"Finally, I have a bone to pick with the "it's the older generations' responsibility to educate the younger generation" idea that I hear so often. At the end of the day, it's everyone's own responsibility to educate themselves, and we all know there's plenty of materials available for that."
I'm on your side of the discussion overall but that's unrealistic. It took me a decade to get so much of this knowledge and wisdom out of papers on programming, OS design, networking, security, etc. I just found some more foundational work in past months that should've been in every classroom for its relevance but nobody's heard of it.
The problem is that the stuff is scattered all over the place and not in pure form at all. There's books, papers, brochures, lectures, etc. These might have good details, fluff, or a varying mixture of each. Many great works can only be found behind paywalls (IEEE, ACM). Others are on academic sites, specific blogs, or places like CiteseerX where you have to know what you're looking for ahead of time.
Our field is anything but a clean, integrated presentation of what really mattered, matters, and might matter. It's a huge, scattered mess that we expect new crowd to just automagically sort through and discover necessary stuff. Prior generations certainly have some responsibility to make that easier rather than harder. I do my part with posts here and elsewhere directing people to specific techs that solved (or nearly so) the problems they are talking about. Need a more thorough solution, though, for the various sub-fields of I.T. before I'll blame the newcomers for prior generation's mess.
I'm on your side of the discussion overall but that's unrealistic. It took me a decade to get so much of this knowledge and wisdom out of papers on programming, OS design, networking, security, etc. I just found some more foundational work in past months that should've been in every classroom for its relevance but nobody's heard of it.
The problem is that the stuff is scattered all over the place and not in pure form at all. There's books, papers, brochures, lectures, etc. These might have good details, fluff, or a varying mixture of each. Many great works can only be found behind paywalls (IEEE, ACM). Others are on academic sites, specific blogs, or places like CiteseerX where you have to know what you're looking for ahead of time.
Our field is anything but a clean, integrated presentation of what really mattered, matters, and might matter. It's a huge, scattered mess that we expect new crowd to just automagically sort through and discover necessary stuff. Prior generations certainly have some responsibility to make that easier rather than harder. I do my part with posts here and elsewhere directing people to specific techs that solved (or nearly so) the problems they are talking about. Need a more thorough solution, though, for the various sub-fields of I.T. before I'll blame the newcomers for prior generation's mess.