You know, I’m an engineer by degree. I’m all into tech stuff, but there’s just so much my brain won’t wrap around. I now understand why. I’m 50, and just can’t compete like I could 20 years ago. It’s not a bad thing, (being 50 and all that) I love the laid back lifestyle, and perhaps that’s what’s wrong, too many, too much, too fast. It’s hard to process everything. Every 18 months, you “NEED” a new phone, upgrade to your computer, TV, radios, cars, EVERYTHING. I’m kind of in the reject tech mode. First it was My Space, then Facebook, now twitter, podcasting, Ipods, MP3 players, etc. It’s just too much. So, I’ll rely on all you to post what’s said. Heck, the first time I turned on a computer was a Fortran programing course!
Well, what's different is the young generation has a broad but very shallow understanding of all the new technology, as opposed to older engineers who had to understand their subjects in great depth. You've already got kids who are Tweeting all day, maintaining profiles on multiple social networking sites, and texting all sorts of complex media files to their friends over their phones...but can't operate a cash register or make change to save their lives. So it's going to be interesting when the Facebook generation starts taking over sole programming responsibility for nuclear plant embedded systems, airliner avionics, and the like.