I’ve had the privilege of working with users with actual computer training. Old ladies who started working on terminals in the 70s and 80s. They were awesome, because they actually understood what they were doing. They could give me an accurate description of what they were doing when shit went wrong. They had real concerns and realistic requests for improvement. And they never blamed the computer when they encountered something they didn’t understand. They’re all dead or retired now.
Todays computer illiterate workforce is doomed to be incompetent because they don’t understand how their main tool works. Nobody bothered to train them.
The complicated thing here is there are so many layers of abstraction to make things easier to use and understand that if you didn’t age with the tech, it’s really hard to fully understand. That’s everything. I see Angular and React developers who don’t understand CSS.
My last position, we had classes that set sizes for everything in multiples of 4 pixels. So size-1 is 4 pixels, size-2 is 8 pixels, etc. And everything was sized with those classes. Which means if you ever wanted to resize anything, you have to go to every element and change the class instead of you know, having input controls have distinct classes.
People are layering on abstraction without understanding why and throwing away all the benefits, time to invent another abstraction layer! I had my tech lead argue with me that this was a better system because “standards”. I’m going to assume the standard was poorly understood because I can’t imagine a multi-billion dollar company hires idiots to set standards.
I got started learning transistors and Boolean algebra and programming an 8-bit cpu in college. Had computers for a few years before that. It’s surprising how many conditionals I see that can be simplified by Boolean algebra.
I don’t actually hate computers, and I try to give IT workers some grace because I’m not always proud of the work I do when I have to finish 3 months of work in two weeks. But I’ve worked with a lot of folks who aren’t curious or looking to learn and improve, and I have to wonder why they ever got into IT in the first place.
For me the worst part of IT is the god damned management. Any possible productivity gains from agile are undercut at every turn by management who has to have a concrete promise of a delivery date before they even define the ask.
Anyway, sorry for the rant. Started my long weekend early and starting a new job next week, so I have a lot of pent up rants from my last company.
I’ve had the privilege of working with users with actual computer training. Old ladies who started working on terminals in the 70s and 80s. They were awesome, because they actually understood what they were doing. They could give me an accurate description of what they were doing when shit went wrong. They had real concerns and realistic requests for improvement. And they never blamed the computer when they encountered something they didn’t understand. They’re all dead or retired now.
Todays computer illiterate workforce is doomed to be incompetent because they don’t understand how their main tool works. Nobody bothered to train them.
The complicated thing here is there are so many layers of abstraction to make things easier to use and understand that if you didn’t age with the tech, it’s really hard to fully understand. That’s everything. I see Angular and React developers who don’t understand CSS.
My last position, we had classes that set sizes for everything in multiples of 4 pixels. So size-1 is 4 pixels, size-2 is 8 pixels, etc. And everything was sized with those classes. Which means if you ever wanted to resize anything, you have to go to every element and change the class instead of you know, having input controls have distinct classes.
People are layering on abstraction without understanding why and throwing away all the benefits, time to invent another abstraction layer! I had my tech lead argue with me that this was a better system because “standards”. I’m going to assume the standard was poorly understood because I can’t imagine a multi-billion dollar company hires idiots to set standards.
I got started learning transistors and Boolean algebra and programming an 8-bit cpu in college. Had computers for a few years before that. It’s surprising how many conditionals I see that can be simplified by Boolean algebra.
I don’t actually hate computers, and I try to give IT workers some grace because I’m not always proud of the work I do when I have to finish 3 months of work in two weeks. But I’ve worked with a lot of folks who aren’t curious or looking to learn and improve, and I have to wonder why they ever got into IT in the first place.
For me the worst part of IT is the god damned management. Any possible productivity gains from agile are undercut at every turn by management who has to have a concrete promise of a delivery date before they even define the ask.
Anyway, sorry for the rant. Started my long weekend early and starting a new job next week, so I have a lot of pent up rants from my last company.