I’m honestly blown away by how many developers don’t even know the basics of git

There was a post here a while back about how younger generations often don’t understand concepts like file system structures because concepts like that (which are still relevant in a lot of contexts) have been largely stripped out of modern user interfaces. If your primary computing device is a cell phone, a task like “make a nested directory structure and move this file to the deepest part of it” is a foreign concept.

I guess my point here is that I agree with yours about this being cyclical in a sense. I feel crippled on a cell phone, but I’m also in my comfort zone on a Linux terminal. Using web apps like MS Teams is often difficult for me because their UIs are not things I’m comfortable with. I don’t tend to like default layouts and also tend to use advanced features which are usually hidden away behind a few menus. Tools built to meet my needs specifically would largely not meet the needs of most users. A Level 1 user would probably have a better experience there than a Level 3 like me. It’s hard (maybe impossible) to do UX design that satisfies everyone.

That is the reason for degrading proficiency. Not, that the tools are bad but the attitude, they have to be easy to use.

That almost everything “just works” is nice as a consumer but it won’t make you troubleshoot and you will not gain technical expertise by using such devices.

Well, in his defense, I could save a file from 8 different applications and they end up in 8 different locations on my phone file system. You would think they would all go to Documents or Downloads…nope. apps dont let you pick locations, and if they do, you don’t get to pick anywhere you want

They don’t know how to send a PDF file from their phone to laptop

With USB cable? Because outside of that it gets complicated and/or vendor-specific quickly.

Managing digital information today is a horrible mess of silos and big business driven incompatibilities. It often drives people to use PDFs, as there is nothing appropriate. Blame the software/businesses, not the victims/users.

Why would they need to know what a folder/directory is? It’s a remnant from meat space and was replaced by tagging and is being replaced by LLM search/AI.

Why wouldn’t they be able to upload it directly to canvas?

I really empathize with people that didn’t have to figure out how to rip a CD at 2x speed or take a class on card catalog systems. They skipped a lot of critical problem solving learning opportunities.

In my experience, it’s not just a lack of reading comprehension, but often some combination of an utter lack of curiosity, laziness and defeatism. Many other things, like video games, have escaped the realm of being reserved only for nerds and gone mainstream, yet computers remain something people just constantly assume are hopelessly complicated.

I know for a fact my mother-in-law can read just fine, as she spends most of her day reading novels and will gladly spend the rest of it telling me about them if I happen to be there. Yet when it comes to her cell phone, if there’s any issue at all, she just shuts down. She would just rather not be able to access her online banking in the Citi bank app for weeks or months at a time, until one of us goes and updates it for her, rather than reading the banner that says “The version of this app is too old, please click here to update and continue using it.” and clicking the damn button. If anyone points this out to her, though, she just gets worked up in a huff and tells us “I’m too old to understand these things, you can figure it out because you’re still young.” She will eventually figure these things out and do them for herself if nobody does it for her for a while, but her default for any problem with her phone is to throw her hands up and declare it a lost cause first. I’ve seen a lot of people have the same sort of reactions, both young and old. No “Hey, let’s just see what it says,” just straight to deciding it’s impossible, so they don’t even bother to check what’s going on.

Dude, you’re on Lemmy. That means you’re probably in the top 1% of people with computer skills.

I’ve done support for sysadmins for almost a decade, and the ones that are the biggest pain in the ass to deal with are the ones who can’t or won’t read the error message and think a little about it. And my kids’ friends all have the same problem: They don’t read what’s on screen and if they do they make no attempt to understand it.

This is why the humanities are important. All those times you have to explain why the curtains are blue is practice for reading other things and determining meaning.

Yeah the biggest problem for people who can’t use a computer always seems to be that they just won’t ever read what it says on the screen. The solution to problems is often very obvious if you just actually read error messages or tooltips or anything

From the article it does seem that the failure of ability isn’t strictly related to computers per SE, but to an over all inability to think about the word problems given in an abstract and mathematically coherent way. They seemed to ask participants to solve what are essentially database query, reading comprehension, critical thinking, and logic problems in the context of an email suite. Word problems can be hard for anyone that hasn’t studied and practiced how to decipher them. It’s just that using a computer kind of forces one to confront those gaps in what should be a fundamental part of highschool education. Math and science classes aren’t just solving problems by wrote memorization or memorizing the periodic table, they are about problem solving. Lots of people fall through the gaps and don’t get that one special teacher who understood this.

Same shit here. Now I know I have ADHD, back then I didn’t. I just couldn’t concentrate on any complete task. And still one day I started my Gentoo install and completed it simply by reading the handbook and the error messages etc. Ended up using Slackware after that, via reading too.

It’s mind-boggling that people who can concentrate on reading pages and pages of text with their content won’t read what’s put under their nose.

I’ve been reading the book “A Small Matter of Programming” which discusses a bit end users relationships with computers.

I think people who are into computers get surprised to know most people just don’t care about how computers work and they shouldn’t have to. They want software that is easy to use and allows them to complete their task. Ex: a spreadsheet is an incredibly powerful software that hides anything about how computers work but still allow users to create multiple different “apps” by effectively programming.

This is one reason Apple is so successful and a lot of tech users don’t understand it. Apple creates “abstractions” so that end users don’t have to deal with low level details — something they don’t want to. They want to see the machine as a black box that just provides them some service easily and smoothly.

Most of the “decaying” tech skills people say are actually stuff people don’t need to know nowadays. Everything is an abstraction anyway, and most people tinkering with desktop computers aren’t aware of how the graphics software is rendering the screen, for example.

I saw middle school students preferring to type a report on a fucking touchscreen rather than a pc with keyboard “because in this way is faster”. Then for some reason they share a fucking screenshot of the document instead of just attaching that to the email

I would put it up to 1999.
But the returns of 1995-1999 are very small indeed.

Would be interesting to see if any of these low-level skill folks are actually high (or higher) on mobile skills.

“Mobile skills” are likely still lower skill. Tablets and phones are mostly content consumption devices instead of content creation (photos/videos excluded). Does anyone do serious software development on a phone? How often are mobile users writing papers or prose using only their touchscreen? How many people are doing complicated video edit on an iPhone? Can those tasks be done on a table/phone? Sure, but I don’t think its common.

The reason this is a problem is that it means there is a barrier between deeper computer skills and the devices/environment that people are using daily. The reason many of us became computer savvy on a desktop wasn’t because we wanted to, its because we had to to get the game running we wanted or we had to write the paper we were required to. So being familiar with other uses on a computer, it is only a very mild extension to writing a script if the need arises. The only “new” or “foreign” part is the script, not the environment or interaction of where you’re creating it.

With a tablet/phone as your primary device it means learning not just scripting, but learning all the skills necessary to use a computer. Its a high barrier.

What do you think all those “hacker” scarecrow movies and alarmist articles and laws were aimed at and caused by?

Modern computers allow one person to do the monthly work of the Soviet Genplan on their home machine in a day if they are smart, in a month if they are average, and Soviet Genplan employed more than one person.

Together with the Internet they make power over masses a much less certain thing.

Except if you poison both, you can not just neuter, but invert the effects.

We still have more and less powerful people in our world.

What I mean is that I don’t think it’s a coincidence that “user-friendly” computing, bloating of the Web and rise of authoritarianism happened with the same intensiveness in the same ~20 years.

From what I recall, particularly the younger generations that exclusively use mobile devices (though of course this is not limited to them) actually have terrible tech literacy across the board, primarily related to spending all of their time in apps that basically spoon-feed functionality in a closed ecosystem. In particular, these groups are particularly vulnerable to very basic scams and phishing attacks.