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"Kids Can't Use Computers" is now ten years old, and it's only gotten worse
(www.coding2learn.org)
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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So when the author says it's the 30-50 year olds that know how to use computers, today it's the 40-60 year olds. I'd say it goes older than that.
One thing that used to bug me on reddit was youngsters going on about how over-50s wouldn't know how to use a computer. That hasn't been the case for decades now.
It's actually the 8-80 year olds that don't know how to use computers.
Most people don't know. They just know how to use a handful of programs. But the vast majority of them don't understand the basic concepts behind them. Things like files and directories are nebulous at best.
Does it matter? A little, because so much stuff revolves around computers nowadays. Which means that they don't really understand the world they're navigating daily. OTOH, they live perfectly well as they are, so it clearly doesn't matter to them.
It's like understanding how a car works. Some people know what every sound is. Some people can't even grasp what oil is.
We’re going to end up like that society in Star Trek that worships a computer.
But... The Computer is our friend!
Hear hear! We 40-50+ year old geeks were learning the Internet as it rolled out. Before that we were upgrading our PCs and modems as funds permitted, joining & running BBS's on DOS. OS/2 seemed futuristic and I ran it for a while, but Linux won my heart. As a teenager, I had my favourite kernel hackers, tested their patches, chatted with them on IRC. Before that, we had our C64s, Amiga 500s and similar. We had the greatest opportunity to learn, and we loved it.
Over the last 10 years I've really had to dumb down my interview questions, covering a wider range of topics until I (hopefully) find a spark of passion and beyond-user-level knowledge about anything (even unrelated to the position)... it used to be easier.
I feel like getting into opensource software is easier than it ever was at least, the biggest Barrie's I see are people thinking they can't and advertising making people defensive about sticking to proprietary options.