Real World Computing
Grumpy old men
A small incident that I witnessed this month is drawn fresh from the mythical fountain of youth. It's been an unescapable part of business (and indeed private) mythology for many years that there's some inherent correlation between the younger worker, or even youth itself, and an affinity with computers. One manifestation is the hoary old "only my kids can program the video" cliché. Another is that I still get called a "whizz-kid" every so often (which, if you look at my picture on the right, could surely be used as some kind of basic eye test during recruitment sessions).
The assumption underlying this myth is "the young" should be doing the computer work because their enquiring minds and flexible ways of working are so much more appropriate to the challenges presented by those mysterious "computers".
Unfortunately what people tend to forget is that the youth of the 1970s and the youth of the 2000s come to the computer in completely different contexts. Back then, if you looked to your computer as a medium for entertainment you had to put up with typing on a keyboard made from fossilised chewing gum, while staring at a screen whose character resolution compared poorly with a modern bus stop information display. Indeed the main entertainment value lay in getting your program to run at all, which delivered the same kind of buzz as completing a model of St Paul's Cathedral out of Meccano - and that kind of bizarre and indirect reward appealed only to a very special kind of disaffected, overly focused, somewhat under-socialised child (look at the Real World Computing columnists' photos and feel free to go "awwwww" if you're of a highly sympathetic nature).
By stark contrast, kids growing up with computers these days view them primarily as a channel for entertainment and social connection. It's a strong marketing plus for all manner of technology companies to persuade us that their tool (be it a mobile phone, an internet connection or a computer) expresses connectedness to our peers in our social group. That's almost the diametrically opposite state of mind from that of preceding generations of socially challenged nerds, but - crucially - there's no automatic guarantee that it's a better state of mind.
A case in point: one of my clients rang in a panic because their branch office internet connection had been summarily cut off by their ISP. It was a tiny office, and in anticipation of correspondingly tiny amounts of traffic they had plumped for a cheap, traffic-capped contract. A rapid burst of investigatory activity on my part revealed that the "normal use" profile of their link had in fact been blasted to smithereens only four days into the contract, and their ISP's routine series of escalating violation warnings had arrived spaced so close together that nothing was able to be done about them in time.
The root cause of all this excitement was one of those delicate artistic types, who needed to look at some photos for the firm's website at home, and having already loaded them onto a rather wheezy and ancient PC at the branch office, decided that the easiest way for him to pick them up at home was to publish them in raw, unedited form by way of a BitTorrent peer-to-peer server. So while he was sitting on the train on the way home, fully intending to collect his photos after dinner, several hundred people all across the world discovered his P2P server and deposited things onto it, as well as looking at the pictures that he'd left there. When he did pick up the pictures using his P2P client on his home MacBook, he further decided that it would be so convenient to drop a few episodes of The Office onto this shared store on the branch PC, before going down the pub...
