Another deterioration I've noticed in knowledge is around the amount of understanding of a filesystem. There's a growing generation that don't properly understand files, folders and directory structures, as they learned their computing skills on an iPhone or iPad (my guess).

I've seen this generation start to reach college and lack familiarity with the basics of file management and general basic productivity on a computer.

The decline in general inquisitiveness is also a challenge - computing devices are now sealed and gasketed, single purpose, and most people have never looked inside one, let alone wanted to understand how they work. There's a part of growing up with technology where you should (in my view) start to wonder things like how if computers run programs, who made the first program? And how did they write it? And what tools did they use to write it if they had no other programs?

It's very challenging to enthuse someone who hasn't thought about this into wanting to learn to program and think like a power user - the locked down computers they've known as they grew up were content consumption platforms, not creation. Apps are made by "other people" in some unknown process - the thought they could do it generally doesn't cross their mind.

In the high school computer programming class I teach we use headless Debian on a Raspberry Pi. The idea that you can rename files, move them, and organize them is mind blowing to about a third of the students. When I ask how they organize their school files, they either use Google Docs for everything (all in one folder) or, if they use Word, they have one folder with all their documents named, "New Document", "New Document (1)", "New Document (2)", &c. When I teach them Chemistry as juniors and insist that they use a spreadsheet (or general purpose programming language) for their complex problem sets, about 90% of them have never seen a spreadsheet before. We now have the "talk" with our juniors about backups, as more than one has lost their entire junior thesis because it was stored on their laptop and nowhere else.

It's frustrating that we spent decades developing fantastic tools to help ourselves with all sorts of intellectual work, and have more or less abandoned teaching people to use them well.

As the tower of abstraction has gotten taller, there's a temptation to teach near the shiny end; ML for high school! But that leaves students with huge gaps in their understanding of how things work under the hood, which impairs their ability to connect what they learn and build on it.

I had the polar opposite of this problem in my school, to the point that I joke that I got a BTEC in Excel, not ICT. All the competent teachers either left the school or didn't last, and left behind only the fresh out of uni teachers that only know how to teach, but don't know the subject they're teaching. As such they only teach you the bare minimum of how to work a desk job because they are incapable of climbing higher for themselves.

The most advanced thing I learned in my sixth form was designing an e-commerce website - not coding it, just using MS Paint and Word to make a first mockup. This was sixth form, the level just below going to university and I was being taught Microsoft fucking Paint.

> When I ask how they organize their school files, they either use Google Docs for everything (all in one folder) or, if they use Word, they have one folder with all their documents named, "New Document", "New Document (1)", "New Document (2)", &c.

1000x this - even on Mac, the rise in the "recents" view seems to be intended to avoid the user needing to know where their files are stored. This means users can't find them to back them up, as they don't understand the file has a path and location, belonging to a structural hierarchy. It's a document, so my junior thesis should be backed up if I back up "documents", right? (Not if it's stored in Downloads.....)

> We now have the "talk" with our juniors about backups, as more than one has lost their entire junior thesis because it was stored on their laptop and nowhere else.

Still see this problem with honours year degree students - must happen at least a couple of times per year, even with access to more on-prem and cloud storage than they can shake a stick at! Tolerance for this kind of situation is now so limited that it's likely a student in that situation may end up failing.

> As the tower of abstraction has gotten taller, there's a temptation to teach near the shiny end

The sheer height of the tower is now such that chunks of it seem to be forgotten about, and crumbling away. And the foundations are near collapse - it's incredibly exhausting trying to explain concepts to someone that has no basic understanding of the operation of a computer, yet is trying to be learn new things.

I've seen boot camps trying to teach people git, where the instructors themselves don't properly understand how the command line works, and wouldn't be able to explain that the files a student "sees" in Finder are the same files as in the Terminal...

It's not necessarily a bad thing. We have folders and file names because we lacked a search feature. Now if you want "the file where I said X..." you search for X, and there it is. No need to remember where you put it; no need to remember the precise name of it. GMail trained them not to need folders, and I assure you I don't miss them.

If people need folders and file names, they're there. People will rediscover them and reinvent all the techniques we did. But they're also inventing new techniques that fit their workflows. Workflows that are more efficient because they're built around their toolkit, not our toolkit.

Like the toolkit of just doing everything online. I've got Google backing up almost everything I do, faster, cheaper, and better than I can. And available anywhere. Not only is it there if I lose my laptop, it's there if I left it at home and want to use my phone, or somebody else's computer.

Different times call for different mechanisms. They'll take time to shake out, see what survives and what doesn't. But things they don't learn aren't necessarily signs of weakness. They may be signs of new strengths.

I think this grossly underestimates how badly people use file systems.

Granted, I would be in the tail end of this theoretical golden age, but I worked in college IT to pay for undergrad in the early-mid 10s at a mid-tier large public university and my job entailed helping out people around my age cohort and adults. We did file backups a lot.

I can safely say that probably 99% of people did not have subfolders and pretty much exclusively used Documents, Downloads and Desktop. Maybe Pictures. Usually with names like paper, paper-1, paper-draft, paper-draft-1, paper-draft-final. I have literally seen desktops filled with icons multiple times over, never organized or cleaned. Almost none of these people have probably seen a command line, and certainly not outside a context where they are following a step by step guide.

If it works for you it isn‘t stupid, but people on HN seem to like to project a very rosy picture of technical literacy in the golden days when very few people probably got to that level.

kids use cloud storage lije Google drive which has folder structure. they learn through that

Too bad they did not learn how to write.

Agree after that period where you stopped needing to manually install drivers and configure things I'm sure tech literacy dropped off - there is no reason to know how your technology works these days (to survive) unless you like tinkering. I am sure it is the same in other technological areas too - I grew up fixing the family cars and now it seems every minor problem goes to the garage. I think black boxes are just the norm now - I'm guessing there are large portions, both young and old, of the population who don't use the internet outside of a smartphone or tablet which they use until it breaks or slows down and replace with another magical app machine. No understanding of tech required.

I've only noticed the use of WiFi to mean Internet pretty recently. Its thoroughly confusing when you are trying to trouble shoot WiFi problems for someone and you realise their WiFi is working fine - their ISP just has an outage. I'd say this is a modern problem but I remember people calling the computer tower the CPU for as long as I can remember.

After a few years of working home internet tech support when I was a youngin I’ve learned that you can’t really rely on anything the caller says, up to and including whether or not they actually powercycled. You gotta rely on them doing what you say to do and verifying it by how they describe the result. That job taught me patience to a fault. And misanthropy, but the patience was more useful.

It not just the yunguns, either. I'm from just the very end of the generation you describe, and have some memory of the limitations of computers at the time (I remember dialup and not being able to use the phone, having to change the computer to 256 colours in order to play games, things being too big to fit on a floppy disc, etc.) but I cringe every time my dad calls anything wireless "wi-fi", or uses wi-fi as a verb:

The laptop wi-fis to the internet! Sure, I guess... The phone wi-fis to the internet! Um, yeah... The phone wi-fis to the tower to get internet! Wait, what? The phone wi-fis to the tower to make calls! No! The phone wi-fis to my headphones! Ok, warmer, but that's Bluetooth. ThE tElEvIsIoN rEmOtE wI-fIs To ThE tElEvIsIoN!!!1 NO IT DOES NOT!!

Agreed, so true. People are addicted to platforms, social media but can't run a program, grep, shell, reverse shell, etc.

Setting up IRQ settings, jumper for IRQ settings, replacing/installing PCI/ISA/AGP cards...

Man. It's amazing, just, how much separation there is by a generation.

We can do our part in my opinion, by educating, showing advantages of knowing how to use tech. I've written a tech setup guide for example for my family, taught my mum what CLI is, basic stuff on it. I think while this is an issue it can partly be solved without much effort, if we simply show others benefits of knowing tech

OK I agree with this thread, but man, IRQ ? those are some low level shit

I am not convinced. I was born in the early 70s and am struggling to see what technical know-how I am lacking in comparison with those born a decade later.

I don't think hacker news readers are exactly an unbiased demographic.

I think the date range is off, but the idea is correct. Born in early 70’s means being just at the right age to learn during the home / microcomputer revolution.

I don’t think you missed anything.

Yes, my first computer experience was Atari 2600 which my cousin had. I was 7 years or so. My first own computer was Commodore 64.