"A kid puts his hand up. He tells me he's got a virus on his computer. I look at his screen. Displayed in his web-browser is what appears to be an XP dialogue box warning that his computer is infected and offering free malware scanning and removal tools. He's on a Windows 7 machine. I close the offending tab. He can't use a computer."

[...]

How the hell did we get to this situation? How can a generation with access to so much technology, not know how to use it?"

Why the hell do we expect kids to know things nobody ever told them that they exist? That seems to me like a more reasonable question. Kids don't know how human body works till we tell them, they don't know how to read unless we show it to them, why would we expect them to know how to reinstall operating system when no one ever used the word operating system in front of them?

If no one ever show RAM to kid, the kid wont be able to react on request to change it. That is the default state, the state when a kid knows a thing is a state achieved by somebody teaching the thing to kid.

Computers are now appliances rather than power tools.

I think that all the kids should be taught enough about computers to know it is no magic, that it is learnable and actually easy once you want to do it (and you dont actually need to be genius to learn it as many believe).

However, I really don't think they all need to know Linux administration.

Cars are so reliable and take so little maintenance nowadays, he marvels at them. OTOH they're also very unfriendly to the shade-tree mechanic. The engines are covered by plastic cowling panels. Everything is packed in so tightly it's a nightmare to change anything. And it's all controlled by proprietary black-box computer systems.

I think people are overreacting to simple facts of life: if a technology is mature and the services around it plenty and cheap, there's no point wasting your time learning the ins and outs of it.

I don't see what the problem is if someone doesn't know how to add a RAM stick just because I do, the same way I don't feel compelled to know how to replace a light bulb to save myself a tenner

"[Some of us chose] to debug viruses, worry about floppy disk compatibility, learn how to change out failed hard drives, etc. if we simply wanted to use technology at all"

Now, Millennials is a pretty uselessly broad term, so depending on what age range you are actually talking about, there is slightly more truth to this. If you are talking about someone who is 29-34 today, then you would be an early adopter of these technologies and it did require a high level of expertise. However this was a very small portion of the population.

If you are talking about 22-25 year olds, then computers and the internet had become more common in households and de-skilling. I know plenty of people who have used and owned computers most of their lives and have never debugged a thing.

Nerds have the inability to understand that most people use computers like any other tool. They do not obsess over it, seek to understand how it works, or otherwise care.

Like a microwave, they buy a new one if their current computer "breaks." Like a light fixture, if it malfunctions, most people hire a repairman instead of doing it themselves.

This has always been true for the mainstream users of computers. It only seems more absurd now because 16-19 year olds have had smartphones and other technology luxuries their whole lives, and so we expect them to have invested more interest into truly learning how to use them and how they work.

But availability of a technology does not have much of a connection to proficiency of said technology.

Ironically, I am sure most of the people here who whine about how little other people understand computers have a similar lack of understanding for other objects they use everyday. How many people in programming/I.T. know anything about plumbing or car maintenance?

As an aside, I always thought that the age rage for millennials was about twice as broad as it should be. I don't really find myself identifying with the older members of the cohort.

I believe that's what drives comments like "kids these days are so good at technology". When archetypal Aunt Tilly looks at somebody younger using a computer, she sees that they do not hesitate when navigating around, quickly clicking on everything that appears.

However, that doesn't always mean they know what they are doing. They're simply much more comfortable trying and hoping that it won't end badly. (Or at least not badly in a way that they can recognize, until someone tells them that their computer is full of malware.)

It's almost impossible to to mess one of these devices up (other than malware) for good, but I think most people who are not very technology literate see them as precariously balanced items that crumble at the slightest touch.

Also, last thing you want is for it to be stuck in some "useless" state when it is needed...

The real answer is, computers suck. Seriously, computers are effing awful machines, all developers are hackers, and the only reason things haven't changed is because we constantly lie to ourselves that we're okay with the world.

Passwords suck, no one can remember them, we have way too many of them to remember, and every damn site needs its own special password requirements. And on top of that every site needs its own username requirements too, so there's two things to forget. And email is the universal password, so you want to make sure you use a good password there, but you never really log into your email, do you? The password is saved. So when you get logged out somehow, good luck remembering the password.

And don't get me started on keyboard shortcuts. At least Windows is consistent, quick question: what's the keyboard shortcut on a Mac to go to the beginning of your current line? Ah trick question, it's different for every god damned application! And some applications don't even allow for that without highlighting the entire line!

There's a reason "digital natives" are great at using phones and choose to use them more. iOS and Android were built from scratch and could learn from all of the mistakes of the old systems. In the process, they came up with a ton of their own mistakes (3D touch and long press each do different things? Really? Also TouchWiz is just a bad idea), but consistency and focus are major wins here.

Computers suck and people get scared. Only having one app on the screen at once, only having one way to do things... that's what people like. It's not perfect, but man computers suck. Anything that makes them suck less is a huge win.

It's easy to brush off the millions of things that computers allow us to do that we couldn't do before because of some terrible UIs.

Computers suck, the internet sucks, but the pony express and cargo boats sucked worse. I can get a message across the world in about a second. No applause for that though. No praise for the things we can now do. We're just too eager to find things we wish we could do, and blame our current technology for not knowing our dreams.

If only those pesky users would just read the source code, they’d understand why this site works when you put www in front of it but doesn’t work without it! And if they want it changed, well it’s open source! They should send a pull request!

It's Control-A in every app!

(or Up if it's a one line text field)

I haven't seen any macOS applications that don't accept Ctrl-A (or any other Emacs-style shortcuts, while we're at it). Maybe I just haven't looked hard enough.

After all, we do that too with git and containers.

If you broke your editor's buttons / view settings, but also typed a dozen pages, you don't want to undo your typing to undo your settings changes.

One way to do everything robs people of their ability to think.

Under that definition, I don't think that there's ever been a successful developer. I'd set the bar more at the ecosystem level. Once a user learns how an ecosystem works, the software in it should be as intuitive as the complexity of their tasks allow. Anything more seems like making perfect the enemy of good.

No, they're amazing machines and don't suck. They just don't meet our arbitrarily high expectations.

But [thread] OP is correct. UIs absolutely do suck.

The proof is that after fifty years of UI design, there's still no such thing as a standard system/technique/anything for assessing the quality, reliability, and effectiveness of a user interface.

There's been almost no effective research into cataloguing the most common kinds of user error OR developer error and designing systems that minimise those errors.

There's a lot of tribal and religious noise about operating systems and languages, but virtually none of it is based on empirical research.

I realise this isn't really the crux of your post, and I broadly agree with you that computers still suck. But the answer to this question is CMD + left arrow. I have no idea what applications you're using where this doesn't work.

The opposite is true too.

The other day one of my coworkers, a senior engineer in his 40's. Sent a simple C++ program he had written to dump some data into a CSV file to another coworker(a new graduate in her early 20's) via email. I was CC'ed. The email body simply said:

Usage: convert.exe [infile] [out.csv]

She stopped by my desk later in the day I mentioned in passing "How did that program work out for you?" she then complained that she couldn't work out how to supply the program with the arguments - double clicking the file did nothing for her. Turns out she had never used a command line in her life.

I was shocked I grew up on the command line it boggles my mind to thing there is an entire generation who has been raised on nothing but a gui. This is quite a smart person with an (non software) engineering degree mind you.

One of our code tests for hiring is writing a very simple version of grep with only a few flags like case sensitive, recursive and inverted. Of the 10 or so people that kind of completed it, not a single person seemed to understand that multiple flags could be specified (in any format).

They will almost always use Caps Lock instead of the Shift key, so rather than momentarily hold down the Shift key and press the letter they want capitalized, they will press the Caps Lock key, type the letter and then press the Caps Lock key again.

Considering that there is only one Caps Lock key compared to two Shift keys I am not quite sure why they do it this way since their hand has to travel further when capitalizing letters on the right-hand side of the keyboard.

As for this 'millennial' business, I think you can quite easily divide the cohort into conscious before they had access to the internet and vice-versa. This obviously varies between geographic regions, socio-economic status and a number of other factors, but from personal experience, there is a massive divide between the two.

DOS and earlier Linux and a more transparent and layered setup. But these days we have stuff reaching all the way from the office suite to the GPU for reasons I can only consider eyecandy.

The mouse skilled people where way more advanced and picking up the taught skills much faster in the practical courses, so I had to tune the program to haptically help the novices and do only non-mouse-favoring questions in the exam. The beginners and the women were equally good in the academic skills, but the women still left from 50% down to 20% for social reasons. But in the end - in the office - the numbers were equal again, even more than 50%, so I was happy.

https://www.osnews.com/print/6282/The_Command_Line_-_The_Bes...

I sometimes think that perhaps the myth of the digital native generation arose because an insanely high percentage of the population is so illiterate with computers that they think that just because the kids are spending all of their time in front of screens it means that those kids automatically "understand" computers when in fact they are just learning very specific applications of computers.

I also think it's a bit of a cop out on their part (not sure that it's the right word). The computer illiterate are so turned off by the idea of trying to understand computers that they will gladly throw compliments at any kid just so that the kids will shut up about anything relating to computers. "Oh ho ho, I'm so old you know I don't know anything about them computers and phones and what have ya. But you kids, you grew up with these things, so to you they are second nature."

Edit: Sibling commenter about millennial vs gen z has a good point. Still I think that it's mostly those of us that made an effort to learn that it goes for though, just like with the people that grew up before that with home computers.

The result of that is you had people as early as elementary school being exposed to programming through Commodore, TRS80s, Apples, etc. Being exposed to something so young tends to give you more understanding over time. Of course, it wasn't for everybody.

Today, computer are more abundant than ever, but they already do stuff. They've, for the most part, become appliances. You have to actively seek out programming whereas before, the computer didn't do much without it.

I'm a little biased though.