It’s like every generation loses the ability to do something in computer technology that was just abstracted away somehow. I as a millennial have never soldered a PC mainboard (modding an Xbox doesn’t count), but I’d say that otherwise, my understanding is pretty good. And I think all of my friends understand the concepts of files.
I recently asked someone about 10 years older if he knew what partitioning and formatting means in the context, and he knew, despite initially saying he has no clue about computers, to show someone 10 years younger (who didn’t know) that such knowledge was just basically required back in the day. And it’s not like these terms are obsolete, the concepts are still the same, even though we went from MBR to GPT and from FAT32 or whatever to better filesystems. It’s no different for phones, but not required and even hidden.
I’d say generally, the technology userbase broadened while average knowledge in the group declined, however I’m not sure whether the absolute numbers of people with a certain knowledge level actually went down.
It’s like every generation loses the ability to do something in computer technology that was just abstracted away somehow
Yes, I’ve been hearing computer engineers (or those with that mindset) complaining that programmers don’t really understand much about how computers actually work since before I even entered the workforce, but I kind of get what they are/were saying. I’d look around at my peers nearly the entire time I’ve been doing this, and I’d see some that really wanted to know a lot about, well, everything, in some cases, being interested in hardware, and then there were a lot, maybe more than half, that just focus on learning whatever the herd is telling them is the newest shiny object - and this is nearly always vendor-led and a lot of it is less about sound reasoning, and more about being fashionable. These days it might be a frontend JS framework, but exchange the set of terms/frameworks and it’s the same old story.
These days it is increasingly difficult to know much about the actual target hardware, if you work in hosted services like Azure, etc…
It’s like every generation loses the ability to do something in computer technology that was just abstracted away somehow. I as a millennial have never soldered a PC mainboard (modding an Xbox doesn’t count), but I’d say that otherwise, my understanding is pretty good. And I think all of my friends understand the concepts of files.
I recently asked someone about 10 years older if he knew what partitioning and formatting means in the context, and he knew, despite initially saying he has no clue about computers, to show someone 10 years younger (who didn’t know) that such knowledge was just basically required back in the day. And it’s not like these terms are obsolete, the concepts are still the same, even though we went from MBR to GPT and from FAT32 or whatever to better filesystems. It’s no different for phones, but not required and even hidden.
I’d say generally, the technology userbase broadened while average knowledge in the group declined, however I’m not sure whether the absolute numbers of people with a certain knowledge level actually went down.
Yes, I’ve been hearing computer engineers (or those with that mindset) complaining that programmers don’t really understand much about how computers actually work since before I even entered the workforce, but I kind of get what they are/were saying. I’d look around at my peers nearly the entire time I’ve been doing this, and I’d see some that really wanted to know a lot about, well, everything, in some cases, being interested in hardware, and then there were a lot, maybe more than half, that just focus on learning whatever the herd is telling them is the newest shiny object - and this is nearly always vendor-led and a lot of it is less about sound reasoning, and more about being fashionable. These days it might be a frontend JS framework, but exchange the set of terms/frameworks and it’s the same old story.
These days it is increasingly difficult to know much about the actual target hardware, if you work in hosted services like Azure, etc…