So growing up my uncle taught me all about computers. We built them together (early 90s, so DOS days - not even MS-DOS), built the drivers together, etc. Ended up being a pretty significant hobby for me even now.

Going to college, I thought that since tons of my generation were going into computers, we’d flood the market, pay would crash, and every subsequent generation would have tons of people too, so companies would hire the young college kids.

Now, I realize I screwed up. People older than me have no idea about computers. People younger than me have no idea about computers. They use them all the time, but almost have even less understanding of how they actually function than older people. My guess is that older generations had to make everything work, so they have a bit of knowledge to use to figure out new things. Younger generations have had everything catered to them, so they haven’t ever had to figure a single thing out. If it doesn’t make perfect sense to them immediately, they leave.

Just yesterday I couldn’t figure out how to find a profile I followed on Instagram. There was a fresh out of college kid I work with that kind of chuckled and made a (good natured, but naively insulting) remark that basically insinuated I was too old to get tech. I couldn’t take it, so I told her that I was actually using the first phone I hadn’t put a custom OS on and how a couple Xmas’ ago, I had built an unRAID server because I was sick of my computer bogging down with all the extra stuff I had it do. They hadn’t even heard of a command line before.

So long winded rambling aside, it makes me sad that no one knows, or even wants to know, how things work anymore. They seem to want it served to them and the slightest amount of work will make them move on. Every generation says the kids are horrible, etc, so I’m hoping it’s just that and we’ll still have a generation of scientists and engineers.