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Comment by throwup238 | Hacker News Reader

I agree that it reeks of old men yelling at clouds but there is data driven precedent here: with the advent of smartphones, computer literacy in education has dropped like a rock. It isn’t just kids these days, it’s a genuine shift in computing across the entire populace that happens to really effect the funnel for programmers at the entrance to that funnel. Copilots are an extension of that development, not necessarily something wholly new.

I’ve heard this anecdotally from every educator I know at the high school and college level. CS students are increasingly entering without any computer proficiency whatsoever so it has to be built up from scratch.

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Yep, despite all the talk of young people being "digital natives", installing apps from Android/iOS app store, taking pictures and chatting with friends doesn't teach you much that is valuable for office work.

PC gaming and specifically modding is what I can thank for much of my computer proficiency, but even that is easy these days with Steam and its workshops for many games.

Of course you’ve now effectively circled back to the early 1980s at some level when there was not a lot of expectation that college freshmen had touched a computer much less were proficient even if the wanted major in CS/EE.

I think the apt analogy here isn't "old men yelling at clouds" but the historical way that one certain previous generation become more adept than those before or after at working with a certain then-new technology -- thus becoming a uniquely skilled generation in that technology, moreso than their elders or their youngers, never to be repeated again.

I'm not talking about millenials/gen X with computers -- I'm talking about silent gen/(boomers/greatest gen?) with cars.

In both cases, a new technology dominated the world, but was new and brittle at first. The kids who saw it in their youth were fascinated, but because of its brittleness they had to become at least minor experts in at least minor troubleshooting and mainteanance (like tuning a carburetor or defragging a hard disk) just to access the coolness.

I mean, it really was a pain to be a car owner in 1960. A lot like being a computer owner in 1995. If you wanted to enjoy one, you were going to need to change a spark plug or registry value once in a while. And you had to be ready to recover from an engine overheating or a blue screen of death, because these were not rare events.

Then the future generations increasingly lost touch with those skills because the technology got smoothed out as it developed further.

So I think it's quite plausible that future generations will permanently have less interest in serious skills with computers since the same thing has happened with cars. There is a way smaller perecentage of people my age (millenial) who are "into" cars or have moderate familiarity with car repair than people in their 70s. So it seems plausible the same pattern could continue to play out with computers, rather than a "old man yells at cloud" illusion

I hope you're not thinking of the decline of folders - folders aren't fundamental computer science.

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