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[The Verge] 404: File folders and directories are gibberish to many modern students
- Thread starter Jintor
- Start date
It's exacerbated by the fact that a lot of modern hardware tries to either "hide" the folder structure (I love my iPhone, but they are real weird about just digging through the files directly) or are overly verbose with it (I had to use a link recently that was a direct URL to an AWS S3 bucket. I actually had to type it out manually, as its as written on a paper document. Anyone familiar is aware that those URLs look pretty wild).
For the font example, most people navigate by the app UI anyway. I don't think folks have really ever browsed fonts/typefaces by file as the primary use case and my experience with fonts goes back to the Mac Plus.
For almost all file types, we can now search by the content in the file. The file itself becomes less significant in our interaction.
Yeah true. I use an Android phone, which makes things easier, especially when I plug it into my computer and see all the folders. But I also own an ipad, and going between them can be frustrating by how much ios hides things from you, and limits what you can do.
Yeah that too. I usually edit a lot of my photos, so I have an "edited" folder in each folder where my photos are. I also don't rename the files. So any search would have a really hard time finding what I want.
Guys, the point is not file/folder structure illiteracy... its computing illiteracy in general. Older generations weren't exposed much to IT, and the newer generations are used to things working automagically. Millennials got the goldilocks zone of growing up with tech and needing to figure out how things work, how to troubleshoot, and self help their way into technical literacy. I damn near became an IT professional by virtue of being an enthusiast PC gamer. Barely kidding.
Not surprised, its why as an IT professional I am actually kind of surprised just how much job security I have... I was hoping/expecting more general computer literacy by having an entire generation surrounded by tech and in the accordance of making things easier and hidden there has been a loss of actual normal technical skills that is going to make my job harder over time...
To be fair I fully expect there to be neurological interfaces to computers in about 20 years.
But yeah, and it is weird how us increasingly older folks know more than younger generations. Isn't it supposed to be the opposite?
You were stating that you need to remember filenames. My point is that isn't as needed when you can search for the content directly.
For example, if I'm searching for a photo I don't look it up by filename, I can look it up by who was in it, the time of year, location...
It was less a commentary on the importance of file directory mastery and more about the problem with conditioning ourselves to let computer algorithms do our thinking for us. People who are conditioned from a young age for an AI to make their decisions are going to be more susceptible to "grooming."
I must have watched the Rob Roy trailer on the Windows 95 CD at least 20 times. Scarcity indeed makes for a different experience.
Ehhh, I'd argue it's young Boomers - old Millennials. Gen X was really the sweet spot.
Ugh. In the late 90s I had a year of typing and also comp sci my senior year.
I understand that people do less file management. My point was that the concept of content being organized in a hierarchical tree and navigating that content through a UI is still pervasive. Even if you can avoid it in your music app, I think it is very difficult to completely avoid it.
Beyond just software design, it is a reflection of how we organize things in the physical world. If I had to give someone instructions on how to retrieve my vacuum cleaner, I'd tell them to go to my building, then to my apartment, then to my front hall, then to the closet.
So I don't think the fact that files on a computer are organized and navigated in a similar way ought to blow anyone's mind. If you don't know the exact mechanics of how to move files between folders, that's fine, but you should at least get the concept.
I graduated high school in 2004, and all computer classes were optional after the once a month computer lab time in elementary school.
All computer classes in Jr high and high school were optional, including typing. But being a nerd I took most of them in Jr high, but only one in high school.
what i've found is that as soon as you talk about something non-physical people just completely don't understand it.
the example you gave is completely fine as an analogy. but when you start talking about "folders" and "hard drives" etc etc, people just don't seem to understand it then. They throw their hands up and say "you do it."
happens all of the time to me.
Bit of hubris here. Takes quite a few assumptions to make a statement like this. I imagine many adults said the same thing to themselves 20 years ago.
I'm talking specifically about understanding operating systems. Parents of us millenials were oblivious, we knew more because we had to, and now it seems less widely known. As a developer I was coding in high school, everyone took typing classes, and so the idea of entry level engineering college courses do not understand these basic concepts is appalling. It isn't about ego, but shock. I fully expected the next generation to be more proficient. There are so many more tools these days, like there was no stack overflow when I was figuring things out. There was no CI pipeline to build code or Ansible to bring up VMs.
Yeah, I don't know how to make my own shoes either, grandpa.
This isn't a bad thing, it's just a different thing. When kids don't know how to do "lol so basic" stuff, it's because they weren't taught it, or didn't need to learn it. Some will need to learn it later for a bit, then the world will change and the rest won't.
This isn't a bad thing, it's just a different thing. When kids don't know how to do "lol so basic" stuff, it's because they weren't taught it, or didn't need to learn it. Some will need to learn it later for a bit, then the world will change and the rest won't.
And again, it's making the jump and applying those same concepts to a computer.
To use the laundry basket analogy, in their heads these kids aren't staring down a mountainous basket of clothing each time they want to pull their favorite shirt out. They're opening up an app which only shows them shirts from the basket, already sorted and organised for them.
This is what they've grown up with and have used their entire lives when it comes to interfacing with phones/tablets/computers. If you're telling them all of a sudden to instead go into their closet, go to the back section where a drawer is located, open the 3rd drawer from the top to find their shirts in the left section of that drawer of course they are going to be confused when they've never interacted with their clothing in that way.
They have never thought about their devices as a series of structured folders and directories before. Maybe folders within Office/OneDrive or albums within their photo collection but not as a larger overarching structured thing. And it can be incredibly hard to get people to rebase their thinking like that.
It's a bad thing for the case shown in the article though. Maybe a random person that only checks pictures and music in their device won't need it but for anything more complex or vague than that and you'll have a problem.
Also students in an engineering class not knowing basics about file systems is a failure in education.
I absolutely agree. It's not an egotistical thing. Any of my peers in the DevOps world know that our job is 90% duct taping other people's code and 10% our own. When we work, we post our code into pull requests for peer review and politely shit all over it to make things better. You have to have some humility to be a good programmer.
Entry level software engineers in college not knowing how computers work is a major problem. This is like starting most majors in the US without being able to speak English or Spanish. These are elementary skills, and if some students don't have it they need to get an intermediate prep school so they're ready to start the first year, which usually includes CS 101 and 201 which is about programming languages, data structures and routines. Not knowing files and folders is a red flag.
Needs to be mandatory typing classes and elective CS classes that introduce this in highschool.
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How does that work for more mundane stuff?
plus it relies on those people enabling the person labeling, right?
Right? How does one depend on such a slow search to retrieve files
Just because I don't know how to make my own shoes doesn't mean I don't understand how they work.
File structure is fundamental to any operating system whether it's transparent to the user or not.
Now that I think about it I remember back when I was in college one of my professors just kind of assumed that we all knew how to use command line and strongly dissuaded the use of GUI interfaces for file management because it doesn't automatically leave records so it makes it harder to troubleshoot. I think he also said things like it being closer to the core of a computer so it being something that everyone that uses a computer should know how to use.
Originally I did find people not understanding how to use folders pretty strange, but reading over the thread it feels like it parallels that quite a bit so I wonder if it isn't that strange after all. Just another step in how things change across generations.
Originally I did find people not understanding how to use folders pretty strange, but reading over the thread it feels like it parallels that quite a bit so I wonder if it isn't that strange after all. Just another step in how things change across generations.
This also makes me think of kids growing up not knowing how to touch type. Like at work when we use a computer to clock in there was a kid in his early 20s who had to look at the keyboard and slowly typed in his ID. When I was in middle school we had a typing class and because I had a PC for years I remember acing it lol. Though in general I remember learning how to use a PC in school from classes.
Even back in 2002 they put us on I believe a Debian distro without desktop which while I hated at the time I kind of appreciate now.
I still prefer Windows or Ubuntu Desktop but it's best to understand bash and CMD.
Mastering them all allows for very powerful workflows, like Linux Docker Containers on Windows WSL allows you to script everything from Windows 10 and it's consistently setup on each PC because it's infrastructure as code.
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Yeah, you need to enable or opt-in to a lot of these features, which I think many younger folks usually do.