We are a generation born on the eve of the death of accessible nerd-ery. Today (October 9th, 2025), in my Hardware Fundamentals class, we took apart hard drives. It’s something I’ve done many times before. I started taking apart my toys when I was nine or ten, and never stopped. Instead of discouraging me from taking apart (and almost never being able to put back together) my toys, my parents, especially my mother, fostered the spirit of curiosity in me. To this day, I want to know how the things I use and interact with work. It’s why I fell in love with transit, and why I’m able to be where I am now, in a city that I love, starting a career that I love.
Adam Mayer, the guest “lecturer”/lab leader in this class, gave a spiel at the end about how hard drives are a dead end technology, and with printers increasingly heading the same way, the amount of accessible, understandable consumer tech is decreasing. Everything is now on a chip, effectively a black box to a normal consumer. Kettles don’t have simple control circuits, they have microprocessors; cameras aren’t tear-downable, they’re computers. My little brother doesn’t strike me as a particularly tech-nerdy kind of kid, but if he were to be, what would have fostered that seed into a developed interest?
A friend recently worried about this to me. During a conversation about our childhood transit exploits, which for many included getting cab rides by friendly engineers and operators, they bemoaned the loss of this kind of early exposure due to the widespread installation of in-cab cameras on trains. While probably a safety-positive change, the loss of the storied institution of careers began by cab rides given to children is a sorry one, and makes proactive, nerdy outreach all the more important.
The kids that are really interested will find a way, like I did, but how many bright minds will we as an industry, as a society, lose out on because those kids never got their nerd seeds tended to?
I don’t mean to catastrophize, but I think this is a problem that not enough attention is being paid to. It’s not the end of the world, but it’ll certainly make it harder for us to find the kids who will help us stop the end of the world.
If you do something cool, show some kids, you might end up with an intern.