Ive encountered a shocking amount of 30yr olds that don't own a computer or know how to properly type. I'd say GenZ and Alpha have plenty of computer literacy as laptops were better integrated into education by time they got or will get to high school.
Outside of some AP classes that had their own computer labs most kids in my age group (early 30s) took one computer class in their entire secondary education. I knew one other person in my entire high school that coded.
They're all issued Chromebooks and live in a glorified browser and GSuite. There's something of an epidemic of students landing in college CS programs and not knowing how to manage files outside of Google Drive.
Millennials got to use real computers growing up. Gens Z and Alpha got locked down Google appliances tightly monitored by schools.
My kid still cannot really grasp the concept of "things being stored locally on the computer or on the phone vs. things being on the Internet". She doesn't understand why some apps require Internet and others don't. No concept of the boundary between local and network. "What do you mean 'it's stored on the phone'? YouTube is stored on the phone, right?"
I think a lot of this is developers intentionally blurring the line between local and cloud storage. If you were a layman iPhone user, would you be able to confidently tell me which of your photos are stored in iCloud and which are stored on your device? Apple is deliberately obfuscating it.
And not even in a "hey, the network is also a filesystem!" sorta transparent way, either. It's an obscure patchwork of half-baked ideas (especially iCloud. To this day, I'm just trusting that I'll be able to do a phone restore, if need be).
It doesn't help that network-transparent storage is _hard_. Before, if you wrote something to storage, there was a preeeeetty good chance it was going to wind up on disk. Yes, yes, disk IO is a dark art that's still probably full of subtle bugs, and there is no God, but generally: file -> disk was, and is, solid.
Now, you have file -> several HTTP round trips -> ope, fiber cut -> hung. And that's just to turn on your living room lights! I've seen networking code that is supposed to provide the same guarantees that the people writing filesystems and disk drivers do, and I can't say it usually succeeds. And people wonder why everything feels more and more broken.
> I think a lot of this is developers intentionally blurring the line between local and cloud storage. If you were a layman iPhone user, would you be able to confidently tell me which of your photos are stored in iCloud and which are stored on your device? Apple is deliberately obfuscating it.
It is exactly this. I'd like to think it is less developers and more marketing/product manager/bizdev types trying to keep their customers ignorant as a form of lock-in.
When I say "developers" I usually mean the entire development apparatus, including designers, product, and, yes, programmers. They all have agency, all work together to produce the product, and should share the honor and/or blame for their product.
I fully believe this, but that is just bonkerstown to me. I mean, okay, I guess the Plan 9 folks eventually won, I just didn't expect "the computer" to be "Google.com".
Of course, university IS meant to be an introduction to whatever your field is, but those of us with in-depth computer knowledge, even basic knowledge of something like Java, had a much easier time of it.
Outside of some AP classes that had their own computer labs most kids in my age group (early 30s) took one computer class in their entire secondary education. I knew one other person in my entire high school that coded.
Hell you can code Python on ti-84s now.