In a way this is a natural side effect of the progression of technology. Manufacturers want their products to get cheaper and easier to use so more people, usually technology illiterate, will buy their products. Computers today are several factors faster and more reliable than computers ten or fifteen years ago. They are also priced several factors less than those computer from a decade ago.
Computers used to cost enough that when they broke down, it made sense to take them to a repair shop to replace parts and diagnose issues. Today the cost of repair can cost about as much as buying a new computer, with the added bonus of usually acquiring a faster system in the process.
As time passed, more utilities were released to help manage fleets of computers in business. Operating systems started including more helpful systems to accommodate imaging and system deployment. They're far from perfect (oh, so far, in some cases...) but they exist, and system management has significantly advanced to try to meet the needs of large businesses.
"Surely, these are good things! Companies need these features so system administrators can focus on getting work done instead of spending all their time troubleshooting user problems on their desktops!"
On one hand these features are great. They cut down on time that might have been wasted with repetitive tasks, and rolling out simple changes to a hundred desktops through automation really adds up.
The other hand, though, is the one in which exploring problems and creating solutions fosters understanding. Why is this computer failing to install this application? What do I do to find a key to delete in the registry? How can I replace a file on a system that won't finish booting?
Sometimes you can learn very interesting things through what your manager would have deemed a waste of time; I learned about visibility of various Windows timers while trying to troubleshoot an application that was supposed to schedule a reboot from the time a user had logged in (spoiler: it's not as simple as you'd think), for example. Working with Visual Basic was like a lesson in spotting people who were actually vampires hiding among normal people; I didn't realize how many applications, written by professional programmers, with a large price tag attached, were actually written in a language that is the object of so many jokes by other professional programmers.
But now there is often pressure to not explore the problem but instead just re-image the system, or reinstall the operating system. We don't take the time to try to figure out what is causing the problem or poke at internals. That's a waste of time. The efficient, responsible thing to do is just wipe it and that should probably most likely fix the problem.
In fairness it usually does.
Then a month later you find other sysadmins or support people complaining about how kids today don't have any comprehension of how things work. They don't know about registry editing, or have any intuition in tracing an application failure when the antivirus program is supposed to be talking to the clients but isn't.
It might very well have to do with the fact that they never had to, and were actually discouraged from taking the time to discovering how things work in favor of the quick re-image. It may have to do with the fact that people who did benefit from having no possible choice but recompile the Linux kernel to get a feature or device to work properly won't take the time to mentor new people for comprehension of a problem rather than just fixing a problem and moving on.
Cheaper technology, simpler solutions. Reimage it. Reinstall it. You don't understand it because you don't have to.
Eventually it's all just magic.
We'll remember the days when stuff cost so much you had to learn to troubleshoot it and keep it going rather than swapping out cheap parts from Walmart. We'll remember learning how things worked because we were forced to poke at parts until the spot where data was getting stuck could be unstuck, instead of reinstalling and hoping the corrupted entry or random file was overwritten with a working version.
And then continue bitching that people today don't understand what the hell they're doing.
Because...y'know...they don't have to.
The other hand, though, is the one in which exploring problems and creating solutions fosters understanding. Why is this computer failing to install this application? What do I do to find a key to delete in the registry? How can I replace a file on a system that won't finish booting?
Sometimes you can learn very interesting things through what your manager would have deemed a waste of time; I learned about visibility of various Windows timers while trying to troubleshoot an application that was supposed to schedule a reboot from the time a user had logged in (spoiler: it's not as simple as you'd think), for example. Working with Visual Basic was like a lesson in spotting people who were actually vampires hiding among normal people; I didn't realize how many applications, written by professional programmers, with a large price tag attached, were actually written in a language that is the object of so many jokes by other professional programmers.
But now there is often pressure to not explore the problem but instead just re-image the system, or reinstall the operating system. We don't take the time to try to figure out what is causing the problem or poke at internals. That's a waste of time. The efficient, responsible thing to do is just wipe it and that should probably most likely fix the problem.
In fairness it usually does.
Then a month later you find other sysadmins or support people complaining about how kids today don't have any comprehension of how things work. They don't know about registry editing, or have any intuition in tracing an application failure when the antivirus program is supposed to be talking to the clients but isn't.
It might very well have to do with the fact that they never had to, and were actually discouraged from taking the time to discovering how things work in favor of the quick re-image. It may have to do with the fact that people who did benefit from having no possible choice but recompile the Linux kernel to get a feature or device to work properly won't take the time to mentor new people for comprehension of a problem rather than just fixing a problem and moving on.
Cheaper technology, simpler solutions. Reimage it. Reinstall it. You don't understand it because you don't have to.
Eventually it's all just magic.
We'll remember the days when stuff cost so much you had to learn to troubleshoot it and keep it going rather than swapping out cheap parts from Walmart. We'll remember learning how things worked because we were forced to poke at parts until the spot where data was getting stuck could be unstuck, instead of reinstalling and hoping the corrupted entry or random file was overwritten with a working version.
And then continue bitching that people today don't understand what the hell they're doing.
Because...y'know...they don't have to.
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