Technological scatterbrains

Mastering the basics of IT (information technology) is a first step toward ensuring the social, professional and cultural survival of anyone who intends to get ahead in the 21st century.

That’s why the statements of our authorities, confessing their ignorance on these matters, worry us and scandalize us.

But mastering the computer, browsing the internet, having a Facebook profile, or using Google is not enough. We have to remember that without a basic culture, without an adequate level of education, the internet becomes just another medium, as empty as the traditional media or even worse.

One thing that worries me is that IT professionals are turning into technological scatterbrains, and what I observe in my profession can be seen in other fields too.

These days, when a programmer faces a bug or a performance problem, before reflecting on what might be going on, he opens his favorite browser and types a query into Google to “solve his problem”. He takes the first answer, copy-pastes the code he finds, compiles and tests. If the problem goes away, he’s happy and moves on to something else.

This seems to work, and many companies and colleagues operate this way, especially the younger ones. Searching for answers on the internet is a powerful tool, but it requires a thoughtful use of those answers, or it can turn into a problem down the road.

The other day I was talking with some computer science academics, and they told me how their thesis students were getting stuck on technical problems for months. All those solutions copied from the internet, which worked at the start of the project, had turned into a mountain of hidden bugs, performance problems and wasted time.

It seems technical people don’t read books anymore; they look for the answer on Google, copying and pasting without mercy.

Trying to understand the fundamentals of things is something the younger ones “can’t be bothered” with. And we older ones have gotten used to that too. If we didn’t read the manual before, today we don’t even take the time to read a tutorial!

Scatterbrains

A scatterbrain (“atolondrado” in Spanish) is someone who acts without reflection, and that is what we are becoming when we make no effort to understand what we are doing. Copy and paste is not the most efficient way to solve a problem, and it can be the source of many headaches in the future. The old hacker aphorism matters more every day: RTFM.

The answer is not on the internet. What’s on the internet is information, which lets you work out an adequate answer for each situation. Unfortunately that is something people don’t understand, and so technological scatterbrainedness only grows.