It seems to run on some form of electricity.
Comment on Who is the enemy?
AstaKask@lemmy.cafe 4 hours agoI’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.
leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 hours ago
Thing is, back in those days computers were deterministic.
A certain action caused a certain reaction, and always the same reaction (given the same context).
Anyone could learn that, as long as they bothered to read the screen (a surprisingly rare talent, to be fair).
Now, at least on windows, it’s anyone’s guess what random mayhem a certain action might cause, or where the interface to perform that action has gone after the last update, supposing it still exists and the system survived the update.
No one can learn that. And anyone foolish enough to try will certainly be driven insane.
MagicShel@lemmy.zip 3 hours ago
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 8088(?) in college. Had computers for a few years before that. It’s surprising how 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 understand 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.
Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants, but there are so many layers of giants that it’s hard to see the ground.
riskable@programming.dev 2 hours ago
Ahahahahahahaha! Oh man, you got a good laugh out of me this morning 🤣
MagicShel@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
I mean, there’s idiots and there’s idiots, you know? Yeah those classes should never have existed and maybe that’s evidence enough of idiocy, but there is an abundance of folks smarter than me. Surely they could hire one of them…