It's worse than that: we're a small subset of the only generations that know how computers work. The vast majority of my peers would balk at using a command line, much less anything deeper.

I say generations because it's obviously not limited to one, but, it sure as fuck isn't many.

As a millenial nurse watching gen z new grads hunt and peck with their index fingers to write a shift note, 100%. I don't think my parents really appreciated how much constantly being on AIM with my friends as a tween actually really benefited my typing skills in a way that's been much more valuable to my career than algebra.

All the math you need to be a nurse is ratio / proportion and kitchen measurements to track I/O. With a modern EMR system (electronic medical record) that does most of the math for you you don't even need that. The rest is latin and greek root words for various body parts and fluids and a vague understanding of how they're all related (hyper-tension in the cerebral is bad because the cerebral is surrounded by a bone case and bones no stretch. That means the cerebral pops out of the bone holes and once it's done that it does NOT go back in correctly like a squeezy ball toy). That gets you through the board exams.

After a year or two in practice you've just seen the same shit with a millimeter of difference over and over and over that you either know what to do about it or who to call to do something about it. And when shit is about to go REALLY wrong that's also happened enough times that you get a weird feeling and just start calling everybody because your psych patient has been trying to kill you for the past week and an hour ago they suddenly stopped trying to kill you and now you have to explain to an RRT nurse (rental ICU nurse) why you're upset that the patient isn't trying to kill you.

When I was six years old, my dad brought a computer home from work. It had Windows 3.1 on it. I had to learn how to use the DOS command prompt in order to play my favorite game, Q-bert. When I was a teenager, a new computer of middling quality could run north of $3000 from the Best Buy. But my friends introduced me to a catalog where I could buy the parts to assemble one from scratch. They let me borrow their copy of Windows 95 to install. Then we all had to learn how to use dial-up in order to connect to the internet, or how to build out a LAN network to play games together in person. We took classes in touch-typing at school, using the computer lab. I went to computer camp during the summer. I went to college and took more advanced classes on programing.

I have spent tens of thousands of hours learning to use the computer, practically from the inception of the PC to the modern day.

Now my friends have kids, and I talk about how they use the computer. Everything is out-of-the-box. Installing something is as simply as clicking an icon. You can buy a mini-computer off the shelf for under $200 and it runs better than anything I could have built thirty years ago. Periodically, they will come to me with a more advanced computer program, which has to do with a very particular OS configuration or some weird networking bug that only someone with 10+ years of experience would think to look for. I typically find the answer online, because I don't remember it off the top of my head. I teach the kid and the kid learns, and then the kid knows as much as I do on that particular subject.

In twenty years, I'm sure they'll know more than me, just because I'll be retired and they'll be in the thick of it.

Also, please nobody ask me how a car works. That was something my parents' generation learned. I'm clueless.

Yes. We are.

We are young with to have learned tech at an early age, but old enough that the tech wasn't user friendly when we were kids, so we needed to understand it better than people do in the smartphone generation.

Installing a new game on my PC in high school was a multi-hour, sometimes multi-day ordeal.

Plugging in a secondary hard drive involved putting jumpers on pins to keep the system from trying to boot off it.

Assigning ports on peripherals involved understanding how to count in binary so you could assign addresses on dip switches.

Installing a printer involved unholy alliances with formless beings.

Every 2-3 years, I still wake up wearing black robes in a strange room in Romania, blood on my hands and a lingering scent of cordite in the air. I'm fairly certain that's related to the Canon BJC driver issues I had upgrading my AST to Windows 95.

It’s funny because we always thought that the next generation’s technical knowledge would utterly eclipse ours, but instead they only know how to edit a short video to seem to loop infinitely.

I literally just watched a video of a dude telling a story about how when he was 13 in 2012, his Xbox 360 controller stopped working and he thought the whole console broke when he just had to replace the controller batteries. 🤣

iOS is literally designed for toddlers to be able to use it. "iPad kids" aren't especially gifted, "iPad adults" are especially stupid.

But on the bright side, those same groups think they "know computers" because they can press large, brightly colored buttons - so they walk around with unearned confidence in their abilities and impatience/lack of appreciation for the people that actually have to fix things.

It's also why a large swatch of these same fucking idiot, drains on humanity loudly challenge the validity of voting tech infrastructure without any factual basis to their argument - they just "feel" like they get it.

Kids don't even understand file structures because modern OSs obfuscate that stuff.