Anon has low regard for the tech-savviness of zoomers

Boomers don't know how to fix cars these days either. In Ye Olde days, cars were designed to be fixed. These days they are riddled with unnecessary electronics, and those electronics are riddled with just enough DRM that reverse engineering anything in your car is a crime.

A Boomer can fix a "classic" car, but nobody other than a mechanic can fix a modern car because of all the DRM-riddled electronics.

I mean, most people don’t know how to fix a car these days other than boomers.

Oh yeah, famously.

Sure there are the few which made it their career

North of 750k, sure. We professionalized the job of car repair and people who specialized in the field continued to develop their skills in an increasingly complex field. We didn't just lose the skill of automotive repair.

We also introduced a number of module components to the chassis and the electronics, effectively making body work, car electronics, and mechanical repairs into three separate fields. So the process of auto repair got more complicated. Boomers did not keep up with the trade. If anything, they got phased out.

This sounds like people raised on Apple being told to use Windows and finding work-arounds. Which, I'm sorry to say, isn't a tech skills problem. They've clearly found baroque ways to use the technology and do the work based on how they originally learned to do it.

I worked in the IT department, but I spent a lot of time talking to teachers. Several of them brought me into their classrooms to teach ‘curiosity skills’ since I think the computer can often teach you how to use it if you’re just curious enough to try.

I mean, they are curious and they do know how to use their computers, at least as far as they regularly employ them. But when the purpose of a computer is to accrue and transmit text and images, that's what you're going to focus your skills on. I'm willing to bet many of your kids are better digital photographers and videographers than you, because they spend so much time in that space. Like, how many millennials know what a Ring Light is, compared to the GenZ/As?

But when Apple has built a device that negates the need to understand file systems and folder structures, it's not a curiosity problem. They're in a Walled Garden, so they're learning how to accomplish their work within the boundaries the OS has created. Incidentally, I know plenty of Millennial-age professionals who keep all their files on their windows desktop precisely for the same reason (they don't understand file systems and directory structures). This is a joke that goes back to the Office Space era.

But your kids don't need to learn about computers. They need to learn about computer architecture. Or not, if they're getting by just fine in their current ecosystem.

Actually, that has always been true.

Yes the UI has become fluffier. But users have always just used first and most convenient way to do something.

• They didn't need to know how file system worked, they just put all their files on their desktop.
• Most never used a command line and never will. They would just shrug and do something else if it required it.
• If a button is even slightly moved, to them it is a travesty that fucks over their whole workflow.

The subset of tech savvy users may be slightly bigger, but the majority never learned how computers worked beyond clicking around. That is in every generation. Our vision is just skewed because we grew up in a tech heavy environment.

But if you ever worked in IT support, you'd know that not knowing how computers work is the default in every generation.

Microcenter, excuse me

https://www.microcenter.com/

To be fair, it's not an obvious concept.

If I pick up a notebook and scribble something in it, the next time I pick up the notebook whatever I scribbled will still be there. It's very unusual that when a computer shuts down the RAM is cleared. Making it worse for intuitive understanding, a lot of apps are constantly saving and restoring state without any user intervention, making it seem like a notebook that just keeps state whenever you use it.

The implementation detail that RAM is very fast but doesn't store state but flash is slightly slower but does store state is something that you have to learn. To actually understand why RAM doesn't store state you need to understand how it's built, and how capacitors can store charge for a short time but need to be refreshed. Why flash / electrically erasable memory works the way it does is yet another university-level class.

Add to that that the concept of a "file" and a "filesystem" are not obvious at all. The concept got its name from actual paper documents being strung together with wire. The name was used in early computer work as a skeuomorph to make understanding computer storage easier. This data on disk is grouped together in a "file" just like you'd group together pages of text into a "file".

If we were designing things from scratch today, the concept of a "file" or "filesystem" would probably not exist. We'd probably just go with a key-value store on top of some kind of B-tree stuff directly on the flash memory.

The only reason older people learned these things is that they dealt with computers that were not as user friendly. If someone is young enough, they probably experienced turning off a computer and losing all their stuff because they hadn't saved. And, saving was cumbersome for a long time. You had to actually decide what filename to use and where on the filesystem to store something. One of the biggest pushes in computing in the last couple of decades is to make all that easier, to make it so that files are saved automatically and you never have to see a file browser or a filename. Sure, the underlying system is still all files, directories, etc. But, that's just not something that people encounter anymore.

I remember being flabbergasted the first time I had to explain this to some of the boomer teachers and admin staff with my part time college job. The secretary had no idea how to find documents outside of word recent list.

The idea that young people are even worse than that secretary is scary.

Yeah, the only zoomers who really understand computers beyond the surface are gamers, especially ones who played stuff like modded minecraft before there were dedicated launchers for it

I had the exact observation. It's crazy

genz uses ai to do thier hw now.

This problem is vastly greater than anything a school board could meaningfully impact alone.

Posts that skip GenX should be a bannable offense

Maybe if they had parents who did anything but whine about how no one pays attention to them they'd be better at using technology.

I'm always happy to learn new things. Whether or not I bring that knowledge to bear depends entirely upon my compensation.