Tech Geezers vs. Young Bloods

Lam1969 writes "Robert Mitchell talks about how technology is dividing him from younger generations: "The technologies I've watched grow have shaped an entire culture of which I am not a part." Adds Dinosaur: "Ask them [members of the younger generation] HOW the things work, and they have no idea. They are really riding on the backs of the 'old folks' like us that built the goodies they enjoy.""

Comments

Old people are just as stupid.

[CyberBill]

"Ask them [members of the younger generation] HOW the things work, and they have no idea. They are really riding on the backs of the 'old folks' like us that built the goodies they enjoy.""

Do the same thing to the old folks. They dont know either. Of course some punk ass kid on a skateboard doesnt know how stuff works, hes retarded. A generation does not invent, select individuals do. Remember, people are stupid.

That's how it's supposed to work

[gamer4Life]

How many people can produce a fire out of just sticks?

Fact is, our society is becoming increasingly specialized, and it's no surprise that some people won't understand the technology behind it even though they use it frequently. They're just specialized in other things, that's all.

As long as *somebody* knows how the technology works (engineers and scientists), there isn't a need to worry.

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[biryokumaru]

You always get this kind of attitude when a technology reaches a divergent point. I would hazard that many people know how to build CPUs and how the internal workings of a system function as ever, it's just that the hardware and the software have slowly diverged over the past twenty years. No longer do you need to know the particulars of a video card to communicate with it, etc. It isn't necessary for software people to know hardware, and visa versa. Both fields have become complex enough to function independently.

Thanks to standardization of system design and function, this isn't really a problem. And I'm certain that AMD and Intel take very careful consideration of the software demands their hardware will face (as do Crucial, ASUS, et al).

There may be a few remaining niches where the software and the hardware remain inextricably intertwined, such as small consumer devices, (iPod Nano, palmtop computers, etc).

It's the modern dilemma: there is too much to know. Two or three hundred years ago, you could read every book ever written. Now you can't even read every book ever written about computing.

It's the old joke: How many software engineers does it take to change a light bulb?

That's a hardware problem.

Re:In other news, water found to be wet, fire hot.

[dlefavor]

point to me at some point in the last 100 years where your average person knew to any degree of certainty how their tech worked

I don't think it's the average user, the author is bothered by, it's the average technology person.

I'm often unpleasantly surprised with some of my supposedly technical colleagues' ignorance as to how computers work.

But what's truly more complex?

[CyricZ]

Let's take your example of assembly versus C++ versus some other language. Consider the software that was written in assembly back in the 1950s and 1960s. Sure, there were some pretty impressive pieces of work. Various compilers, OS/360, and whatnot. But compared to software today, such items are of a level of complexity often expected from first or second year undergraduate Comp. Sci. students.

Sure, we're not using assembly today, but even some of the more minor systems implemented in C++ are far more complex than anything that was written in pure assembly several decade ago. I mean, look at something like an optimizing JIT Java virtual machine or a .NET runtime. Those are fairly complex motherfuckers. Far more complex than anything that was even conceived a few decades back.

Re:But what's truly more complex?

[suitepotato]

You're missing my point (and maybe I wasn't clear). The core of all higher languages is in the end the basic logic of binary circuits. Understand AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR, etc., and binary math, and that everything devolves to those foundations and you have a better grasp on what you can do with the higher concepts. I rather think the explosion of applications on every platform with crappy memory management and bloat is directly related to this. Coders of today do not understand anything about stacks and registers and limitations. Frugality, Occam's Razor, and other important principles are ignored and heck, never even learned. Just throw everything you want in there and since you don't know why any of the snippets does what it does in machine code, you won't know when a compiler is going to do its designed thing and result in problems. If you did know, you would have written things differently. The law of unintended consequences can be hemmed in by understanding the finer grained lower levels of any complex system. It isn't for nothing that the people who design and build engines have to know something of metallurgy, mechanical engineering, materials engineering, machining, etc. What the little tiny bits of metal will do in response to the doings of the big complex engine is important. So too is it with programming.

Re:But what's truly more complex?

[Angst Badger]

The difference is that in Ye Olde Days, a programmer had to understand all of that complexity because he had to code it himself. Today's systems are more complex, but the average programmer only has to understand the interfaces presented by various pre-packaged APIs and components that hide the complexity -- which was presumably understood by the specialist programmers who designed those components.

The sad truth of the matter is that both the oldbies and the newbies are wrong. Contrary to what the oldbies think, the field is now sufficiently large that it's not possible to understand all of the complexities, and you don't need to understand all of them. The newbies, on the other hand, are so wrapped up in their reflexive sophomoric belief that new = better that they miss the valuable point that their predecessors are making: sometimes, you can write better software if you know what's going on inside the black box.

This reminds me of the pointless flamewar that erupts from time to time between hard-core assembly language programmers and the users (but seldom the developers) of optimizing compilers. There is a popular but mistaken belief that today's optimizing compilers can outperform hand-coded assembly. Even for some fairly trivial cases, this is simply not true, but you have to be an experienced assembly language programmer to even make the comparison between human-generated and machine-generated code.

What I think the oldbies are really lamenting -- at least *I* am lamenting it, having been programming since the punch-card era -- is the declining level of skill necessary to write software. In the old days, it had to be not only good, but actually excellent code, because the hardware wasn't fast or capacious enough to handle the kind of code that's the norm these days. No one -- well, very few of us -- wrote code in assembly language because we wanted to; we did it because we had to. And from this, there was the usual pride that arises from what amounted to fine craftsmanship. Nowadays, the economics of software development have shifted so that it is just too goddamn expensive to build code that way, not that it's more expensive than it ever was, but because it's so much cheaper to throw some fresh junior college grads at it and call it good. That they come complete with the arrogance of ignorance only adds insult to injury.

This is not the first time this has happened. You heard similar complaints from all of the craftsmen who were put out of work by the industrial revolution. Fine, hand-crafted furniture is stronger, longer-lasting, and (arguably) more attractive than the particle-board and veneered junk that comes out of industrial furniture factories, but no one can afford the "good" stuff anymore, and the cheap junk is good enough.

The difference in quality is not imaginary. Compare the old MS-DOS editor, QEdit, with the trivial and ubiquitous Unix editor, PICO. QEdit, which was written in assembly language and is completely statically linked, weighed in somewhere around 48k and included vastly more capabilities as well as a fairly sophisticated macro language. PICO, which doesn't have much in the way of capabilities at all and is written in a high-level language, weighs in at 171k and then dynamically links in some more libraries, occupying over a meg of RAM before it has even loaded a file.

Would the average user notice any difference in performance if all code was written the old way? Yes, especially -- but not exclusively -- on older machines. The problem is that the average user couldn't afford to buy software built that way, any more than the average person can afford to furnish their entire home with fine handcrafted furniture.

What surprises me, however, is that in the free software world, where such economic considerations do not apply, the free apps are often not much better than the equivalent commercial apps. OpenOffice and MS Office, for example, are both big, lumbering, resource-hungry hogs whose resour

Stupidity?

[Skyshadow]

Why should the average person understand how their cell phone works?

Seriously, how is it stupidity to simply be ignorant of things that you don't need to know? I don't know how my digital camera works beyond a few of the basics (light shines on CCD, then... er... picture ends up on my flash card), that doesn't stop me from being a reasonably good photographer. I know how to use my camera, how to manipulate the aperture and the shutter time and the ISO to get the picture that I want. Isn't that what counts?

No person can be an expert on everything, and in my experience the people who try tend to be the real useless ones...

Riiight...

[Rallion]

And this older generation, they did everything themselves, from scratch! They started out by learning how to mine and refine metals, to create copper wire. Then they discovered electricity. They invented the resistor and the capacitor. They learned how to machine parts....

Standing on the shoulders of those who came before is the definition of progress. So, please, unless you make your own wiring and screws and capacitors and what have you, shut up and stop whining.

Screw new technology...

[Morgalyn]

.. most people still don't know how a flushing toilet works. It's something most everyone uses every single day. It's a very simple machine. But apparently I was some sort of female plumber superhero in college because I knew how to fix it.

Some people will just never become curious about the things they use from day to day. Others will. That's the difference.

I think the same thing every time I see this stuff

[ifwm]

GOOD!

I'm a smart, technically savvy individual, who generally knows how ALL of his technology works. In fact, I make it a point to do so most of the time.

And as long as that's the case, that means that I WANT the younger generation to be ignorant, so I can reap the rewards of their ignorance.

As long as they're still ignorant, I'm still getting paid.

Down with ageism.

[Pinback]

After racism and sexism die out, maybe we can go after ageism. Making arbitrary distinctions based on age is just as bad as doing so based on race or sex.

Not really.

[einhverfr]

It's the modern dilemma: there is too much to know. Two or three hundred years ago, you could read every book ever written.

But committing to memory all of the oral tradition even in one culture would have a similar education to what we have today. I think it was Pliny who said that the Druids had something like 20 years of training. And it doesn't take a professional Linguist to read something like "How to Kill a Dragon" and realize the depth of these traditions. Or how easily can one commit the entire Rig Veda to memory (it was originally memorized, you know).

In other words, the required knowledge in specialized fields really isn't a new phenominon.

The second issue is that most of this stuff isn't really that conceptually complex. It can easily be explained in Contemporary Standard American English without using jargon. The problem is that people have so much ego invested in broken analogies (OSI model used to "explain" how TCP works, for example, with few people even remembering that OSI was supposed to be a competitor to TCP and built along fundamentally different assumptions).

In short it is not that there is too much to know, but that it is hard to winnow it down so that you know what information to consume. The problem is compounded by broken requirements like knowing the OSI model which is not only dead but broken.

(I always tell people to memorize the OSI model for exams and then don't ever worry about using it after.)