Engineering lack of curiosity

My grandmother was terribly disliked by rail travel. The locomotives did not inspire confidence in her, behaved clearly suspicious and openly threatening. With great difficulty, my father managed to get her into the car when it really was necessary. My father, having traveled almost the entire union on business trips in his entire life, spent about a year or more in the carriages of clean time, but each time incredible mental efforts cost him to board the plane. I fly, not noticing the fundamental differences in them from the city minibus, and I certainly do not worry about this. I would venture to suggest that whether commercial commercial space is now massively available, it won't cost my children or grandchildren any mental effort to drive them to the lunar colony and back for the weekend, but I myself will never get into anything that flies outside the atmosphere. Earth.Normal, evolutionary course of history. Descendants must be better than ancestors, otherwise humanity will degrade.



There is a similar trend in IT, if we take as a criterion the measure, so to speak, of "routine" technologies, their integration into daily social interactions. Personnel began their triumphant march to the people in an era when computing was the lot of scientists, engineers and a handful of marginal nerds. All of them were already united by an engineering and a creative approach, but the personal staff had a hard time - the generation of our parents perceived them both then and now as some kind of black boxes, over which it is necessary to carry out precisely calibrated shamanic rituals to obtain the desired result. There is no place for creative curiosity - if the desired icon or button is missing in the indicated location on the screen, but are shifted a little to the side, there is a completely understandable panic and a desire to bother technical support, generating tons of appropriate folklore in the style



(scared), my panels are gone!

(wearily) press control ...

(joyfully) oh and now my panels are flickering!

(wearily) let go of the control ...



In this industry, I believe the generational line is where the obviousness of technical solutions disappears. For example, selecting an item in a ListView is done with two mouse clicks, and clicking a button with one. We are used to it. This is probably the result of some research in the field of interface ergonomics from Microsoft or Apple, or maybe even from PARC. But try to explain to your mother what is the difference ... People, not so far away, but, shall we say, not close to IT, often suspect us of some magical abilities, when we, having approached a deliberately unfamiliar (but obviously riveted on some then a single-board or microcontroller), a piece of iron with buttons and a screen, we understand it much faster than mere mortals. But there's no magic hereof course - it's just that the workflow of the device is more obvious to us and the interface is usually designed exactly the way we would have thought of it ourselves. Therefore, everything is immediately clear.



Intermediate disclaimer: all of the above, as usual in my articles in the "chat" style, obviously suffers from many simplifications and assumptions for the sake of brevity of the subsequent presentation of the main idea.



So far, all of the above reflects my own, idealized and slightly simplified picture of the world, which took shape at a time when I myself was more or less related to the “current” generation. But the years go by and now I, already a teacher of a number of IT disciplines in two leading metropolitan universities, work with students. Students are different, the whole spectrum from enthusiasts to nihilists, from those who came to sit their pants for 5 years because it is so customary, to those who seriously intend to gain useful industry knowledge and skills. For some reason, there are more first ones, and this is very sad, because the competition for this specialty in this university is quite high and it takes effort to get here.



And in the process of routine work, I recently began to notice the phenomena that frighten me. Something is happening, for which names like "chronic lack of curiosity" come to mind. Let me explain with an example. Students complete a series of labs in the language of their choice, but usually C # or java, rarely python. A small formal report in electronic form is also required to attach an archive of all essential sources so that I can run and check them for myself. It would seem that the phrase "attach the source archive" should not cause misunderstanding in anyone? When it comes to C #, for the sake of clarity, I tell them "attach an archive of your solution". Can you understand something wrong here? It turns out, as far as possible.



Remember the ancient IT anecdote of pre-Internet times about a business trip who was sent with a floppy disk to another city to copy some software that his company needs. And who brought one LNK file on this floppy with a link to this software. Do you think this only happens in jokes? No matter how it is. Now the end of the semester, half of the students have not completed half of their labs yet, and although in September I begged them not to postpone, so that later they would not rake 30+ works from the entire stream every evening, they do just that.



And so, one talent was found, which, judging by the text part of the report and screenshots, did the next three laboratory work correctly and correctly, without hesitation sends an archive, inside which - yes, you guessed right - there are three lonely SLN files. I ask him, they say, dear colleague, do you even know what an SLN file is and what is it for? And he answers that there are the very required source codes of his laboratories. When I said that the source codes are not there, the student's answer was in the style of "well, if you say so, then I will fix everything." That is, even when the teacher was obviously hooked on this particular place, the student did not have an idea to independently crawl into this unfortunate file and personally find out what was wrong with him. Here it becomes funny at first, and then not very much,when there were four more such talents - and all, at first glance, are smart guys, they don’t graze the back ones, they do not lag behind academically and all that.



This means that the problem of chronic lack of curiosity is of a systemic nature. When I was 10 years old, I created my first executable in Turbo Basic in my life, being beside myself with happiness that it turns out that you can compile - write programs that are not tied to the development environment, but executed directly. And then he climbed to see what was inside. Still not understanding anything from what I saw, I still noticed that there is a signature at the beginning, some text lines at the end, and that the machine code itself looks uneven. That is, an engineering curiosity about how a complex system “under the hood” works, even if the relevant knowledge is near zero, I considered something natural for any human individual. Well, if not everyone at all, then for anyone entering the university at the IT department with a degree in software engineering.Well, who in childhood did not try to disassemble some mechanical toy and see what was inside?



So, please, we have the future intellectual and technological elite of the country, for which the very idea of ​​looking inside an arbitrary file and seeing what is there and whether it can somehow be understood, interpreted, corrected, turns out to be far from obvious! Even though the SLN file is text, not binary.



By the way, the difference between a text file and a binary file is also not obvious to them, and this, alas, is more massive than unwillingness to look inside. Not in the sense that any file is a sequence of bytes, no. And they also have no idea that files are more human-readable and more machine-readable. People who seem to have chosen the path of a developer. Suddenly, a generation of future IT-schnicks appeared, for whom the file became the basic semantic unit of information!



But this is not the first or second year, and many of them are already employed in their specialty and are very successful in their jobs. What's happening? Have you seen similar phenomena? Or is it I already have a syndrome "before the grass was greener"? Discass.