Young people (on average) know less about computing than they did.
The author of this article says "floppy disks, or 'the save icon' as the young kids would recognize it" - except that they often wouldn't. Kids don't have any experience of saving and loading files.
They know less about desktop computing.
You could argue that's not really computing, and in a very obvious sense it isn't. But it's certainly a form of application development, for a very specific kind of application.
And the up side is that - unless AI takes over - people who can do nuts and bolts infrastructure computing will be rarer and in even higher demand than they are now.
But, on the other hand, I've met teenagers who lacked confidence even using a browser to navigate to an unfamiliar website. They've learned how to navigate particular apps as silos.
This reminds me of my parents and grandparents' generation using computers. Comfortable with what they know and use regularly; no concept of what happens outside of that narrow window.
Same energy.
I grew up with cars I could (and did) service. I still remember how to break down a drum brake, and adjust it so it worked again when re-assembled. I've used grease zerks on the auto I drove. I've helped troubleshoot a carburetor.
Can't do that anymore, and it's only partially because the components don't exist, but because everything is so much more complicated you have to specialize in it to get much done.
Tangent wrap-up.
Maybe these "digital natives" have simply decided to specialize in something other than computers (and cars). Not all of them: I work with several folks who are decades younger than me, and they're perfectly comfortable with packet captures and bare metal databases.
Yup, this article is some world-class curmudgeoning. Most kids my age weren't programming at 7, so I had free reign on the commodore PET in the school library. Same thing goes for kids of today. Most are passive consumers, some will tear their world apart and figure out what makes things tick.
As a tuner, this reads strangely. I've rebuilt my ABS disc brakes and ECU tuning has been a thing for decades. People are building 300hp Saabs in their garages with open source software.
Maybe not the same thing, but about two years ago, my car's check engine light came on. Dealer quoted me $2400 to fix the issue (ABS pump failed because of low voltage on system power). About a month ago, some friends and I spent a Saturday replacing the ABS pump. $300 ebay part, $20 worth of tools, $10 worth of brake fluid, $50 worth of OBD-2 readers to confirm what the problem was, and $50 for lunch for my friends.
I think it's not impossible to fix cars today. Maybe you won't be tuning an engine to get more power out of it, but it's 100% possible to tear down your brakes, brake systems, and lots of other stuff if you know where to look. I'm not super technical with cars, but if you forced me to it, I could change out my car's brake pads given two days.
This stuff isn't easy, and the tools are more computerized now, but if you want to understand modern cars, the info is out there. Buy your car's maintenance manual. It'll probably cost $30, but you'll have more information about your car than you could ever possibly learn. Every circuit, every resistor, every bus line, every hydraulic line.
But I think you're right that there is a class of people who work at a level above the tech. And I think that's what "digital native" usually refers to. Something less like a software engineer, something more like a societal engineer (I don't want to use the term "social engineer" because that's a loaded term in the security world). For them, tech is a platform to be used for alternate ends - followers, and likes, and clout and such.
I think it's a good thing that not everyone needs to be able to troubleshoot DHCP issues in order to get online - though I know that my friends and I got really good at that in high school. The fact that we enable people to operate at the level of societal engineering (as opposed to forcing everyone to operate at the level of software engineering) speaks to the maturity of tech. And that, at least, should be comforting to those who use tech to create tech.
on mobile systems, the balance of power feels very different. apps are each their own immersive experiences, each picking their own widgets, toolkits, styling, paradigms. many apps are a thin shell over far off closed services we could not understand if we tried.
mobile has been a very advanced war on general purpose computing. the value of understanding the os, understanding "computing" has gone way way down in this far more black boxes environment. the user has been treated like an idiot, protected endlessly from themselves, and the technical underpinnings deeply deeply masked over.
computing is being destroyed, especially on mobile. the desktop is one of the few places one has any chance to learn about computing in any meaningful way.
Until you can make a first class "mobile app" on a mobile, it's a system for manipulating people.
Of course its muggings here how has to perform the task of putting it all back together - the emotional labor to use a modern term.
That of believing that living lower down the stack makes you superior somehow...
Here's an example of someone I think is clearly fucking amazing but arguably lives much higher up the stack than this guy...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...
With a modest amount of effort, you could totally understand an AMPS phone, the last generation of analog cellular. It was a two-way FM radio controlled by a tiny CPU, no more complex than a Commodore 64.
Understanding a modern phone is a huge job. Even at a general level. There's a 90s data center worth of compute power in there. About four radios. A GPU. A 6-axis inertial guidance system. Several cameras. A rather excessive amount of software. A web browser, which is itself overly complex. Voice codecs. Voice recognition. Quite possibly a machine learning system.
That's a lot to understand. It is also not useful to the end user to understand it.
Put in other terms, even those who absorbed the Commodore 64 programmer's guide didn't truly understand the machine. They may have known how to write software for it and even how to exploit the various chips, but that manual only provided surface level details about the electronics.
I’ve tried (well maybe not phones, but other things). There’s a lot of stuff and large chunks of it are either undocumented, do not provide documentation unless you are in a contract with the company or are very superficially documented. On top I usually ended up finding I could not fully comprehend how A worked without comprehending B which required C which required D, etc.
That being said, the "digital natives" claim really rubs me the wrong way even when it is confined to the subset of people who are genuinely interested in computers. It leaves the impression that the younger generation has little to learn from the older generation. The flow of knowledge should be going in both directions.
Today, just millions of normal people use computers, tablets, phones, appliances every day and they get along fine - but they are not power users, since you can spend your time on the computer with almost zero knowledge about it.
A concrete example would be that it's totally fine today to not know, what a file or folder is - because all you see is a feed or an album.
Do a lot of kids (above a certain age) actually not know what a file or folder is? Doing perfectly ordinary day-to-day stuff which is not at all technical in nature, I find I have to save and open files all the time.
My kids know a lot less about the internals of a tech stack than I do, but they create a lot more things with the tools at their disposal than I do. Unlike the author, I think they're in a better place than I am.
Gen Z usually seem more like Boomers who can maybe do wonderful things with the video-telephone thingy but don't know a lot about it.
I get it, you're not too old to be good at computers, but I don't see the need to put down the younger generation and act like their tech knowledge doesn't extend beyond "video streaming".
Acting like kids are computer wizards is an exaggeration, but acting like young people know less about computing than this older generation is simply wrong.