Comment by vladvasiliu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vladvasiliu | Hacker News Reader

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I think it's a question of habit / inertia. "This is how we've always done things".

In the company I work for, 99% of people spend their days in some combination of teams, outlook, word, excel and chrome. Word is basically for random text which is expected to last longer than an email or for carting around screenshots, Excel is for people who need five lines in a table. All these things work fine in a browser. The other 1% are either accountants who actually use Excel for what it was made, designers, etc.

Among those 99% there are a bunch of people shouting from the rooftops how much security is a priority for the company, so they run around in circles trying to secure a fundamentally insecure OS, while at the same time being scared shitless to update anything for fear of "breaking something". I'm convinced that moving to something like Chrome OS would improve these 99% of people's lives tremendously. But it's not what they're used to, so everybody just keeps on going down the same path.

I also think something fundamental is missing in the education of your average office worker.

The reason why people are scared to change software is that they can't actually use any software. They basically don't know how it works and are just cargo culting. They memorize some functions, and they think that is all they need to do their job, which they consider to be some higher level thing like being a bureaucrat.

But it's like literacy. You're not literate when you can only read one book. You're literate when you can read any book.

There are principles in how software works, below the level of the programmer, that everyone can learn. What is running on my machine, what is running on the server, why do I see the things on the screen that I see, what do common GUI elements do, and so on.

I entirely agree with you, but I'm at a loss as to how we might improve things.

People just don't seem to care, just like they didn't seem to care to understand how machinery used to work. They know that they should press this button and expect that outcome.

We teach reading in school. I think the same could be done now for tech literacy.

It was pointless to try something like that before because the older generation was usually less tech literate than the kids. But these days tech literacy is dropping (and with AI, probably even more so), so it might be that the older generation could actually teach it.

As a programmer I fully understand and even support what you suggest, but I’m not sure it will ever work. My mother, wife, good friend, etc - none of them can grok what a computer program is, or the file system. I’ve tried and tried for many years and it just doesn’t click. On the other hand, I’m realizing more and more how ‘blind’ I am when it comes to color, fashion, decorating, shapes, etc. My logical left-brain merges perfectly with computers, but not more squishy things. Many friends and family are the opposite. I don’t think teaching can overcome that basic wiring. We’re just different.

> The other 1% are either accountants who actually use Excel for what it was made, designers, etc.

I, half-jokingly, recommend firing anyone who opens Excel and hasn't entered a formula within 15 minutes.

That alone would solve a lot of problems :)

At the other extreme, also fire anyone who uses Excel as an app development platform or a databse. Fire even faster if its used for something mission critical.

Yes, yes and yes.

Now, i really begin to wonder if that should be some kind of add-in to be sold..

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