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

Obligatory Simpson Quote...

[It doesn't come easy]

Abe: I used to be with it, but then they changed what "it" was. Now, what I'm with isn't it, and what's "it" seems weird and scary to me. (Episode: 3F21 Homerpalooza)

It's only going to get worse as the pace of change continues to accelerate. In ten years a few engineers will be designing new classes of electronics based on quantum principles. Or totally new types of devices based on photons or magnetic spin vs. electron charge. Ten years later, that will be passé and maybe we'll be doing something with neutrinos. Who knows how things will work 30 years from now. It will all be magic by then.

It is somewhat true

[suitepotato]

I feel kind of odd watching flamewars about who is tougher and more hardcore, C++ or some other language group, and I think to myself, "maybe they should have to actually deal with assembly, logic, and bits for real before they start talking hardcore. I remember when we were putting together kits out of catalogs with hex pads and light up bulbs and calling it computing.

Oh well. I think all this excitement has gotten to me. I'm going to go take a nap now. Where's my cane?

Re:Grumpy Old Man

['nother poster]

I don't know anything about diverging fieldds and such, but it's simply a sign that the technologies have become commodities. At the early part of a technologies lifecycle only the early adopters and geeks get into it and have to know the nuts and bolts of how it works because you have to make it and maintain it. Then some others come in and you have to maintain it for them. Then the tech gets matured to the point that it becomes a commodity and they still need many of the originl geeks and adopters to maintain it, but they don't do nearly as much down in the guts of the tech anymore. Very few tech geeks nowadays could tell you all the parts that go into a working steam turbine electrical generating system, but they can sure plug in a gadget and use the electricity. This allows the next generation to focus their efforts on the next new technology, which will eventually become the next commodity, ad infinitum.

No kidding

[einhverfr]

I am often put into the role of teaching others how things work. I am 29 years old and have no CS background (I am entirely self-taught). I talk to most techies and they have no idea how things work behind the scenes. I am not talking "this IM client sends the message to the server which sends it to the other IM client." I am talking an in-depth understanding of how things like TCP, IP, and UDP work. They generally have no clue. I actually had one student who had several years of IT experience tell me that he thought UDP and ICMP were the same thing...

How did I understand how these things worked? I started by reading the oldest documentation I could find. Part of the problem is that computer professionals have become very good at confusing eachother (using the OSI model to discuss TCP/IP for example) and the other part is that the document writers in general don't understand what they are writing about. Then I could go and read newer documentation and have some sense of what it is worth. Good documentation in this industry is a rare thing.

Maybe it helped that both of my grandparents on my mom's side were writing programs before I was even in diapers ;-)

Re:Grumpy Old Man

[biryokumaru]

I'll bet the people who maintain or design and build the Tesla turbines know how they work. That's what I mean by divergence versus commoditization.

With commoditization, as you describe it, the common fear is that all the knowledge will one day be lost because no one has to use it anymore. You see this in a lot of B Sci-Fi movies set in the distant future, often leading to religious-based uprising (religion being the clear enemy of science, what?)

Whereas, with technological divergence, you end up with the breakup of a field into two, like "computers" into "hardware" and "software." There are plenty of electrical engineering students who know what NPN and PNP mean, and haven't a clue about, say, the pros and cons of classes versus structs re functional programming and modularization.

Thus I say it is a point of divergence, because the field has broken into component fields. Commoditization is a realistic fear, which was certainly described somewhat in TFA, but I think it is somewhat narrow-minded at this point. Most people don't know a carburetor from a transaxle, or what ring and tell have to do with traditional land-line telephones. That doesn't mean that knowledge is lost.

I, being a believer in meritocracy, ignore the actions of the end-users, who know not what they do.