I'd argue that the "average developer" has probably never used SSH, or so rarely that it's practically as if they don't know what it is beyond a way to type commands into a remote machine. Think FTP. That is something that would be a little safer to assume that an "average developer" would have.
I have to consciously remember that a lot of the development tools I use on a day-to-day basis (ssh, git, emacs, rails, django, js unit testing, diff, etc), while commonly discussed on HN, are not actually the norm in "the rest of the world".
FTPing a pile of PHP files, versioned using .zip files, and merged by hand without diff tools seems to be the "average developer" when I start looking around a bit.
I have to consciously remember that a lot of the development tools I use on a day-to-day basis (ssh, git, emacs, rails, django, js unit testing, diff, etc), while commonly discussed on HN, are not actually the norm in "the rest of the world".
FTPing a pile of PHP files, versioned using .zip files, and merged by hand without diff tools seems to be the "average developer" when I start looking around a bit.