still learned because I grew up poor, so my first car was around 500 euros and I did everything myself.
Decided on a whim to fix up an old car from the 80s. I was able to tear it down to the frame and reassemble it with not much more than a set of imperial wrenches. That’s a bit of an oversimplification but not much. And while there was a lot that could go wrong there was nothing that was a black box where you could get to a point where if something was wrong you would throw up your hands and say, “Oh, well. Guess this is garbage now!” Different time, I guess.
Yup, now you spend several hundred on a Chinese clone of whatever factory diagnostics tool allows you to code modules and such. And there are still probably things you can’t touch.
Cars are too simple now and you couldn’t fix one even if you wanted to since they are so locked-down.
I mean, I’d argue they’re too complex. But I agree, you need so many specialized widgets (many that vary by brand and model) that its impractical to do more than change the oil.
I was looking at a Model A on display at a dealership when I went car shopping recently. They had the engine open, and I was looking at the thing thinking “If you sent me this in a box as a ‘Build your own car’ kit, I’m pretty sure I could do it”.
Sorry I meant simple to use. Repair and maintenance is very complex. You often can not even do some maintenance since you need specialized tools or software that only mechanics have access to.
Local Area Network Network.
Sorry I couldn’t resist.
I’m going to interpret that last “network” as that extra f-ing 50 ohm bnc terminator that you’re pretty sure you don’t need, until you’re about to learn something about coax impedence matching.
RAS syndrome
ATM machine
Our parents didn’t think it was important. Our kids don’t think it is necessary.
Imagine how horse farmers felt about engine maintenance on the first automobiles. Early adopters probably knew everything about how to fix tractors and cars. But today, how many people know how to change their own brakes or flush the coolant?
Life evolves, and transitions come faster with every generation. It’s good that nobody knows how to use a sextant or a fax machine.
or a fax machine
Healthcare industry is crying in the corner
I’m still mad we print so much stuff at work, it’s 2024 just update a spread sheet. I don’t need an email much less a physical copy of something I saw the update for an hour ago
I had to print out a PDF the other day because the software wouldn’t let me sign it, and then scan the document back into the computer.
My dad thought computers were important. He got me a VIC-20 soon as they came out, and that was $1,800 in today’s money, not an amount he spent lightly.
Sure, obviously there were exceptions or we wouldn’t have half the modern conveniences we do. My parents were very enthusiastic about computers, and my kids are each building their own desktops. I’m speaking in generalities.
It’s good that nobody knows how to use a sextant or a fax machine.
Modern Naval officers are taught to do navigation by starlight for backup purposes. Cause GPS ain’t that infallible.
Farmers right now are fighting a legal battle for the ability to repair their own tractors.
It’s not good for farm equipment to be locked down and sealed off just like it’s not good for operating systems to be locked down and sealed off.
I agree with you on that. I’d also like to be able to replace the battery on my phone or control my social media. But that wasn’t really my point. Disposable goods are bad for consumers and bad for the environment, along with fast fashion, factory farming, corporate conglomeration, and the vertical integration of news media.
And I think that’s the new frontier, which is really just reclaiming the old frontier from the profit-takers. People are learning to sew and knit, how to cook, how to farm, how to repair their stuff, and how to evaluate propaganda. That’s the shit our kids will say we never bothered to learn, and if they do it right, maybe their kids won’t have to learn.
I still know how to use a fax machine :(
I think the modern car climate is a better comparison than the change from horse and buggy to Model T. Many people work on their own cars, but it’s mostly for fun and the increasing levels of computers and sensors in cars makes it more difficult to do all the work yourself. And then you add in the nuts and bolts car companies make that can only be unscrewed using special tools that the companies also make to force you to bring the car to one of their dealerships.
Tech literacy rates are falling like the skill to use a car with a manual transmission. Since everything kids do is on their phone, and phones are like that one car company that welded the hoods of their cars shut, they never need to pick up the skills with computer software that the work world expects them to have (but who really wants to know how to use Word and Excel anyways), nor the skills with working on your own hardware.
Sidenote: Fax machines are, unfortunately, still very much a thing. At least, if you ever have to deal with the federal government or the medical industry, they are.
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Gotta love it when you come into a bit of a bitch & moan article about Tech and end up learning something new about Human Physiology and Medicine.
Cheers for that!
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Well, if I understood it correctly, my mother is very much like that (for example: it’s very hard to keep her on track to get to the end of a story without her getting lost of some lateral explanation about an explanation about a relativelly unimportant detail in the main story) and even I tended to work like that in the past (not so much nowadays), so your whole post for me was easy peasy to follow and a satisfying learning experience because it went into all sorts of interesting places :)
Judging by the upvotes from others, I would say I’m far from the only one.
It probably helps that here and in this post you’re basically talking about complex and interesting things to a pool of people with lots of above average intelligence, Education and/or curiosity ones.
The next generation doesn’t know how to use a mouse because they do everything on the phone. And yes, I have met people like that.
“How quaint”… cracks knuckles, proceeds to type a hundred words a minute with all ten fingers on a QWERTY board.
There’s a Pirate Software clip where he talks about the amount of kids who don’t even recognize a controller as an input and go straight to assuming all screens are touch screens
Relevant clip from a gaming industry veteran. Kids don’t even know how to use game controllers, because they have only ever played phone or tablet games.
Most of the world doesn’t know how to use game controllers, because they’re not used outside of consoles
Just curious, what age group is he talking about here? 6-year-olds? My little brother’s 13 and he plays games on his Xbox all the time. And his slightly older friend’s a PC gamer.
How old are they that don’t know how to use a mouse?
20’s
My four-year-old daughter is shockingly proficient with a mouse and keyboard. Kid goes to town on Spyro: Reignited. My wife snagged an old PC from her office and we want to set it up for her eventually for learning, light gaming and MS Paint. We figure in another year or two we can set up a family Minecraft server and get her in on it. The dream is to get her playing Valheim with us when she’s older.
Hoping she will be as good with PCs and I am, and would love to help her build one when she’s grown.
shes old enough to start learning hardware now! i absolutely did this with my kids when they were 3-6. take an old pc apart, put it back together with them naming the parts. they all loved it. a toddler trying to say ‘processor’ is hilarious btw. only one (25%) seemed to continue playing with hardware but they all know what makes up a pc and he is the one running the family minecraft in docker.
Mine started Minecraft at 5. She never took to Valhiem, and plays minecraft instead. She’s 16 now.
does M$ Paint really still exist?
As a real answer, yes, you can still install traditional Paint, as well as that garbage-but-at-least-it-supports-tranparency Paint 3D.
Hehehe, boy are you in for a treat!
It’s worse than that: we’re a small subset of the only generations that know how computers work. The vast majority of my peers would balk at using a command line, much less anything deeper.
I say generations because it’s obviously not limited to one, but, it sure as fuck isn’t many.
Yeah, the era of the ‘genius computer wiz kid’ had a small percentage of people working significantly with computers, but they were very obvious. You either knew your way around the computer very well and used it heavily, or just didn’t use a computer if you could help it.
I remember growing up the other teens would hate being forced to use a computer to type up an assignment, and would ask “can’t I just hand write it?”. We are talking about a percent or two, even among the age group, that would seriously use computers.
Now every kid uses “computers” constantly, but their level of understanding is about the same as the folks that formerly just wouldn’t bother trying back when the computers demanded you fiddle with TSRs, config.sys, autexec.bat, jumpers, dip switches to get things just right, and just right from application to application (this application demands XMS, this other demands EMS). For most kids of the era, maybe they’d use a computer with a word processing application on it, and otherwise they would play with a game console, which was far less finicky.
Between computers and navigating the stupid interface of VCRs of the time, you had TV shows pick up on the whiz kid as a meme (Wesley Crusher in TNG, Lucas Wolenczak in SeaQuest, so many sitcoms of the time would have one…). However they weren’t the prolific folks. Most kids of the time didn’t have time for computers (which also commonly showed up in the sitcoms, the cool jock would have the nerd whiz kid pull some stuff for him, because he sure couldn’t be bothered to deal with computers).
I work in tech.
My dad was a teacher, his subject was computers, at that time “computers” class was heavily programming. Basic stuff.
It seems that kids from gen x, and the millennial generation had the timing to learn the tech before it “just works”, so we’re used to figuring it out as we go, because there was no way to look it up on the internet, so we had to.
The zoomers and younger generations are largely “it just works” users, where all the basics of getting things to just plug and play was a thing. If it didn’t work it was either “incompatible” or broken. So don’t try to make it work, or you’ll be sued for DMCA related violations.
IMO, there’s a sweet spot, somewhere in the late 70’s or early 80’s to about the early-mid 2000’s when people had to know something about tech to operate it. Anyone with the aptitude for tech, who was born during this time is generally working in tech.
People born before that are generally the old school pen and paper types, and anyone younger is generally the plug and play digital era.
If course, everyone is different, so the dates are probably liable to be different depending on the area, and each person may have different motivations, etc.
My generation (early millennials) are generally known for being the “tech” person to friends/family, and ADHD; at least, as far as I can see, from my little bubble of friends who mostly work in/with tech.
Yup, agree with this.
And this is why I’m teaching my kids computer stuff. We haven’t gotten too crazy with it, but my kids have built some stuff in Scratch and helped me assemble my PC (they’ll assemble their own) with me explaining what the main bits do. I also intend to do some basic Arduino-type stuff w/ them as well once I get started w/ home automation (have a NAS and some apps, but no sensors or anything cool like that).
They’ll probably never need that knowledge, but having the ability to reason about a problem using some foundational knowledge should be useful regardless of what they do (i.e. why isn’t this working? I’ll check the wires, run a simpler test, etc).
But do they have to set jumpers on the motherboard to choose the processor voltage?
And make sure the IRQs on their sound card and printer don’t conflict ?
“your sound card works perfectly”
It really whips the llama’s ass
I think they open sourced that recently… I should take a look.
Kids these days don’t know how good they have it…
They probably never will.
I don’t think that’s a bad thing. We made it easier, and they’re reaping the benefits of our work.
The only issue I see is that when it breaks, nobody will know how to fix it, since we’ve abstracted all the complexity away from the users, so they don’t understand the underlying processes that need to work for the thing to function.
Other than that, it just works.
The only issue I see is that when it breaks
That’s a pretty big issue, and that’s likely a huge contributor to issues like ewaste. If someone owns a computer and the memory goes bad, they buy a new computer instead of new RAM. Likewise with batteries on phones, capacitors on appliance circuit boards, etc. There’s so much that used to be regularly repairable that could still be repairable if people understood the basics of the tech they use. But when it stops working, the knee-jerk reaction is to replace it, not repair it, esp. when it’s generally cheaper to replace than have a service tech come out (when 50 years ago, many would just repair it themselves using the provided service manual).
I like to blame manufacturers here, but a large part of me has to acknowledge that a lot of people wouldn’t bother even if they had all the documentation readily available. A little bit of knowledge about how things actually work can go a long way in reducing waste throughout society.
Yep, pretty much this. I grew up with computers. The first one I used was a C64 in school. We got our first family PC in 1996. I was 14 back then.
If you wanted to do basically anything, you had to figure it out or read an actual manual. We had to fight with drivers and such in order to get any game or device working. It was part of the fun; you had to be nerdy to want to do that.
Nowadays, even my completely tech illiterate dad can use an iPad to browse, e-mail, stream stuff and connect on social media.
To be clear: my dad phoned me this morning asking how he could set the time on his digital Casio watch. And he’s using an iPad!! That’s how easy we were able to make tech, so even a toddler can use it.
I feel very lucky that I grew up with tech and can solve most problems on my own.
Yep. With my dad teaching computers, we always had one in the house. I started on DOS, and I’ve used most versions of Microsoft operating systems since then.
I’ve built computers, upgraded, modified, tweaked and nerded out over low level settings and optimizations…
At this point, I can do all of that. I choose to simply buy something off a shelf because I can’t be bothered to do everything that’s needed to get my system working perfectly. Someone else has done the engineering to make their PC’s operate efficiently, so I’ll just let them do the hard work, and pay slightly more for my system so I don’t have to think about it.
Once the warranty is up, and something goes wrong, I’ll be in there with a multimeter and soldering iron to fix it if I have to…
When I went to install a suite of emulators on the Steam Deck, it was one installer and some light configuration. Installing ROMs involved using an app that automatically digs up the box art and adds console collections to the Steam interface.
All of this largely just worked.
As a millenial that was wild. I’ve never trusted things to just work before but a bunch of open-source devs made it happen. That’s what made me realize we live in different times (and why newer generations have no idea how to actually use computers).
My housemate is completely incapable of installing mods without using a mod manager, so when my subscription to vortex lapsed he wanted my help and I was like, “look… just read the fucking instructions man, odds are it’ll tell you exactly what to do”
The old RTFM technique, classic.
It seems that those aged roughly between 30 - 50 hit the sweet spot when it comes to computer literacy.
There is an interesting text about it, albeit it is 11 years old already: Kids can’t use computers… and this is why it should worry you
Every now and then I read one of those panicked articles raising the alarm about how some member of the young generation doesn’t understand folder structures or whatever, and I panic for a second because what if an entire generation grows up not knowing how to use a computer? But then I remember that I’ve read stories upon stories from Reddit and assorted boomer sites from the 90s and aughts about the exact sort of tech support problems described in that article, and that I’ve never met someone my age or younger who can’t touchtype at least 60 words a minute, and that my sister for whom a command line is the scariest thing in the universe figured out how to install ReShade for a DirectX game she liked all on her own, and that our parents talked the exact same way about cars, and I calm down.
Late Gen x and early gen y had an off-line childhood and digital adulthood. I think that explains a fair amount about computer literacy, because a lot of what they were exposed to is the base config so they had to learn their way up.
although I find that there are plenty of both that are absolutely clueless about tech
Another weird thing that changed in that generation was communication style. Sms and email bred their own language and abbreviations…
Other notables - digital wayfinding (online maps and Gps), music purchase and consumption, proliferation of social media, adoption of online persona, all changes that gen x / early y lived through.
