[skandinaff]

This. I do remeber as a kid in the 90s, who was among the first who got a confuser at home - at age 5..6 I remember actually being pulled to my apartment, to play all those DOS games I had (didn't have game console, but a pentium PC, with windows 95/DOS). At some moment, I remember even being thrilled to spend my time playing jazz jack rabbit or something of sorts, instead of going downstairs to my apartment block yard (was living in ex-ussr space) which at the time was full of kids playing. It is not anymore. This memory makes me sad now, what a waste of childhood. At least, I got to experience, playing with sticks and stones with other kids, and navigating DOS file system as a 6 year old.

[close04]

I think back of my childhood and playing the usual games like hide and seek with at least 10-12 other kids around my building and occasionally I'll slip into the "kids these days" thoughts. And then I realize I had something no kid these days has: massive amounts of boredom.

There was nothing in the house to make me want to stay in. Nothing like a console or PC, best thing were books on days when going out would be deadly (exceptionally hot or cold). I was going out by necessity, initially knowing and as I grew up hoping that some other kids will be doing the same. And from that large pool of "random" kids I'd get very close to a few, become friends and then have some more on-demand negotiated fun instead of opportunistic. This lead us on hundreds of adventures anywhere we could physically go for it.

Before we even consider how walkable or dense a city is, how safe, how permissive modern laws are of letting kids just be, etc. the questions is, how many kids or parents stop short of running into any of these problems because the kids have all they think they need inside some type of electronic device?

[skandinaff]

So how do we get out of this mess? Because now, as an adult, I see no value in those electronic gadgets, videogames, especially at ages <16yo. Do we create laws and ban all of this? The democrats among us will scream and shout. Leave it to "each family's consideration" and we'll get the lowest common denominator scenario.

[Xirdus]

There is huge value in being acquainted with computers at a young age, especially if they end up in STEM or some white collar job.

[skandinaff]

As to continue my anecdotal story, I could safely say that all of my interactions with computers up until the age of 14 were purely gaming with occasional drawing in ms paint. Even so, at the age of 14, I did manage to create a simple html web page, and install a php based web engine, those actions were barely conscious, just following some tutorials in my mother tongue. Only at the age of 17 I made some first real steps into using computer to compute, write first simple programs, and began to be able to understand how it actually works. I'm pretty sure, that all of the time I spent with computers before 14 contributed less than 0.1% into "getting into STEM" and that learning English, reading actual books, spending time in extracurricular classes did way, way more. But then again, that's just my personal experience. Though I believe, it's of many.

[Xirdus]

You are not giving your 14 year old self the credit they deserve. Creating simple HTML webpages is beyond capabilities of most adults even when following tutorials. I personally witnessed many 14 year olds who failed at literally that. In school setting. Where they had a human teacher they could ask for help with anything, so much better than just a tutorial. Without PHP, just static HTML files saved on desktop.

Years of gaming let you internalize a huge number of UX idioms that you rely on everyday, like left and right mouse clicks, hierarchical menus, hotkeys, text input, active and inactive UI elements, navigating documents larger than the viewport (drag/scroll wheel/scroll bars), and so on and so forth. Imagine how much harder it would be for your 14 year old self to install and run XAMPP or whatever if they knew none of these things. Imagine how much harder it would be for your 17 year old self to begin their programming journey if they didn't already know what a file is.

Looking back from the end of the road, those 0.1% might look tiny and insignificant. But there's a high chance you'd never go into programming at all if you didn't play video games as a child. Not because of the games themselves, but because they gave you early exposure to computers. If all you did was browse Facebook instead, the effect would be much the same.

[dyauspitr]

There is no value. You can learn programming in months and that’s if it is even a real job in a couple of years.

[Xirdus]

I heard that the biggest struggle current CS professors have with college freshmen is teaching them about files and directories. It takes a full year before it clicks for most people.

[bombcar]

This was true but accidental when "we" were growing up, because if I wanted to play a game on the family computer, I had to figure out the right drivers and suchwith to make it work.

"Acquainted with computers" is closer to endlessly strolling tiktoc now.

[Xirdus]

Even doomscrolling gives you dozens of skills that never get talked about because they're just so obvious to anyone with those skills - but someone who's not even doomscrolling would literally not have, and it would bite them big time in office setting. Things like navigating touch menus, recognizing interactive and non-interactive UI elements, telling apart user-submitted content from ads, likely how to type, likely how to use multiple apps, likely how to send links and attachments to other people, likely what an account is and why remembering passwords is important.

I used to work in a phone store where almost all customers were 50+. Explaining how to call a saved contact was a daily occurence to us, nevermind creating new contacts. While I do understand why this happens and have nothing but sympathy for these people, I wouldn't want my daughter to be like that at 18.

[buellerbueller]

infinite tiktok scrolling != "being acquainted with computers" in the way you are stating here

[Xirdus]

It is very much what I mean here. See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314727

[krzyk]

I had similar experiences (post-communist country), but I was a bit older, got my first computer at age of 9 (Atari 65XE, replaced with C64 2 years later).

So I got a bit of childhood before receiving those (pretty scary stuff if I think about it - exploring holes that looked like trenches, that were dig up by workers to put water pipes in them, or exploring an old, ruined house) - living in a typical communist-era block of flats community.

But a year or so after receiving computer I started spending less and less time outside and more on computers, basically making me socially isolated except my two closest colleagues. Nowadays my two daughters are more social than I am, but I like computers too much.