
Teens don't have a clue about IT? (2016) - herohamp
https://blog.mysunland.org/index.php/posts/teens-dont-have-a-clue-about-it
======
rc-5
Allow 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 teenagers for which this is true,
this is also true for people of all ages - those who aren't interested in
learning the base technology simply won't.

>>>Green text with a black background is the norm, right? No.

This seems a diversion from the writer's point, that teenagers don't
understand computers. Maybe it's meant to simulate what the writer believes
teenagers think of the command line? If so, it's hopelessly off it's mark,
like much of this post.

>>>All they want is a computer that works, and that runs their text messaging,
anti-privacy and social media apps. They think that Linux is for hackers, that
OS X is premium users and windows is what everybody else uses.

No. Just no. I don't know where the writer could have gotten such an idea -
most people who use OS X at my school do so for dev, but there is definitely
also a sizeable Linux population in addition to the Windows contigent.
Personally, I have devices running Windows, OS X, and a few Linux distros.

Ultimately, however, the writer disproves his own point, that teenagers don't
know how to use computers as well as their reputation deserves. Being at home
with the development of computers is vastly different from actually using them
- something at which, I counter, teens are actually pretty good. Yes, the
majority of teens may not use the command line much. But the computer is much
more than the command line - something other posters on this thread have noted
well.

~~~
tapland
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 interested in tech actually learning the
tech and your average high schooler doesn't graduate able to write drivers,
create software or hand-code websites and web servers.

It was a belief in the coming of a tech-utopia where every young person would
know those things. But it doesn't just come automatically. There has been a
huge surge in usage, driven by increased accessibility, standardization and
user interfaces that don't require prior knowledge.

A lot of the older generation (probably mostly the less tech savvy ones) still
believe we are getting there and have at least somewhat gotten there. We
really haven't.

~~~
jcranmer
Probably any millennial will recognize this picture:
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/deanwhitney/3926151592/](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.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
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.

~~~
lopmotr
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.

~~~
jraph
It seems that in the common, accepted terminology, text editors [1] are used
to edit plain text documents and word processors [2] are what LibreOffice
Writer and Microsoft Word are. They process formatted text document, and sure,
they can even be used as text editors. So yes, they edit texts, but calling
them text editors can be confusing if not clear from the context because of
the common terminology (here, the context was clear for me though).

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_editor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_editor)

[2]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor)

------
rootsudo
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++ class - from what I believe was a fired Compaq programmer,
needless to say it sucked but gave me a foundation.

Meanwhile this was also the time where you needed to know a bit of HTML to
modify your Geocities, Angelfire, Neopets (middle school days) to Myspace
profile.

Facebook came in and removed that whole layer of customization - Windows XP
was really stable and besides malware no one needed to really know how to fix
their computer.

Then if you were into Video game culture, you had to learn how to solder to
modify consoles with modchips, how to burn a CD, and generally modify and
configure OS settings from IRQ to adding a DVDRW.

Same with pirating videos, there was no youtube - maybe you'd get lucky and
find an FTP server that hosted videos but even then you'd had codecs. Default,
Windows didn't include Divx, MPEG2, etc - just WMV/WMA.

Same with burning an MP3 to CD.

Nowadays I feel like a SRE/Sysadmin hack, but man then again I know my way
enough a system, can program lazily and hold my own with people who consider
themselves senior devs, architects etc from MSFT, NIST, SpaceX --

It's nice. Maybe I do know something.

~~~
non-entity
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.

~~~
jimmux
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 <blink> tags into Notepad was enough to impress
your friends.

~~~
TimTheTinker
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. that modern folks have, high school would have been completely different.

I have a friend who taught himself the DOS prompt on his parents' computer
when he was in early high school. He had no access to any materials (this was
before the internet was available); he literally typed every possible
combination of letters and discovered the commands (dir, cls, move, del, ren,
etc.) and tried to infer what they did.

~~~
bashwizard
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.

~~~
TimTheTinker
Great story, thanks for sharing :)

There was a Windows for Workgroups computer lab at my high school. They had a
DOS-based login, but accessing the DOS prompt from Windows was disabled. At
one point, someone figured out that the login screen could be bypassed by
pressing Ctrl+Break; the teacher found out and disabled that particular
keystroke. But after hours of experimenting, I figured out that Alt+3 sends an
ASCII character (0x3) that has the same effect. So we were back to playing
games in the lab after hours -- they were often hidden in a folder named
Alt+255 which looked like a space in DOS but was invisible to the File Manager
in Windows. Good times :)

~~~
bashwizard
That also reminds me of when I regularly used to visit our local library after
school (junior in high school at that time) which had these job terminals
(win95 boxes connected to the internet through a fiber connection) for people
to use when looking for jobs.

Apparently they disabled basically all keystrokes while the application ran so
we could only use a trackball to navigate the job board web site and print.

I never figured out how to just enable keystrokes again so I just unplugged
the power cord, booted up in safe mode and edited autoexec.bat and uncommented
the line for the application to autorun on windows boot up and rebooted. Free
fiber internet and a lot of IRC for weeks to come!

However one of the librarians came up to me one day and asked "aren't you a
little too young to be looking for a job?" and I was just joking and replied
"yeah well, it's rough times you know". She looked concern and then looked at
the screen and said something like "What's your name? I don't think you're
allowed to do that... I'm going to have to tell you to get up and leave now".

I was indefinitely banned from using the computers and job terminals.

------
joezydeco
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 stuff I have no clue about.

Nothing has changed. It’s just a matter of your point of view.

~~~
benibela
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

~~~
na85
Actually, real programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand.

~~~
red2awn
I thought they use butterflies.

~~~
lbruder
There's an Emacs macro for that.

------
kdamica
I think there's a point to be made here that proficiency with UI is often
conflated with technical understanding by nontechnical people, but I'm not
sure the point about teens is well-founded. Specifically, while it's probably
true that teens don't understand IT, neither do the vast majority of adults.
I'd love to see some data on this.

~~~
yoz-y
> Specifically, while it's probably true that teens don't understand IT,
> neither do the vast majority of adults.

I think that’s the point. The whole promise of “digital native” generation is
false.

------
gumby
They 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.

~~~
Johnny555
_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 younger)
could manage to milk a cow.

The FFA has 700,000 members [2], and I'd bet that at least half of them could
manage to milk a cow, so that's closer to 1 in 200.

This isn't quite a fair comparison since the article above was referring only
to "teens", not "children", and the FFA numbers include members up to age 21
and includes members in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands).

[1] [https://www.aecf.org/resources/the-changing-child-
population...](https://www.aecf.org/resources/the-changing-child-population-
of-the-united-states/)

[2] [https://www.ffa.org/our-membership/](https://www.ffa.org/our-membership/)

~~~
gumby
Thanks for the clarification!

I originally had typed "1 in 10,000" but that seemed too many kids....and it
turns out I was utterly wrong!

~~~
vidanay
Udderly

------
cuddlybacon
When I was in school, there were computer classes from grades 6 until 12. It
covered topics like typing, keyboard shortcuts, internet browsing, internet
research, and basics in more advanced topics like Photoshop and programming.

By the time my sister, who is 7 years younger than me, got to school that was
mostly gone. It was cut back "because kids just know that stuff".

------
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.

------
8bitsrule
When I was a teen, I couldn't have explained (in any detail) how a car engine
worked either. Five years later, I'd quickly learned in order to keep my own
running. Those who need to, and have the time, will figure it out.

If they are clueless, that's good. There are _much more important_ things a
teen needs to learn.

~~~
jakoblorz
That's so true. The question is if kids learn the tools to understand what
computers do when needing self-study later.

------
guggle
Hello,

I think the article is not very good, however its main point still stands.

Part of my activity is teaching basic word processing and basic html/css to
non-IT students. And it's quite a struggle because most (I say most because of
course there are exceptions) students don't know how to use their computer for
the most basic tasks.

Most have no idea how files are organized on a computer, ignoring the concept
of file system. They simply can't navigate their file system and end up stuck
between their "Documents" and "Downloads" folder. They routinely "lose" their
files.

Once they've been introduced to the notion of file system, most don't
understand the difference between regular folders and files and zip archive.
Arguably, Windows is to blame here since it tries to hide the difference. Then
they try to edit the files directly from the archive and don't understand why
they can't save them right away.

Most don't know how to use a keyboard. Basic shortcuts (ctrl+c/ctrl+v and the
like) are ignored. Most rely on the mouse and the menus for everything, and of
course are terribly slow to achieve their tasks.

So we have to explain all these things before we even start with our subject,
to the point where I wonder if they've been exposed to desktop computer
before. I think most have only been using phones and tablets.

So, from my point of view, the conclusion of the article is right: teachers
and parents should not assume their children and students know how to use a
computer, because it might not be the case.

~~~
bambataa
That's because the aim of computer design in the few decades has been to turn
such things into implementation details. If your primary computing device is a
phone or a tablet you have no idea, and /no need to know/, what your photo's
filename is. It's just there in the app and can be easily shared, edited or
printed from there.

The question is -- is that a bad thing? For the majority of people a computer
is a means to end and the fewer implementation details exposed the better.
Just as I don't really want or need to know how a car works in detail in order
to get from A to B.

What I see happening is that computing knowledge becomes more and more the
preserve of specialists and that's a good thing. When I started to learn
programming I read about why the command line was so useful and people were
saying things like "you can batch rename files really easily!". But the only
times I've ever really had to do that are programming-related tasks such as
log files etc. Most people simply don't need to do that often enough to
justify learning how.

~~~
guggle
> The question is -- is that a bad thing?

My answer is yes, because once you enter the job market, you probably won't be
working with a phone or a tablet. And obviously if you can't use a keyboard
you'll be slow at your task.

------
TeaDude
You want to know who's fault this is? Yours, whoever wrote this article.

It constantly complains that modern teens barely touch anything underneath the
surface in tech but ironically completely smears over any of the underlying
issues.

Let's have a think...

Do any of the mainstream tech publications cover low level programming? No.

Are any low level computer skills taught in college or other mainstream
programming courses? No.

Do big tech companies give a thought to the quality of their software as long
they can foist it on people? No. (Although you could probably argue that that
isn't a new phenomena)

Garbage in, garbage out. Someone failed to protect the tech industry and it
isn't these teens' fault that real programming is completely obscured. The
best chance they have is getting into retro games so they can stumble across
David Murray or Clint Basinger or the like.

~~~
vengefulduck
Hate to break it to you, but I’m in college learning C and assembly right now,
don’t know how much lower level you can get.

~~~
watwut
You can build it all from diodes, relays and other electronics.

------
vsareto
>They most likely won’t care about the operation of their system

Frankly, I don't either. Most of the important know-how comes to servers or
cloud service configurations. My personal and work computers just work, no
thanks to my knowledge. Win10 is vastly better than all previous versions in
terms of this. Even if I run into something, there's always Google/YouTube. I
think most teens can handle Google.

You don't need to have this stuff memorized any more. That under-the-hood
knowledge you're trying to get me to memorize? Just tell me what to search for
and I'll go look it up if I want to learn about it. I can remember that search
phrase easily. I'm not going to remember every detail you talk about.

When I can't google my way into 6 digit jobs, I'll start worrying. Until then,
those under-the-hood people can rest easy knowing things are much more
streamlined these days because of their work.

~~~
maxDemianx
Sarcasm.

------
tuzakey
From 2013: [http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-
co...](http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/)

It's not just teens.

------
outime
When I had my first computer as a kid (~8yo) and no one to teach me about the
inner workings, I still felt that I wanted to dig deep into it. As the years
passed by and saw the evolution from dial-up to all-day-long available & fast
connections, tons of material to learn online, videos on demand... I thought
oh wow, the next generations are going to have so much IT knowledge very
early!

Turns out that today, in my humble experience, it’s very rare to find geeky
(pre)teens unless they have geeky parents (and not even then). Computers
became much more simplified, problem-free and in different forms to mostly
consume content. So the curiosity that grew inside of me while solving daily
computer problems is very difficult nowadays as most of the issues aren’t very
challenging (which is very good for the average user).

~~~
rc-5
This comment has somehow sparked an idea in me... I, too, dug into computers
as a child (now a teen). But I got my first computer (a Chromebook) in 5th
grade.

Perhaps not having computers (or tech in general) as a child causes an
enlarged interest when given access to computers?

------
RandomGuyDTB
I 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.

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21707864](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21707864)

~~~
IIAOPSW
Bad news kid. As you grow up adults are on average just as averse to
understanding anything on a deeper level, and even worse they get to vote and
it counts the same as yours. Best thing you can do is self select into a
profession where you're surrounded by people who do care and eventually you
can forget what the average person is truly like.

------
ratsmack
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.

~~~
kovek
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.

~~~
lostlogin
> Also, I had a neighbor with lots of knowledge in electrical and software
> engineering... Shame that he was drinking a lot.

These things aren’t necessarily unrelated.

------
leokennis
Even if the premise of this article is true...being able to fluently use
computers (even if you don’t understand their inner workings) is already
better than what their parents achieve.

No one was complaining that mom and dad don’t know what defragmentation is,
and why it doesn’t matter on an SSD. No one was sad grandma had no clue why
changing the DHCP setting on her router made no difference when she was
outside the house.

The issue was your mom calling for the 20th time asking how to rip a cd in
iTunes, or dad not being able to attach a photo to an e-mail.

That issue seems more than solved by the current generation.

------
chrisco255
It ought to be a dying trope that kids know tech better than adults. I think
the author is correct in observing that tech has become so user friendly and
ubiquitous that understanding the basics doesn't really mean much. It's
certainly not going to help you get ahead in any field. And as Millenials and
gen X gets older, they have been around technology for decades longer, and the
tech is no longer changing the workforce as quickly as it was in the '90s and
'00s and even early '10s.

------
dang
The article is rather silly but the thread is rather good, so let's try
turning off the flags and letting it run. Current, former, and future
teenagers welcome!

------
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.

------
thrower123
There's no golden age when people used to know how to use computers. It's
always been a small percentage that had any idea how things actually worked.
You used to have to have that type of obsessive, systemizing kind of mind to
work things at all, so most people just didn't. For every one of us futzing
around with autoexec.bat, there were a dozen or more who didn't care to frig
with systems where troubleshooting was more complicated than turning it on and
off and blowing dust out of the cartridge.

Most people are not curious nor do they care to know things at that level of
detail.

------
jtmcmc
I use green text on a black background in my terminal.

~~~
gburdell3
You use a terminal?? Back in MY day, we used PUNCH CARDS! Kids these days...

------
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.

------
mywacaday
I don't know why there was ever an expectation that teens would know more.
People that are interested in a topic know more, its not a factor of age. The
same could be said of cars, boats, household appliances, anything! If you are
interested you will learn and if your not you won't. Exposure and use on a
daily basis does not imply that you will know whats going on under the hood, a
literal old car metaphor for understanding whats going on out of sight. The
majority of people drive or are driven in cars and only have a cursory
knowledge of how they work and the thing is they don't need to and that's how
it should be. We don't expect people to understand in detail how their
cars/trains/elevators/coffee machine/hair dryer work, why should a computer be
different?

------
ImprovedSilence
I mean, I didn’t have a clue about IT and only ever used windows until AFTER
college. In high school I didn’t have the slightest care for any computer type
stuff besides AIM, Napster and cracked video games. I had two programming
classes in college. (Neither Of which I cared for too much or really learned
much about the underlying machine)and they were both done on Windows
computers. I guess I’m lucky my degree (EE) overlapped with comp eng, I got
into some decent jobs that let my work overlap gradually into software land. I
now I work on Linux machines all day, and have a very healthy hunger to
continue to learn and pick up new knowledge.

But bottom line, none of this developed until I got into a career. Kids back
in the day were just as clueless. And there are a few outliers, sure.

------
numlock86
First paragraph:

> Many teachers and parents believe the younger generation know more about
> technology and “computers” then their own generation. They believe the teens
> of today know more about computers because we grew up with them, we have
> always used them and use them for almost every task.

Ok, the entire article basically starts off with a subjective assumption.
Great ...

By that logic my parents should know how analog telephones or TVs work, but I
already have doubts that they have an idea of how 3.4 kHz sound like or even
know what a kHz is. I doubt they ever heard of cathode rays either. So why
should nowadays teens know how MIPI DSI works for example? Because they look
at a 7" screen driven by that the entire day? The whole idea is just plain
bogus.

------
Kluny
"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.

~~~
PeterisP
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 stuff works 'under the hood'
explicitly without this assumption.

~~~
hinkley
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.

------
VLM
IT is about highly scaled standardized system level engineering of documented
verifiable reliable processes in support of even more complicated business
processes that theoretically make, or at least save, profit.

The article title is correct in that teens don't know anything about that.
Most management personnel don't, either.

Although the article contents seem to be that teens are somewhat worse than
average at manipulation of UIs. Given stereotypical teen performance at
automobile operation, culinary skills, operating romantic relationships, and
muscular coordination in general, I'm not sure why anyone is surprised.

------
voldacar
I unironically find green text on a black background really nice to read, it
contrasts well without being fatiguing on the eyes like dark text on light
background. not sure what the author is on about

~~~
fl0wenol
I prefer beige/amber and black because I don't like too much color saturation
and I feel it's a wee bit easier on the eyes. Like the default colors in CDE
on Solaris.

~~~
asdff
turned my shell font color to a close approximate of the hn background beige
and it's been great.

------
the_jeremy
Don't know how an unsubstantiated rant like this (from 2016, no less!) is
trending, but I'll respond.

When I was a teen, I knew practically nothing about computers - I remember
trying to use regedit to hack a server-side game because some friend told me
to. I could type and play games and surf the internet, that was about it.

I wrote my first program in college, and I'm doing reasonably well in software
(graduated 2017 with a SWE job at median wage for my area, job hopped for a
20% raise after a year, and just got put in for a promotion at my new job).

------
imgabe
I imagine the author shaking his fist at the sky while writing this.

Speaking as a former teen, teens don't know much about sales and marketing,
mechanical engineering, international politics, or basically any other aspect
of the adult world. This is because they're teens.

I guess because they learn to use new technology faster it gives the
impression that they know all about it. But I don't know why anyone would
expect them to be an expert in operating system design or anything.

~~~
jheriko
i blame the parents and the education system... these things you mention are
much more important in practical terms than the vast bulk of curriculum
contents these days.

------
PeterStuer
The article and many of the responses here to it sadly reflect the casual
agist narrative that was long present but especially in the last few years has
become more prevalent. It is not a productive model to reason from unless
division is your goal.

You will find computer literate in each generation, just as you will find the
majority in each case completely oblivious to and uninterested in acquiring
the knowledge to understand and troubleshoot non trivial issues.

------
pnathan
I've observed this myself. A lot of the computer studies stuff for high
schoolers in the 1990s was "How To Use Word", I don't imagine its gotten
better since.

> Using green text on a black background is not only obnoxious but also hard
> to read.

speak for yourself. :-)

> they don’t care. All they want is a computer that works,

This isn't actually an unreasonable ask. It's roughly identical to cars,
phones, and other tools.

The author's original point - that teens aren't gurus - is quite excellent.

------
Izkata
> Green text with a black background is the norm, right? No. Using green text
> on a black background is not only obnoxious but also hard to read. If at all
> the norm is white text on a black background or white on black.

Hm. I use white-on-purple at work, and green-on-black at home. Anyone else use
apparently-unusual terminal colors?

*green-on-black with occasional red, was part of a rotating color set I used to use. The Christmas colors were nice enough I kept them year-round.

~~~
kyuudou
yellow-on-black usually

------
newsgremlin
Thinking back to my adolescence, there were few that were that proficient and
similar observations could have been made, being able to use limewire and the
office suite was about as technical as it got for my late millennial class.

I think we are getting smarter overall, but I don't expect it to be the norm,
it requires a societal shift away from distracting platforms and entertainment
that don't facilitate the need to explore and learn.

------
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.

------
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.

------
rdiddly
Kind of like every other demographic. But yeah definitely don't make the
mistake of assuming tech knowledge is inversely proportional to age. Otherwise
it'd be like we're all coming out the womb writing assembly language and by
age 50 we can't even work a toaster.

------
cm2187
I am trying to help juniors in a financial institution to pick up programming.
What is interesting is that it is a skill a lot of people wish they had, and
lots of people sign up. But very few follow through when they realise what it
means in practice.

~~~
giornogiovanna
> what it means in practice.

What do you mean? Do they think it's boring, or that it's too complicated, or
that it's useless, or something else?

~~~
cm2187
I think it’s a mix of it is hard work and not to their taste.

Which I think is fine. I am talking to a population who didn’t lean toward
engineering in their education and career choices. But my point is that their
might be some curiosity, just not the appetite to pay the cost of
understanding how the sausages are made.

------
theLotusGambit
> Why do the teens of today think this? Because simply, they don’t care. All
> they want is a computer that works, and that runs their text messaging,
> anti-privacy and social media apps.

Wanting technology to just work without having to deal with esoteric nonsense?
How childish!

~~~
ryukafalz
That “esoteric nonsense” is how all this stuff actually works, and if you
don’t have a grasp on the basics, it’s hard to tell when you’re being taken
advantage of. (And these days, it feels like everyone’s looking to take
advantage of unsuspecting users.)

~~~
hatsuseno
When I have a problem with my car, I take it to a dealer or a certified
repairshop. I effectively know jack-all about the workings of that machine. I
can be easily conned into paying for repairs that don't need doing. Do you
wish to claim that no such context exists for you?

It's easy to gloss over the fact that for >99% of users the machine "just
needs to work", and I don't think that's unreasonable. There will be a subset
of kids that /do/ take an interest in this stuff, and will pick it up as the
next generation of "IT magicians".

------
mattlondon
I've done a bunch of things at work for "bring your child to work" days etc
where we run a class with the kids for an hour or two to make a game using
Scratch on raspberry pis.

There is a wide spectrum of ability and interest (and the ages go from perhaps
8 or 9 to mid teens), but a large proportion of the kids get it and are off
and happily programming away to make their flappy bird clone based on some
basic instructions. Many say they already know Scratch from school. Many get
bored and go rogue by ignoring the instructions and doing their own thing with
the game and you start to see some bizarre mashups of what they're supposed to
be making and what their imagination came up with. When we run those classes,
the feedback is usually really really positive.

Sure - scratch is not "programming" as most of us would think of it, but it
_is programming_.

Tl;Dr - give kids a break. There is interest and ability there if you give
them the chance to express it.

It is very easy to judge.

~~~
jakoblorz
Sound very supportive!

Let me add: The parents that brought their kids to these occasions may have a
technically background also? Then these parents know how to use a computer and
may have passed this knowledge on, at least the positive attitude towards
knowing how it works. Children are interested in what their parents do after
all. Children are trained in consuming computers/content on computers, so some
(maybe even the majority of what I observed) may have a negative attitude
towards learning what computers actually do. After all, consuming rewards them
with joy, learning is meh...

------
mastrsushi
"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"

Was this written by a teen?

------
RMPR
Interesting article, although the absence of margins made the reading painful
(at least for me)

------
lota-putty
Sounds like grown-ups are failing to learn how to engage teen-minds during
these tech-vibrant times.

------
kube-system
Heck, I've worked with a lot of developers who would fall into the same camp.

------
what-the-grump
And 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]

------
jcims
I'm less worried about teens than I am the folks we're interviewing with
masters degrees in computer science that don't know what a subnet mask is or
how to use a sniffer.

------
the_dripper
this article has bad spelling. not to be a snob but i could do it better, as a
non-english speaker. also i dont get why the youth always has to be
represented in a bad way. i mean most uf us are kinda stupid, but not all of
us.

------
rodgerd
Gen X doesn't have a clue about punch cards. Boomers don't have a clue about
steam engines.

My teen is a lot more interested in what she can use tools to do and create,
not fucking around with installing hardware and operating system. I feel like
this is a better use of her time, frankly.

This is like listening to people my parents' age rant about how no-one has to
use their pantyhose to fix a broken fan belt, or adjust a carb to a richer or
leaner fuel mix as you go skiing and come home.

------
learn_more
Jonny can't troubleshoot.

------
zeku
this is just a rant and not constructive.

~~~
tpmx
An observation doesn't need to be constructive. I needs to be relevant and
novel. This is a relevant and novel observation.

The people seemingly feeling hurt by this - you do realize you're outliers,
right?

~~~
horsawlarway
You're getting downvoted because this is neither relevant nor novel.

The number of folks who genuinely understand computers has been rising at
unprecedented rates. Just look at the number of employed programmers.

Does that mean most children understand it? Of course not, just like most
adults don't. When Grandma is amazed that her grandkids manage to make Netflix
work, I don't think there's any real expectation that they will become
software engineers.

This is like bitching that kids from the 1920s don't know how combustion
engines work. It's not productive.

~~~
tpmx
The amount of people who can create things that have some value for someone at
ever increasing abstraction levels have increased, for sure.

Also: I really dislike that self-righteous "your're getting downvoted for..."
thing you're doing.

I don't mind being downvoted when I know I'm correct ;).

------
jdofaz
This is from 2016

~~~
dang
Added. Thanks!

