How many people are smart enough to open an issue on GitHub but stupid enough to run code from a password-protected file in a random Mediafire link?
GitHub is many things nowadays. Some people use it sort of like a blog where they can easily post long pages of text, sometimes it’s the first thing that shows up in the search results when you search for a computer/phone problem.
I’m gonna sound old here but the younger generations are in general less computer literate than they were back in my day, and a lot of people have no qualms about downloading and running random exe’s from discord or mediafire.
Yeah, in my office, nobody had heard of dvorak (my keyboard layout), and they think I’m crazy for using vim. They don’t seem to understand how git actually works, and when I describe how compilers work, they think I’m speaking a foreign language. And these are people with years of SW development experience and CS degrees, a couple of them have masters.
I’m older than many of them, but I’m not that old (millenial), yet I’m positive I knew all of this stuff back when I was at their point, as did most of my coworkers. Not sure if it’s a “kids these days” thing, or if I was just in a hacker-minded group earlier in my career, but I’m quite disappointed in the depth of technical knowledge SW devs have these days. Oh, and I hired most of them, and they were the better ones of the bunch I was presented with.
To be fair, we’re a Python + JavaScript shop, but I still expect devs to be curious about how things work under the hood.
So you’re the guy from the alt-text in https://xkcd.com/1597/
Ok you might be a little crazy for using vim in 2024 :D but it depends on the context. Editing a quick config file from command line? Sure. Working on a big project? No way, give me an IDE with real navigation and auto complete functionality.
I think part of the reason is just that the barrier to entry for software development continues to drop with IDEs, dependency/package managers, etc. It’s really easy to get a working knowledge of your tools without knowing how they really work under the hood, which is good and bad.
The reaaon tech literacy has dropped so much is actually because we’ve gotten too good at UX. You don’t need to know nearly as much to do most things with computers now, so most people don’t bother learning about how to properly use a computer anymore. Setting up an email address or a router or a website has gotten significantly less complicated so the average person can do it without needing to learn any new skills. Hell, phones are so streamlined that most people probably don’t even realize their phone has a file browser.
