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 8-bit cpu in college. Had computers for a few years before that. It's surprising how many 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 define 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.

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.

Todays computer illiterate workforce is doomed to be incompetent because they don't understand how their main tool works. Nobody bothered to train them.

There also so many things restricting the usage of the tool. Every week my scanner tells me it has a new software update and I cannot install a simple update without admin access, so I have to call help desk and have them remote into my computer so they can click the "ok" botton.

Everything is so walled off there's no reason to learn how any of it works because you have no access. When the security bios update (forget what it was called) fucked everyone's computers last year I found a fix online and could have easily went to several locations and got them up and running, but no one on site has the access to boot into safe mode and instead we all just sat on hold with help desk for 2 days waiting for IT to do the thing I already knew how to do.

It seems to run on some form of electricity.