Yes, this attitude is a clear part of why Slack crushed IRC. "It was easy for me, therefore anybody who finds it hard is dumb and we can ignore them."

I too figured out all sorts of computer things at 12. By standardized tests, I'm also in the top 1% of ability for things like that. And my dad was a programmer then, so I had a leg up.

At some point, I realized I had a choice. I could feel smug about my (narrow) genius and focus on tools for my (narrow) cohort. While grumping, of course, about how stupid everybody else was. Or I could recognize my luck and use it to make things that were good for everybody.

You know what helped me make this choice? Realizing how bad I was at so many other things. And how generous other people were in not only putting up with that, but helping me along.

In my middle school (late 90's, the age of ICQ) all the self-described "non-technical" girls spent their breaks on mIRC in the computer lab gossiping or whatever teenage girls do. If we're talking about a developer audience (the readers of Hacker News) it really isn't difficult at all.

Are you sure that wasn't just AIM? AIM couldn't be port blocked like IRC. Most all schools had already blocked those ports.

It was definitely IRC. As boys who had a prerogative to tease girls, we installed NetNanny to block launching mIRC (and then the trial period expired and the school computers got infested with registration reminders...). AIM had zero mindshare in Europe at the time, it was all ICQ and later MSN.

Our school had nothing blocked, and the computers weren't locked down at all.

Yep. It's not hard. People are pretty clever and will work things out if they need to. It's just that we hand feed them shit like slack and tell each other that they're surely too dumb to use anything else.

> If that bar is too high for people in tech then we have serious problems.

But Slack isn't solely used by technical people. Where I work, everyone is on slack - product people, lawyers, tech people, etc.