A graduate joins your team, clearly sharp, and in the second week asks where the file went. You explain that it is in the downloads folder. There is a pause, and you realise the idea of a folder, a location inside a tree where a file sits, is not one they think with.
It is easy to find this funny. It is more useful to find it interesting, because it is not a personal gap. It is the environment they grew up in.
Many people now entering the industry did most of their computing on phones and tablets. Those devices hide the file system almost completely. You open an app, your things are inside it, and when you need something you search for it rather than navigating to it. It is a different mental model, and for everyday use often a better one.
But a lot of software work still sits on top of the older model. Paths, working directories, environment variables, processes, the idea that a program runs somewhere and reads from somewhere. People who absorbed these things by messing about with a family computer at fourteen often have no memory of learning them, which makes them poor at explaining them. They assume the basics are obvious because they cannot remember a time when they were not.
So a few practical adjustments are worth making now.
When you onboard somebody, do not skip the layer you think is obvious. Draw the tree. Show where things live and why. Explain what a terminal is actually doing when it runs a command. Twenty minutes early saves weeks of quiet confusion that the new person may be too embarrassed to raise.
Write documentation that says where, not just what. Run this from the root of the repository is a gap for someone who has never needed to think about what root means.
And remember that the same shift applies to the people who use what you build. Your newer users may search instead of browse, expect things to save themselves and never think about where a download went. Designing for that is not dumbing anything down. It is meeting people in the world they actually live in.
The mental models each generation takes for granted keep changing. Noticing which ones you are assuming is a skill that will keep paying for as long as you work.
– Asael Shinder
Top comments (0)