Item — HN Reader

> We live in the age of automobiles. If you don't know how to use one you shouldn't be employed where they're necessary. Rather than making a dumbed down workforce we should be building people's skills up.

FTFY ;)

Computers are just another modern convenience. We need to be making them more user friendly and safe. Nobody wants to spend all their time learning, maintaining, and fixing their computers any more than they want to do that with their cars.

They should just work, without surprises.

2 comments

Yeah, if you can drive your car or put fuel in it and you need to drive for your job... Guess what happens? You don't have a job.

I mean... yeah? If you do work using cars daily (delivery driver, cab driver, etc), you should know how to use one. Or am I misunderstanding what you're saying?

As a daily driver of a car, I don't need to know how it works. I know how to _use_ it - get in, turn it on, drive.

Who cares if it's electric or ICE, how combustion or regenerative breaking works, why you need to balance tires, how to change brake pads etc. I take it to the mechanic (IT Department) and they do magic, then give it back to me.

Same for computers. Why does the user need to know about USB 2 vs 3, memory, disk space, multi-threading, ad blockers, etc. Turn it on, use it, and send it out to be fixed when it doesn't work.

I bet that the maintenance costs on vehicles/computers is inversely proportional to their operators understanding of how they function.

If you hired a driver which would you rather hire, the one who knows which grinding sounds that a vehicle makes are good/bad or the one who just keeps using it with disregard for the grinding sounds because it isn't currently inhibiting their ability to drive?

You're abstracting the complexities down to a granularity that strawmans my contention.

If you cannot operate the vehicle you need to do your job you don't have that job. I'm not saying that people need to be experts. I'm saying if you cannot learn the tools needed to do your job then you shouldn't have the job.