AAnonymous writes:

>It is obvious there is some serious fear out there
>among some people that will either need to be re-trained (by people
>that are 20 years younger) or unemployed.

That's an interesting idea, but it represents a very naive point of view.

I remember when I first learned to program computers, in machine code on
a Monroe 1655 programmable scientific calculator. I was 12 years old at
the time, and I thought I was really hot stuff, using "privileged"
opcodes and the like. I had learned something special, an initiation into
a secret society. (Actually, the really significant achievement was
talking a Monroe salesperson into letting a 12-year-old kid take home a
$3500 machine on weekends without so much as a signature, but I didn't
realize that until much later.)

The next year, in high school, I taught myself Basic. Later that same
year came FORTRAN, then ALGOL, then COBOL, the HP9810, and a couple of
years later, RPG and Burroughs B300 assembler (on a machine that was just
about as old as I was). I'd added a bunch more to that before I finished
college, and as I learned all these new things, I gradually learned that
they really weren't new things at all: just the same thing over and over,
with different decorations.

Same thing with learning how to operate computers. After I learned the
first one, I thought I was really special. But by the time I got to the
tenth, or twentieth, I figured out that they're all the same, with
different decorations.

It's easy for someone who's just written their first Visual Basic program
to consider themselves a computer expert. But the fact is that knowing a
computer language, or a command set, or the boot sequence of an operating
system, is pretty trivial. That's not what's worth paying for; I suspect
that for many of the people on this list, learning a new computer system
is a matter of a few of weeks of intensive study. A new computer language
may take a week or two. Technical knowledge isn't special, for people who
have a talent for it, and most computer people who've selected their own
career path have done so because they have a talent for absorbing
technical information.

What *is* worth paying for is the ability to apply that knowledge to
real-world problems. That requires being able to understand, and
empathize with the person whose problems you're trying to solve. It
requires an ability to understand and react to the way people interact
with the computer. It requires being able to visualize the communication
paths in an organization, or the creative process employed by someone
whose job you're trying to facilitate. All of these are people problems;
they have nothing to do with computers.

Only after I've come up with a solution do I start deciding what hardware
and software to implement it on, and that decision is usually driven by
something other than purely technological considerations. When given a
free hand, I employ HP 3000s and Macintoshes because I can trust them to
do what my users tell them to do, without my having to employ much of the
technical knowledge that this poster mistakenly thinks is the real asset.
When I'm not given a free hand, I use whatever is available. From a
technical point of view, it's all the same.

PCs are neither new nor different, just smaller. So until computers
change -- I mean *really* change, like using fully-associative memories,
or employing entirely new principles of operation such as in optical and
quantum computing -- any retraining I need will be trivial: no more than
learning new words for the same old concepts, or new arrangements for the
same old pieces.

-- Bruce


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