I've always felt that young people are seen as good with computers because they're more confident and less afraid of failure, and that even if their only experience is instagram they're more likely to google a scary error message or click around at random in various menus.
I don’t know if it’s because I am old fart but my generation (born early 80s) would teach their parents how to use a computer or the internet when we were teenagers. The next generation might teach me how to use the latest gestures on iOS or instagram, that doesn’t seem to be a new technology or a useful skill to me.
I'm not sure that that is the case, any longer. I have a lot of trouble with our college-aged interns, because they will barely make an effort to try doing something before getting stonewalled and bailing out to go ask someone to do it for them. Sometimes I just want to yell at them to run the code and see what happens, and then try to figure out why what happened happened. And these are computer science majors.
Maybe they need someone to yell at them to break them out of their comfort zone and learn something new. They might find they enjoy it or even that they’re good at it once they do it.
It’s human nature to feel like the next generation is coddled, of course. Maybe the real problem is that the current generation isn’t as capable of instruction as previous ones.
> doing something before getting stonewalled and bailing out to go ask someone to do it for them
Funny this is the problem. One of my major life lessons was learning not to always persevere, and to ask for help as soon as possible. Solves more problems faster, teaches you more ways of looking at a problem and smoothly scales to delegation.
This cannot be emphasized enough. In a social+technical work environment, the more you "persevere" on your own, the more you'll become pigeonholed as a tech guru who solves immediate problems but loses influence in the higher-level decisions of your organization. There's still a balance, though, as asking for too much help will lead to resentment and people just straight up thinking you're stupid.
I'm not sure it really is a good thing that being too good at something is leading to pigeonholing. It's a shame that what was before (or for other discipline) named mastery is now just seen as relegating from higher levels. Can you pigeonhole in medicine? Nuclear physics ? Professional football /sports ? Cooking ? I could go on. I'd frankly rather have people with less high level view and more knowing what it really means to do something before deciding to do it.
> being too good at something is leading to pigeonholing
People who are good at something tend to ask for help when they need it. Asking for help is a way to get better. Blindly persevering wastes time and tends to force one into dead ends.
I don't think giving up instantly is the same thing as asking for help when you need it, and I don't think e.g. spending 30 seconds minutes googling the definition of "ENOENT" before calling someone else over is blindly persevering. I think there's a path through the middle of the two extremes, where you try a bit of basic problem solving on your own, but ask for help when you're stuck, and learn from the experience.
> spending 30 seconds minutes googling the definition of "ENOENT" before calling someone else over is blindly persevering
It's not blindly persevering. It is, however, giving up an opportunity to learn from and interact with a colleague. Whatever you were working on related to the query might have additional context filled in or expanded upon through conversation. Some of my most productive and unexpected insights came up as a result of such banter.
When you ask "what does this mean," you're asking for a definition. You're also communicating the problem and hinting at your angle of attack. Possible valuable and unexpected responses include "you're approaching it wrong" or "why are you working on that problem when X looks more lucrative"
