I feel like there was a very short window where PCs were just easy enough to use that most people had one, but the OS experience was just complex enough, with things breaking frequently enough, that you had to learn some basics out of necessity.
Like , I’m a 100% not an IT guy - but I know all sorts of shit that seems like it should be common knowledge, but isn’t. Any time I manage to get something in our IT and software environment functioning at work, or explain the chain of events to some catastrophe based on evidence in our software logs, and I get talked about like some kind of wunderkind, it is frustrating more than anything else.
I’m not some IT genius, I’m your average asshole who knows some basics about the tools we use in 99.9% of the work we do. Chances are if there were more of said assholes we wouldn’t run into the problems I address in the first place. But admittedly, perhaps some of that knowledge/ability to think that way comes from having to figure out shit like why my DOS game wouldn’t work in 1995, or what the fuck that purple monkey Mom downloaded a few years later was actually doing.
Ugh - sorry, this turned into a rant, this kind of shit has been top of mind recently…
Yeah, I am kinda the opposite - I’m halfway through a master’s in software engineering and I work in the field, using Linux at work and Windows on my own PC.
Still, as I never use e.g. Word or other office programs I don’t know jack shit about them. But as one of the family “computer guys” I am constantly asked to help with stuff that I rarely use or even have never used before. If they had the ability to think in the correct way, like how you just mentioned you do, they would be able to resolve at least 70% of the problems pretty effortlessly. Society definitely needs to teach these basics better so that people could just google their problem and deal with it.
I feel like there was a very short window where PCs were just easy enough to use that most people had one, but the OS experience was just complex enough, with things breaking frequently enough, that you had to learn some basics out of necessity.
Like , I’m a 100% not an IT guy - but I know all sorts of shit that seems like it should be common knowledge, but isn’t. Any time I manage to get something in our IT and software environment functioning at work, or explain the chain of events to some catastrophe based on evidence in our software logs, and I get talked about like some kind of wunderkind, it is frustrating more than anything else.
I’m not some IT genius, I’m your average asshole who knows some basics about the tools we use in 99.9% of the work we do. Chances are if there were more of said assholes we wouldn’t run into the problems I address in the first place. But admittedly, perhaps some of that knowledge/ability to think that way comes from having to figure out shit like why my DOS game wouldn’t work in 1995, or what the fuck that purple monkey Mom downloaded a few years later was actually doing.
Ugh - sorry, this turned into a rant, this kind of shit has been top of mind recently…
Yeah, I am kinda the opposite - I’m halfway through a master’s in software engineering and I work in the field, using Linux at work and Windows on my own PC.
Still, as I never use e.g. Word or other office programs I don’t know jack shit about them. But as one of the family “computer guys” I am constantly asked to help with stuff that I rarely use or even have never used before. If they had the ability to think in the correct way, like how you just mentioned you do, they would be able to resolve at least 70% of the problems pretty effortlessly. Society definitely needs to teach these basics better so that people could just google their problem and deal with it.