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Study Shows Teen Gamers Like Tech, But Don't All Crave IT Jobs 227

Posted by timothy from the it-is-only-one-corner-of-technology dept.
CIStud writes "If you think playing endless hours of Dungeons & Dragons will create a desire to get into the information technology, think again. A new study by CompTIA of teens and young adults shows that only 17% want to pursue a technology career despite the fact that 97% say they 'love' technology." This can't be any more surprising than that most concert-goers don't intend to be professional musicians, can it? 17% actually sounds like a pretty high figure to me. The article goes on to soften even that number, though: "[I]nterest levels jump when teens and young adults are presented with options for specific jobs. Nearly half of the respondents can see themselves potentially designing video games; 41 percent envision creating applications for mobile devices; 39 percent, designing web pages; and 34 percent, applying technology in fields such as healthcare or education."
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Study Shows Teen Gamers Like Tech, But Don't All Crave IT Jobs More

Study Shows Teen Gamers Like Tech, But Don't All Crave IT Jobs

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  • Stupid article is stupid (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14, 2012 @12:44PM (#40325089)

    I like pizza, but I don't want to be a cook at the local pizza joint.

    • Re:Stupid article is stupid (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Gideon Wells ( 1412675 ) on Thursday June 14, 2012 @01:04PM (#40325549)

      This article would have made more sense realistically a while back. Current teen gamers are part of a console generation where one of the main three contenders, the Wii, is even doing well in Nursing homes. Gaming could be seen as having a stronger correlation back when gaming was more niche.

      To use your analogy, anyone can make and eat pizza these days. At one point, in a steadily decreasing percentage of those alive, the only people who made/ate Pizzas were enthusiasts who either built their own oven, knew someone who did, or was a relative of an over owner/builder. If you are this involved, connected, etc. you might be more inclined to work at a pizzaria than anything else.

      These days anyone can buy a frozen pizza for a dollar and nuke it in the microwave. Yet the TFA makes a big deal that these microwave pizza eaters aren't as dedicated or interested as the oven building pizza eaters. Go fig.

      • Adding one's own toppings (Score:4, Interesting)

        by tepples ( 727027 ) <.tepples. .at. .gmail.com.> on Thursday June 14, 2012 @01:29PM (#40326031) Homepage Journal

        These days anyone can buy a frozen pizza for a dollar and nuke it in the microwave.

        Pizzas don't have a mechanism to keep people from adding their own toppings before putting it in a microwave or conventional oven. Console games, on the other hand, do have a cryptographic mechanism to keep end users from adding mods.

        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward

          I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Sir_Sri ( 199544 )

        Gamers don't really have a lot of use for the Wii. Their adoption rate (games per console) is pretty pitiful as is their overall played time. The nursing home thing is much more what we would call serious games. Game technology used for serious purposes, although in a nursing home it might be half and half, get the people exercising while getting them some mental stimulation and entertainment on a rainy day.

  • users vs producers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tverbeek ( 457094 ) on Thursday June 14, 2012 @12:45PM (#40325105) Homepage

    This should be obvious that gamers would be mostly uninterested in tech careers. It'd be like people who watch television all wanting to go into theater, or people who like to drive going into automotive mechanics, or people who like to eat pursuing a career in culinary arts. Liking to use something is very different from wanting to be one of the people who make it work.

    • It would be far more interesting to know of those who were interested in tech fields, how much these activities influenced them. Of course, that difficulty of the difference in experiments is probably on par with the difference in how interesting the results are.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by detritus. ( 46421 )

      Exactly, the whole "video game programmer" craze that started years back from the various online colleges fell flat on its face.
      All the gamers expected they could just walk in and land a job making up and designing games without any idea of what was really involved, or that they would actually have to learn a thing about development. The only best possible scenario for the 99th percentile was being doing grunt work for EA working long, stressful hours on someone else's project.

      Notice how those degree progr

      • "Notice how those degree programs are rarely advertised anymore." I wonder if that has more to do with the legal trouble Le Cordon Blue Schools got into last year. Essentially some for-profit cooking schools were sued for overstating the employability of their graduates.

      • Re:users vs producers (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Sir_Sri ( 199544 ) on Thursday June 14, 2012 @01:38PM (#40326167)

        We offer a very successful game development specialization as part of computer science or software engineering. That works very well. It is our most popular stream and even kids who don't get the full specialization usually take at least one of the game development courses. It's still a comp sci degree, so they can go off and do anything any other computer scientist can do, they are specialized in game dev.

        Easily half of our students are interested in games (and take some game dev courses), and are into technology because of games. But that's mostly the domestic ones. The ones from the middle east, india and china are much more academically oriented (which is why our grad programme is 85% foreign). But game development on average is a shitty career choice, long uncertain hours, low job security and dependence on government handouts for game companies isn't a great way to make a career. So even the ones who have fun making games in course work will go off and build boring databases and web sites or be business analysts etc. When someone offers you a job paying 50k with no benefits to make video games, and someone else offers you 70k with benefits and career advancement options it's tough to take the game dev gig.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jedidiah ( 1196 )

          All of the criticisms you just leveled at the game industry can be applied equally well to any job in IT. It's especially true of any tech nexus like Silicon Valley.

          If you aren't into it, you're going to be miserable and wondering why you put up with any of the shit. You will also likely be rather bad at it too.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Sir_Sri ( 199544 )

            It's true if you let it be. Game development as an industry is like that. IT is like that only if you choose to take that kind of risk. You could just work for cisco or a bank or something and make a decent career of it and turn your e-mail off at 5.

            Now sure, you take a pay write down on that. But there's something to be said for the quality of life of making shitty web pages 9-5 and not getting called in at 3 am to fix a down server, or still being at work at 3am trying to get a publisher deadline that

        • When someone offers you a job paying 50k with no benefits to make video games, and someone else offers you 70k with benefits and career advancement options it's tough to take the game dev gig.

          You're not exactly a starving artist in a garret on 50k so the choice is simple. If you could only earn 5k and had to rely on additional work to survive (like a lot of musicians and actors) then that's a different matter. But otherwise, it is always better to be happy than rich.

          My career advice would always be to go for what you enjoy, as long as you can make some sort of living out of it. As anyone who has ever worked should know know, being well paid does not compensate for having a dreary, unintere

    • That's because IT is boring. Sitting in an office not talking to anyone is not most people's view of an ideal job. (Though it does offer the opportunity to consume lots of audiobooks. :-) Also talk and music radio.)

    • It's a valid study, though. For example: all the good writers read a lot, and most people that "love books" have thought up a story or two of their own in their life. Most artists like to view art as well as produce it. Do all people that have a deep interest in viewing art/reading books yearn to also produce it, or is it just that people that like to produce art/books also like to view it?

      I really think that every teen that is truly a fan of TV (most people watch TV, yes, but that's different from being

      • "most people that I know play games of some type nowadays"

        Fixed that for you.

        There is a large cohort of people over 50 who never played video games as a kid, and still don't. In fact, even after the dawn of the video game in the 1980s, there was still a period when it was mostly (male) geeks playing them, so I think you'd even find a pretty large number of over-40s who never got into gaming when they were young, which is the strongest predictor of whether someone plays games today: aside from people encoun

        • Lots of people who gamed when they were young and now have IT jobs would rather spend their free time away from a computer.

        • "most people that I know play games of some type nowadays"

          Fixed that for you.

          In my opinion There is a large cohort of people over 50 who never played video games as a kid, and still don't. ...

          And fixed that for you. Signed, a 50-something gamer (I avoid FPSs but enjoy a good RTS)

    • This should be obvious that gamers would be mostly uninterested in tech careers. It'd be like people who watch television all wanting to go into theater, or people who like to drive going into automotive mechanics, or people who like to eat pursuing a career in culinary arts. Liking to use something is very different from wanting to be one of the people who make it work.

      Yeah, it would kind of be like all concertgoers wanting to become professional musicians.

      Wait, I think that I may have heard that analogy already.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jedidiah ( 1196 )

        People are missing a bit on the logic.

        They take the fact that most professionals are enthusiasts to erroneously conclude that most enthusiasts will become professionals.

        In Venn terms, it's a little circle nearly completely inside a much larger circle.

    • It'd be like people who watch television all wanting to go into theater

      That or like people who watch YouTube making their own videos to post on YouTube. It's a bit harder to do that with a video game.

  • D&D! (Score:5, Funny)

    by KatchooNJ ( 173554 ) <Katchoo716 AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday June 14, 2012 @12:45PM (#40325111) Homepage

    Let's roll to determine your career path. Roll a d20!

  • I could "see myself" as an astronaut as well (Score:3)

    by slimjim8094 ( 941042 ) on Thursday June 14, 2012 @12:45PM (#40325125)

    Am I missing something, or is this roughly the equivalent of people saying "I want to be a fireman when I grow up!"?

    Still, I suppose it's encouraging that software dev is seen as reasonably classy. Even just a few years ago it was all "but I'm not a sweaty nerd!"

    • Am I missing something, or is this roughly the equivalent of people saying "I want to be a fireman when I grow up!"?

      Still, I suppose it's encouraging that software dev is seen as reasonably classy. Even just a few years ago it was all "but I'm not a sweaty nerd!"

      Sort of, they see the potential fun in a career and say "I want to be a fireman because I just want to play with the siren and drive a big red truck."
      They have no idea of what it fully involves (pun intended).

      • I suppose this could be the same thing... lots of people going "I want to make a game like Angry Birds!" who don't really understand the work involved (hours of debugging a missing paren, etc

        )

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Sir_Sri ( 199544 )

          Everyone has game design ideas, it's only a relative few that can do the required statistics and linear algebra and programming to make it all work. And the people who can do all of those necessary things have as many ideas as people who can't.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jedidiah ( 1196 )

            You're conflating designers and programmers. They aren't necessarily the same thing. Actually, they usually aren't the same thing. Although there is some overlap.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Sir_Sri ( 199544 )

              Every programmer contributes to design, but ya, absolutely, these days there are world designers, encounter designers, systems designers etc. I'm half systems designer half programmer. And programming is more 'tools programming' for some of us, so we build the stuff the regular designers do.

              The thing is, the barrier to those lower skill jobs, the level design and itemization and so on jobs is being able to use the tools. You can learn that skill in school, which is pretty easy, a 12 month course will man

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Jeng ( 926980 )

        I wanted to be a fireman because I liked to play with fire.

        One of the crazy things we would do at bonfires was to toss a pallet up on the bonfire which blocks the flames from going up, then seeing how long you can stand on the pallet. High school was such fun.

      • Am I missing something, or is this roughly the equivalent of people saying "I want to be a fireman when I grow up!"?

        Still, I suppose it's encouraging that software dev is seen as reasonably classy. Even just a few years ago it was all "but I'm not a sweaty nerd!"

        Sort of, they see the potential fun in a career and say "I want to be a fireman because I just want to play with the siren and drive a big red truck." They have no idea of what it fully involves (pun intended).

        Okay, I give up, what pun was intended? (Or are you obliquely referencing the xkcd about using the phrase "no pun intended" after a sentence with no pun in it?)

      • Re:I could "see myself" as an astronaut as well (Score:5, Funny)

        by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Thursday June 14, 2012 @02:41PM (#40327193)

        But Firemen aren't the good guys these days. Their wages and benefits are costing the government money that could be better used giving to the rich as tax cuts.

    • Am I missing something, or is this roughly the equivalent of people saying "I want to be a fireman when I grow up!"?

      Still, I suppose it's encouraging that software dev is seen as reasonably classy. Even just a few years ago it was all "but I'm not a sweaty nerd!"

      I would say the public perception of software dev being classy/cool is based entirely on seeing a twat like Mark Zuckerberg make ten billion dollars because he could do a bit of coding, plus the stories of a simple iphone app making its developer a million dollars in a couple of weeks, or whatever.

      If there were many lazy, untalented, young, incredibly rich burger flippers, then burger flipping would be cool too.

  • How many said they wished to produce educational video games for mobile devices?

  • Please (Score:4, Insightful)

    by PCM2 ( 4486 ) on Thursday June 14, 2012 @12:49PM (#40325225) Homepage

    I think the percentage of "young adults" who actually have any idea what their future career is likely to be is less that 17 percent.

    • Realistically, yes. I agree.

      I'm still dumb founded by those who genuinely believe that we have our life-long career and ambitions set by time we enter high school.

    • Also, how many Google employees wanted to be a "search engine optimizer" (or whatever) when they grew up? How many could have wanted it, since the concept didn't exist in their time?

  • I bet they don't want to be janitors either. (Score:5, Funny)

    by pathological liar ( 659969 ) on Thursday June 14, 2012 @12:49PM (#40325227)

    Why go into the white collar equivalent?

    I (sometimes) enjoy my work, but glamorous it ain't.

  • Smarter than they look (Score:5, Insightful)

    by girlintraining ( 1395911 ) on Thursday June 14, 2012 @12:55PM (#40325361)

    Normally teenagers are the gold standard for naive thinking, but they got it perfectly right on this one. I'm in IT. I've been here for a long time. I tell anyone considering a career in it to beat themselves soundly about the head and shoulders. How many ways is it bad? Ah, let us count the ways...

    You'll rarely get any respect from your employer.
    Most of us don't work for Google -- we work for MegaCorp(tm). MegaCorp's sole focus is on the end of quarter profit margin, and that means that everyone that isn't in sales is slowing us down. Cut those budgets! Trim those sales! Yarr, matey, we be bringin' in da gold this quarter! Nevermind that IT said it costs more and runs slower being powered by wind than a diesel engine. Your entire field is considered a bloated waste of money.

    You will not be playing with the best technology, you will be helping others play with it.
    Whatever is sitting on your desk is most likely a 3 coiled turd unless you are a programmer of some kind, or a manager. It's 3--5 years old, and so loaded down with antivirus, encryption, and at least 5 conflicting corporate 'big brother' programs to catalog your every keystroke that it runs slower than molasses uphill.

    Your talents will be wasted.
    Only the '20 year men' have a shot at getting something done and being recognized for it. And most likely they'll be looking for dumb kids like you to put in tons of overtime for a pat on the head.

    • Insightful.
      As for the last sentence, the key is to collect lots of PAID overtime. Your job is to make the "20 year" manager look good by meeting deadlines; but that doesn't mean you should be taken advantage of.

      If they refuse to pay overtime, then just work 42-43 hours and go home. Miss a couple deadlines. When the manager complains say, "I need to work overtime to meet schedule. But I expect to be paid, as required by law." If they still refuse to pay, and insist you MUST come-in on Saturday to work f

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Hatta ( 162192 )

        If they still refuse to pay, and insist you MUST come-in on Saturday to work for free (like my last job), do so, but watch hulu instead

        If I'm at work, the damage is already done. Whether I work or watch hulu, the point is I'm not relaxing at home. If you find yourself in such a position, get the manager on tape and sue.

    • My experience is completely different.

      I work for an industrial MegaCorp and the process is very simple. True, the bottom line is profit and growth but it is by no means quarterly - at least not for the development because it takes a lot more time than 4 months to implement a new iteration of industrial equipment and bring it into the field.

      The process starts with defining new requirements - of course ones that will either increase sales or decrease costs. Then development budgets and timelines are establish

    • Normally teenagers are the gold standard for naive thinking, but they got it perfectly right on this one. I'm in IT. I've been here for a long time. I tell anyone considering a career in it to beat themselves soundly about the head and shoulders. How many ways is it bad? Ah, let us count the ways...

      You'll rarely get any respect from your employer. Most of us don't work for Google -- we work for MegaCorp(tm). MegaCorp's sole focus is on the end of quarter profit margin, and that means that everyone that isn't in sales is slowing us down. Cut those budgets! Trim those sales! Yarr, matey, we be bringin' in da gold this quarter! Nevermind that IT said it costs more and runs slower being powered by wind than a diesel engine. Your entire field is considered a bloated waste of money.

      You will not be playing with the best technology, you will be helping others play with it. Whatever is sitting on your desk is most likely a 3 coiled turd unless you are a programmer of some kind, or a manager. It's 3--5 years old, and so loaded down with antivirus, encryption, and at least 5 conflicting corporate 'big brother' programs to catalog your every keystroke that it runs slower than molasses uphill.

      Your talents will be wasted. Only the '20 year men' have a shot at getting something done and being recognized for it. And most likely they'll be looking for dumb kids like you to put in tons of overtime for a pat on the head.

      And who exactly forced you to work for MegaCorp(tm)?

  • Dungeons & Dragons? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sir Realist ( 1391555 ) on Thursday June 14, 2012 @12:57PM (#40325425)

    What tiny proportion of teens and young adults has ever even heard of it, much less played it?

    • D&D was not mentioned in TFA.

      • You're right; how weird. In fact, searching for that D&D quote from the original post, all I can find is news aggregators and repostits quoting /. I wonder where the quote comes from?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Hatta ( 162192 )

          If you read the summary it says:

          CIStud writes

          "If you think playing endless hours of Dungeons & Dragons will create a desire to get into the information technology, think again. A new study by CompTIA of teens and young adults shows that only 17% want to pursue a technology career despite the fact that 97% say they 'love' technology."

          Looks like CIStud actually wrote his own summary. That's actually better than the SOP of quoting the first paragraph and leaving it at that. That's more work than the /.

  • People who love animals are the same way. The vast majority love them because they are tasty. An independent group love them because they're animals. Same kind of thing for technology.

  • as a video game designer (Score:5, Interesting)

    by james_van ( 2241758 ) on Thursday June 14, 2012 @01:01PM (#40325495)
    i thoroughly enjoy crushing teenagers' dreams of being video game designers by showing them the reality of it. i show them some code and start talking about physics or shaders and their little souls just deflate. granted, ill occasionally get one that isnt scared off, but most of them just think that because they play of lot of video games, they could design them.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      They could design them, but most of them couldn't code them. People who use the web can often be good web designers, but not many of them can actually write the html, and even fewer can write the server-side that generates the HTML.

      I realize that in the game design industry, the term "designer" is usually abused to include the coding aspects, but that really isn't design. Even creating the 3D models may or may not qualify as design, depending on how strict you're being about the term.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by james_van ( 2241758 )
        valid point. with very few exceptions, most of the kids ive ever talked to about game design probably couldn't "design" a game though. They have a few abstract ideas, but when i've challenged them to write some things down and make a few sketches (to at least encourage them to think more in depth and flesh those ideas out) they quickly fold. i usually get stuff like "i want to make a game like WoW, but cooler". so i say "what would you do to make it cooler?" and they reply with " i dont know, add more

        • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

          by Jeng ( 926980 )

          Here is a game I would like to see developed.

          I would like a racing game that allows you to drive anywhere in the world using maps and information from real world mapping providers.

          It would be great, I could finally drive as fast as I want on any road I want to drive on.

  • teen gamers like to play, not work.

    Gee, real "news at 11" story there...

    I'm also failing to find an overall point here. I drive a car every day, yet I'm not an auto mechanic. I brush my teeth every day, yet have never had a desire to be a dentist. Not quite sure when we started thinking that most of the objects or functions consumers interact with or do every day would somehow prove a professional correlation, especially when the cobbler wears no shoes.

  • From what I've seen, most of them think this means coming up with a few ideas and then finding someone else to do all the hard stuff. It's pathetic. Maybe 1% of that 50% will actually take it seriously, and even then a bunch of them may get 2-year technical school degrees that come printed on Charmin 2-ply. If they're lucky, they can get a job at EA getting paid peanuts while being chained up in the basement and eating hardtack and swill.

  • Past the obvious, "it's not because I like it that I want to produce it". There are more technology than IT. Engineering (as in building stuff) is all about technology, but it has nothing to do with computers. Chemical engineering is all about technology as well. But it is not IT.

  • "Teen Gamer craving a job" seems like an oxymoron (Score:4, Funny)

    by dlb ( 17444 ) on Thursday June 14, 2012 @01:15PM (#40325799)

    Who was thinking about work when you were a teen? (Let alone IT work)

    When you're a teen,.. playing Xbox 8 hours a day while getting paid for it would seem like a perfectly legitimate career path.

    • How would a teen react to the description of a tester's job? "You will be playing Xbox for eight hours a day. The games you will be playing are horribly broken. You win if you can tell us how you broke them."

  • Different world now, tech-wise (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Thursday June 14, 2012 @01:23PM (#40325925)

    I think this is just natural considering what's happened with technology in the last 20 or so years. Tweeting, blogging or posting a status update to Facebook is not a difficult, cumbersome task. The user interface is intuitive, you don't have to do too much magic to get Internet access, and the results are immediate. Someone on the back end did all the magic to make this possible -- you're just a user.

    Contrast that with being interested in PCs around the early to mid 1990s. The cohort who "loves technology" was limited because loving technology meant you loved to mess around with arcane, strange concepts that most of the population didn't understand. Today's "love technology" crowd actually loves using technology someone else built for the most part. Do you think your average Facebook using teenager would want to go back to, say, 1993 and spend hours fiddling with driver parameters to get a video card working in Windows, or OS/2, or DOS, or Linux? Or figuring out the magic incantations to get your 14.4 kbps modem to dial into an ISP?

    Unlike a lot of people, I still actually enjoy my systems engineering/architect job. I get to solve interesting problems and come up with workarounds for strange situations all the time. I wouldn't want a traditional corporate job, or project management, or whatever, just because those jobs aren't intellectually stimulating IMO -- mindless paper shuffling. However, I have seen my share of people who tried to force themselves to love IT jobs, and they're disappointed. The fact remains that you have to have the "figure it out" mindset and the discipline to sit and work through a complex problem. I'm also one of those people who is interested in all the crazy stuff going on under the hood to deliver data around the world, so I guess I "love technology" too. That said, with things like ITIL and process-driven IT, there are a lot of IT jobs that are very boring now...the key is to get yourself one of the interesting ones. As far as software dev goes, sure, everyone thinks they'd love to program video games because playing them is fun. Doing boring, predictable, corporate software development is different -- just connect parts from different toolsets. I can't tell you how many CRUD web interface applications I've seen -- businesses need this stuff a lot more than they need video games. Someone has to do the unsexy work.

    So, the group of people who "love building things with technology" is much smaller than the "love using technology to stay in contact with my social circle" group -- same as always.

    • Do you think your average Facebook using teenager would want to go back to, say, 1993 and spend hours fiddling with driver parameters to get a video card working in Windows, or OS/2, or DOS, or Linux?

      First, the driver parameters for DOS were, uhh... "load=ansi.sys" Second, Windows didn't back then didn't really have video drivers to speak of. Third... Linux wasn't really useful in 1993 and only a few thousand people at most even knew of its existance at the time.

      Or figuring out the magic incantations to get your 14.4 kbps modem to dial into an ISP?

      BananaCom and other terminal programs handled that for you, but if you really felt like doing it manually: AT&D1&C2S95=55 followed by ATDT1235551212, and when you were done +++ATH0 got you where you needed to go. Not complicated. My pass

  • I'm not going to become a chef anytime soon though.

  • Well of course. If I go into management, I can play computer games all day. If I go into IT, I have to fix the managers computer when it won't play games

  • When you do something you love for a living, sometimes you don't love it anymore. Plus, unless you are a software engineer, a typical IT career can be for the birds. Infrastructure guys are generally worked to the bone and only noticed when something breaks or fails. Management rarely complements an infrastructure team when things go smoothly. Also, to management, IT is an anathema at best and at worst, seen as a liability (read that, necessary evil.) I don't know that I would encourage my son or daugh

  • Gaming led me into IT because... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wynterwynd ( 265580 ) on Thursday June 14, 2012 @01:58PM (#40326525)

    You used to have to learn everything about the computer just to get the damn games to run.

    I literally started my IT career at age 13, hammering away at a shiny new 486SX/25 on a command line trying to get games to run properly. I learned very basic scripting/programming concepts working with batch files and optimizing autoruns so the sound would work in Wing Commander or Space Quest wouldn't crash. I learned hardware installing my first CD-ROM and sound card to play 7th Guest. I learned troubleshooting methodology trying to get Windows 3.1 to work just so I could play Myst.

    Gamers today don't have to go through all that. Gaming is mainstream and a long way from the marginalized hobby for nerds that it used to be. Consoles took away all the need for know-how, now it's just insert disc and push buttons. When you don't have to understand the components to get the pretty-shinies to bleep-boop on the screen, you don't try to.

    Having said all that, I do believe that PC gaming can lead to IT knowledge, if to a lesser extent than it used to. Hardware tweakers, framerate enthusiasts, and OCers will absolutely have the skills to jump into system building and optimization with both feet.

    • It all comes down to whether a person has the "how do things work" hacker mindset. It sounds like our "IT career path" started off pretty similarly... I actually went to a decent school for computer science with the hopes of someday working on games. What I learned in my time there (and particularly while writing "Asteroids" from scratch for my senior project) was: I don't like programming. I enjoyed breaking a problem down into discrete components, and I enjoyed getting results, but I loathed the tedium

  • The newer generation didn't grow up with the opportunities the understand what simple coding could do. In the 4th grade (1991), I had "computer class" once a week where we were taught BASIC and the concept of step-by-step logic coding via turtle (Logo). I was able to grow up tinkering with throw-away 286s and 386s, screwing them up and then reinstalling DOS.

    Today, kids have beautiful UIs and systems that want to minimize their interactions. They don't have computers... they have "apps", "the internet", and

    • The newer generation didn't grow up with the opportunities the understand what simple coding could do. In the 4th grade (1991), I had "computer class" once a week where we were taught BASIC and the concept of step-by-step logic coding via turtle (Logo). I was able to grow up tinkering with throw-away 286s and 386s, screwing them up and then reinstalling DOS.

      Today, kids have beautiful UIs and systems that want to minimize their interactions. They don't have computers... they have "apps", "the internet", and all these other environments, but are rarely presented with the opportunity to understand how Action A leads to Result B.

      They love what technology can do, but they have no clue how it works. They're not tech-savvy. They're tech-dependent.

      This is all so true... and your last paragraph sums up perfectly what I've been trying to explain to people who say "kids today know so much about computers!" I'm stealing it, if you don't mind.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by geekoid ( 135745 )

      IN 4th grade('72) we did do simple programming either, yet I have a lucrative career in IT.

      By you assertion we wouldn't have any computers because no 4th grader had basic programming until the 90's

      "but are rarely presented with the opportunity to understand how Action A leads to Result B."
      my kids are going through school, and I find that statement to be ridiculously false.

  • I like good looking women.

    But that doesn't mean I want to be in Pr0n.

    I remember an old Sensai wo said he loved his martial art but his turning it into a career teaching kids killed his love of it.

  • What's the link between technology and D&D? Roleplaying (which involves real-life social interaction) in a medieval setting (which has no technology) is pretty far from IT or software development.

    It is true that software engineers often fancy board and role playing games. But it's not because of technology, it's because of their mindset.

  • There's no girls and it's all full of fat guys with social disabilities, it fucking sucks.

    How does enjoying playing a computer game cross over in to that kind of environment?

  • ""If you think playing endless hours of Dungeons & Dragons will create a desire to get into the information technology, "
    Who the fuck ever thought that?

  • Part of the reason is that they have friends, such as myself, in the IT industry. Friends who say, "Yeah, working in IT is fantastic, I love getting phone calls at 2am when I'm trying to sleep because some client decided to change their API without telling us first. And of course, it has to be fixed RIGHT NOW, because Grandma can't get to her webmail interface to read the latest chain letter."

  • "This can't be any more surprising than that most concert-goers don't intend to be professional musicians,"

    The slight difference is that anyone with half a brain can work in technology one way or another, while very few people can become professional musicians.

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