← Back to context

Comment by yourapostasy

17 hours ago

Which brings up a point I've been wondering over the years.

Where are the hordes of kids like us back then who were content with the afternoons, evenings and wee early morning hours of endless fiddling? What I realize now is those years spent fiddling sharpened our debugging senses in both ineffable and tractable ways.

A larger proportion of the juniors I see coming through the corporate halls these days than I remember from even 10 years ago do not have that knack for fiddling, nor history when it comes up. And it shows in their debugging temperament. LLM's are making this worse.

I've seen the sentiment come up a lot, and I've talked about it with a buddy a lot.

For all the issues people claim to have with iOS or Android, they really "just work" compared to the shit we had to deal with back in the day. And I don't even mean bugs, but UX just wasn't as sleek.

I can find a pdf of the TTRPG I'm playing that's hidden deep in an iCloud drive by simply opening spotlight an typing the approximate name. And the same works on my iPhone. Apps that create documents for me hide their file structure, because it's all abstracted away from me. It works, and I don't have to think about it as much.

You still have kids that start fiddling with tech, but only out of clear interest. Not as a necessity.