In the realm specifically of computers, I think kiddos today who do have the inclination to tinker in the ways we remember fondly doing so are going to have a lot harder time of it. I personally have spent time around Zoomers who were raised on iPads, and they love and are interested in learning more about technology, but at the same time are coming at it with what I perceive at least to be a far lower skill average than what I had at their age because all they know are iPads and smartphones, which are more and more locked down and untinkerable and who's muscle memory and general knowledge pool just isn't transferable to "real" computers, if you will. For example: a younger person once asked me where the file browser was on a Windows PC. I had to explain to them that's Explorer, but it didn't connect with them because it was configured on this machine to open their share drive on a university system which is just a drive letter, not a set of curated folders like "Documents," "Downloads," "Gallery," etc. And to be completely clear here: I am not calling this kid stupid, they weren't. They were untrained and ignorant, akin to someone who wants to learn to drive a sports car only ever being given access to the PlaySkool red and yellow pedal car.
Now that being said, there are still plenty of ways kiddos can tinker with software and electronics. 3D printers immediately come to mind. You (usually) can't just bang your sausage fingers on a capacitive screen and get good quality prints from go. There's calibration, for many there's assembly, for still others there's less computery-stuff but more things like chemistry if you're going the resin route, not to mention materials safety and of course, inevitable troubleshooting. It's not quite the same but IMO, it still promotes analytical, problem-solving, learning-to-research-and-self-teach type thinking which is critical to developing engineer brains.
That being said, if you do want your kid to go into software, if it isn't already obvious to you, take away their stupid phone and give them a proper computer. And if you don't want them necessarily going into software then just take away their stupid phone, at least sometimes, so the social media companies can't completely rot their brains out before they're even out of school.
given recent advancements in UI
Also I have to push back on this specific point: I don't know of a single thing, except MAYBE iOS, that is consistently good with regard to UI. Windows is downright atrocious at this point, MacOS is fine (apart from Finder which is awful but it's always been awful), Android is a complete mess, every AAA game sports an interface that's even worse than the last, embedded systems are almost universally badly coded/organized and full to the brim with chinglish (is that term offensive?), web apps are slow as fuck with everything designed "mobile first" by which they mean they took out all the text and made everything stupid icons inside drawers so you end up sitting there translating some designer's idea of how hieroglyphs could work...
While I think your point is valid, IMO, entering in tech is so much easier. There's much more information available and you can tinker with hardware much more easier due to low prices. But it's very much easier to watch Youtube and play games on a playstation, so they do that.
I can't speak for everyone but I can tell you what my ice-breaking moment was that got me into software: I was playing the original Driver game for PC, and via reading on Gamespot forums, learned you could give yourself god-mode + access to any map if you went into the files and edited the map configuration, which was stored as plain text and easily editable. I never completed more than like... 3 missions of that game back then, I was just too dumb, but I was smart enough to edit a text file and it was the first time I altered software without using an interface or settings menu.
Of course being a dumb kid I assumed all software was like this and broke many files and executables opening them in Notepad and changing random characters, but nevertheless I credit this with starting me down the path of being a software developer. I don't think most people get into this stuff because it's easy or hard, we get into it because we want the computer to do something that it isn't currently doing, and we look for a way to make it do that. And of course there are still innumerable ways to go about it now, but they are paradoxically more complicated (not able to be performed in something like notepad, usually) and also less complicated (installing mods via Nexus, for example, is not technically challenging: the software does the vast majority of the work for you).
Comments
Agree and disagree.
In the realm specifically of computers, I think kiddos today who do have the inclination to tinker in the ways we remember fondly doing so are going to have a lot harder time of it. I personally have spent time around Zoomers who were raised on iPads, and they love and are interested in learning more about technology, but at the same time are coming at it with what I perceive at least to be a far lower skill average than what I had at their age because all they know are iPads and smartphones, which are more and more locked down and untinkerable and who's muscle memory and general knowledge pool just isn't transferable to "real" computers, if you will. For example: a younger person once asked me where the file browser was on a Windows PC. I had to explain to them that's Explorer, but it didn't connect with them because it was configured on this machine to open their share drive on a university system which is just a drive letter, not a set of curated folders like "Documents," "Downloads," "Gallery," etc. And to be completely clear here: I am not calling this kid stupid, they weren't. They were untrained and ignorant, akin to someone who wants to learn to drive a sports car only ever being given access to the PlaySkool red and yellow pedal car.
Now that being said, there are still plenty of ways kiddos can tinker with software and electronics. 3D printers immediately come to mind. You (usually) can't just bang your sausage fingers on a capacitive screen and get good quality prints from go. There's calibration, for many there's assembly, for still others there's less computery-stuff but more things like chemistry if you're going the resin route, not to mention materials safety and of course, inevitable troubleshooting. It's not quite the same but IMO, it still promotes analytical, problem-solving, learning-to-research-and-self-teach type thinking which is critical to developing engineer brains.
That being said, if you do want your kid to go into software, if it isn't already obvious to you, take away their stupid phone and give them a proper computer. And if you don't want them necessarily going into software then just take away their stupid phone, at least sometimes, so the social media companies can't completely rot their brains out before they're even out of school.
Also I have to push back on this specific point: I don't know of a single thing, except MAYBE iOS, that is consistently good with regard to UI. Windows is downright atrocious at this point, MacOS is fine (apart from Finder which is awful but it's always been awful), Android is a complete mess, every AAA game sports an interface that's even worse than the last, embedded systems are almost universally badly coded/organized and full to the brim with chinglish (is that term offensive?), web apps are slow as fuck with everything designed "mobile first" by which they mean they took out all the text and made everything stupid icons inside drawers so you end up sitting there translating some designer's idea of how hieroglyphs could work...
While I think your point is valid, IMO, entering in tech is so much easier. There's much more information available and you can tinker with hardware much more easier due to low prices. But it's very much easier to watch Youtube and play games on a playstation, so they do that.
I can't speak for everyone but I can tell you what my ice-breaking moment was that got me into software: I was playing the original Driver game for PC, and via reading on Gamespot forums, learned you could give yourself god-mode + access to any map if you went into the files and edited the map configuration, which was stored as plain text and easily editable. I never completed more than like... 3 missions of that game back then, I was just too dumb, but I was smart enough to edit a text file and it was the first time I altered software without using an interface or settings menu.
Of course being a dumb kid I assumed all software was like this and broke many files and executables opening them in Notepad and changing random characters, but nevertheless I credit this with starting me down the path of being a software developer. I don't think most people get into this stuff because it's easy or hard, we get into it because we want the computer to do something that it isn't currently doing, and we look for a way to make it do that. And of course there are still innumerable ways to go about it now, but they are paradoxically more complicated (not able to be performed in something like notepad, usually) and also less complicated (installing mods via Nexus, for example, is not technically challenging: the software does the vast majority of the work for you).
Or, better, give them two in one, i.e., a GNU/Linux phone.