For most of my life, I’ve generally been considered by friends and family to be Good At Computers. Whenever a Windows box or an old printer or a Wi-Fi router or something stopped working normally, a quick call to moi would be sufficient to get everything working again. I always thought this was somewhat amusing, because none of the problems experienced by people who call me about them were actually all that complicated; they were almost always along the lines of “somebody unplugged the ethernet cable while dusting”. On one memorable occasion, an older relative needed my help because the “computer wasn’t accepting their PIN” – they were trying to log into a Microsoft account with it.
In our enlightened age, the likes of “why won’t the printer turn on???” (they weren’t pressing the power button) are considered pretty common and entirely reasonable problems. It’s the sort of very basic mistake that people who are not Good At Computers will make. This means that being Good At Computers essentially means, to laypeople, the ability to read unexpected error messages on a screen. People who are Good At Computers are simply doing the bare minimum to make technology work; none of this is hard, all of your problems can be solved in a single Google search. Anybody with bare minimum creative problem solving skills can be Good At Computers. The vast majority of people do not know what a Kubernetes is; 99% my skills and knowledge are completely unnecessary to be Good At Computers. Turn it off and on, click suspicious UI button, plug in cable, open Google – these are the only requirements of the job.
It seems like the staggering majority of people who are Good At Computers aren’t actually good at computers at all. When talking about web development with a friend of mine (who is enrolled in a computer science program at a fairly well-respected university), they asked me completely seriously if I write code or just “use a website builder website”. This person was running a tech consultancy that does websites and AI stuff for some time before we met, but I introduced them to Tensorflow. To be clear, I’m not an AI developer. I know a few fancy words and I’m decent at linear algebra, but I don’t know the first thing about actually building a model that can get results. Surely, then, this was some kind of mistake. Surely they’ve been using some other framework I’ve never heard of because I’m not an AI developer, and somehow didn’t hear about Tensorflow. Nope, apparently not. They just do prompt engineering.
In their senior year of high school (my first year of college), I showed an old friend of mine how to use nmap
. Being smart, Good At Computers, and capable of doing the bare minimum of research and learning effort, they took to it quickly, and within a few days had found a widespread vulnerability in the school network. They proceeded to exploit it quite successfully.
A few days into that little exploit, I received a picture of them hamming for the camera in an orange prison jumpsuit. Apparently they had been caught. They weren’t actually arrested; the jumpsuit was a joke. I found out later that they had only been caught because they sent an email to the IT department from their school account, explaining the exploit. This rather bemused me, but the rationale must have been solid, because the department immediately offered them a full-time job managing school IT (which they turned down). The exploit? Open, functioning JetDirect port 9100 printing on all of the printers. In the entire district. Apparently subnet isolation was well beyond the capacity of the sysadmins there. This was a very, very simple attack that any competent system administrator should have sealed up immediately: the only explanation I can think of for the oversight is that the IT professionals who were carefully vetted for the job of keeping a fairly important network functioning were Bad At Computers.
To paraphrase Nassim Taleb: the 95th percentile isn’t impressive, because anything more than the absolute bare minimum of work automatically puts you there. The long tail behind you is saying things like “We Can Optimize Your Website With Modern WordPress Themes”, and the guys ahead and wayyyyy above are talking about hash tables that use cache lines as efficiently as possible and have best-case lookup overhead of just two cached memory accesses (I will never cease to be amazed by SwissTable). The problem arises in the fact that, despite that only 5% or so of the people in this industry are actually competent with computers, the majority are Good At Computers to laypeople: there are certainly some newbies and hopelessly incompetent grifters who can’t even solve basic tech problems, but by and large people here are capable of doing the bare minimum. Imagine that: only about one out of every twenty people you’ve met who are Good At Computers are actually good at computers. Everyone else is the team of system administrators that couldn’t be bothered to even do one full network scan, or the AI consultant who hasn’t heard of Tensorflow, or a “senior web developer” who only knows how to use WordPress block themes. Most people are Bad At Computers.