I was in A&E last week (all is well) and the consultant I saw was twelve years old!
Not sure about having a 12-year-old as a consultant in Emergency Services, but it is good to have a 12-year-old to assist with a computer once in a while. (I know you are referring to how young the staff appear to be.)
I was in A&E last week (all is well) and the consultant I saw was twelve years old!
Not sure about having a 12-year-old as a consultant in Emergency Services, but it is good to have a 12-year-old to assist with a computer once in a while. (I know you are referring to how young the staff appear to be.)
[Serious comment]
Actually, a 32 year old would likely be more useful.
Back in the early days of motoring, to be a motorist you had also to be something of a mechanic, as failures were so regular you had to be able to manage some repairs on the fly. Now cars are so much more reliable and easy to use, this is no longer the case.
A similar phenomenon is occurring in IT - modern consumer kit is so much more user friendly and complex internally while simple at the user interface, that you no longer need to have any computer engineering knowledge to use one. We are seeing Gen Z and Alpha coming athrough now with excellent *user* skills but less understanding of how computers actually work.
Or as we cynically say in IT - if you make computers so simple that any idiot can use one, the any idiot will.
"If you make your code idiot proof, the world will produce better idiots".
I would like my medical staff to be younger than me - I mean, I am old and losing it. My GP is younger than me, which means, hopefully, she will continue working through my early dotage and not retiring just when I need help.
A similar phenomenon is occurring in IT - modern consumer kit is so much more user friendly and complex internally while simple at the user interface, that you no longer need to have any computer engineering knowledge to use one. We are seeing Gen Z and Alpha coming athrough now with excellent *user* skills but less understanding of how computers actually work.
I am perennially surprised by how poor basic user skills are in work settings, even from people of my generation who ought to have been using (say) simple spreadsheets for a couple of decades. It's like some people never pick up the meta-skill of "prodding it until it does what you want" or even JFGingI. For example, I handle some work around subject access requests and for particularly large releases we take measures to shrink the resulting PDF files. In some cases there are dozens of files. I was advised to just pick the very largest and open them one at a time and apply the optimisation to each one individually. Adobe Acrobat, I figured out after 5 minutes, has a batch processing function so I could just queue up as many files as I wanted and let Acrobat crank through them. [I suspect that Acrobat gets away with being expensive and crappy in a lot of ways by being "industry standard"; it's certainly a horrible resource hog on my Core i5 with 8GB RAM]
I am perennially surprised by how poor basic user skills are in work settings, even from people of my generation who ought to have been using (say) simple spreadsheets for a couple of decades. It's like some people never pick up the meta-skill of "prodding it until it does what you want" or even JFGingI. For example, I handle some work around subject access requests and for particularly large releases we take measures to shrink the resulting PDF files. In some cases there are dozens of files. I was advised to just pick the very largest and open them one at a time and apply the optimisation to each one individually. Adobe Acrobat, I figured out after 5 minutes, has a batch processing function so I could just queue up as many files as I wanted and let Acrobat crank through them. [I suspect that Acrobat gets away with being expensive and crappy in a lot of ways by being "industry standard"; it's certainly a horrible resource hog on my Core i5 with 8GB RAM]
When I first worked on a computer, my instructor told me to not be afraid to press any key, but, understand, if I press the wrong key everything would crash. Now, the kids have no fear. They never heard such instructions. Most computers now have recovery systems that get one pretty close to what one was doing before the crash.
When I first worked on a computer, my instructor told me to not be afraid to press any key, but, understand, if I press the wrong key everything would crash. Now, the kids have no fear. They never heard such instructions. Most computers now have recovery systems that get one pretty close to what one was doing before the crash.
I spent a long time looking for the 'any' key I was being told to press!
I was in A&E last week (all is well) and the consultant I saw was twelve years old!
When my daughter was a toddler she had a hospital appointment. I'd have been about 32. The doctor recognised me, but I did not recognise her.
I was one of your Brownies she explained.
Clearly something was going awry in the space / time continuum if I was old enough to have been a Brownie leader to someone who was old enough to be a doctor!
Comments
Not sure about having a 12-year-old as a consultant in Emergency Services, but it is good to have a 12-year-old to assist with a computer once in a while. (I know you are referring to how young the staff appear to be.)
[Serious comment]
Actually, a 32 year old would likely be more useful.
Back in the early days of motoring, to be a motorist you had also to be something of a mechanic, as failures were so regular you had to be able to manage some repairs on the fly. Now cars are so much more reliable and easy to use, this is no longer the case.
A similar phenomenon is occurring in IT - modern consumer kit is so much more user friendly and complex internally while simple at the user interface, that you no longer need to have any computer engineering knowledge to use one. We are seeing Gen Z and Alpha coming athrough now with excellent *user* skills but less understanding of how computers actually work.
Or as we cynically say in IT - if you make computers so simple that any idiot can use one, the any idiot will.
I would like my medical staff to be younger than me - I mean, I am old and losing it. My GP is younger than me, which means, hopefully, she will continue working through my early dotage and not retiring just when I need help.
I am perennially surprised by how poor basic user skills are in work settings, even from people of my generation who ought to have been using (say) simple spreadsheets for a couple of decades. It's like some people never pick up the meta-skill of "prodding it until it does what you want" or even JFGingI. For example, I handle some work around subject access requests and for particularly large releases we take measures to shrink the resulting PDF files. In some cases there are dozens of files. I was advised to just pick the very largest and open them one at a time and apply the optimisation to each one individually. Adobe Acrobat, I figured out after 5 minutes, has a batch processing function so I could just queue up as many files as I wanted and let Acrobat crank through them. [I suspect that Acrobat gets away with being expensive and crappy in a lot of ways by being "industry standard"; it's certainly a horrible resource hog on my Core i5 with 8GB RAM]
I spent a long time looking for the 'any' key I was being told to press!
When my daughter was a toddler she had a hospital appointment. I'd have been about 32. The doctor recognised me, but I did not recognise her.
I was one of your Brownies she explained.
Clearly something was going awry in the space / time continuum if I was old enough to have been a Brownie leader to someone who was old enough to be a doctor!