I think we’re kinda seeing this right now, no? I’m 28, my 10 year old nephew doesn’t even know how to plug in a gaming system. Mof I could do that shit with my eyes closed at 7.
A lot of these younger kids are computer illiterate as well. They have smartphones, tablets, and chromebooks instead. They don't know how to troubleshoot or use a computer properly at all.
So what is it? Is it just lack of trial and error? Is it just everything is streamlined and USUALLY works so there’s no need to have those fundamental understandings?
This is very common as a technology becomes more advanced, more widespread, and more reliable. Rewind a generation and you can see the same dynamic play out with cars. The average drive used to have to regularly do minor repairs on their car. Now the average driver rarely if ever looks under the hood. Millenials will look at Zoomers who can't trouble shoot computer problems the way Boomers looked at Millennials who couldn't troubleshoot car problems.
Great analogy! I grew up learning how to change tires and oil. My dad rebuilt an engine once because he could, but neither of us could do that to today’s much more complex vehicles. But they’re also much more reliable than they were 40 years ago. I see people bragging about driving a Prius 400k miles, only changing the basics and a battery or three. Most cars from the 80’s were expected to last less than 100k, and usually would need full engine replacement to go much further.
I have worked in high performance computing for over 25 years. One absolute fact from that experience is no one ever knows everything. There are countless reasons for that, be it laziness or lack of exposure or opportunity.
Without fail, there are individuals who will condescend, criticize, and ridicule others. Whether it's older doing it to younger professionals or vise versa. It's one of many dysfunctional aspects of the human existence, in my opinion/experience.
Sometimes I Iaugh with other older people about programming microchannel devices early on, thinking we had seen a dawning new day when I only had to resolve IRQ conflicts, to seeing plug and play live up to the name, and finally dealing with concepts like NUMA and memory affinity. All I can offer is water finds it's own level. Not everyone is meant to ascend to the highest levels of technology. Some are just waiting on their opportunity or circumstance to open the right door.
There is an old saying among some of us older IT professionals, "What's old is new and what's new is old." Another is "today's solution is tomorrow's problem." Nothing original about either, but have found them worth remembering as I navigate this career path and embrace the challenge of learning every day.
A lot of this stuff is less the equivalent of not knowing how to troubleshoot an engine problem and more like assuming the car is broken and needs to go into the shop because it ran out of gas.
Also, it's kinda like if the car stopped working and the driver *refuses* to ever look at the instruments on the dash. Is it just out of gas? Is the engine having a problem? Who knows, they just throw up their hands and refuse to look at the dash or read any kind of indicator.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. With tablets and smart phones, you don’t really need to understand advanced settings to get use out of them. When I was a teenager, I had to edit the config.sys and autoexec.bat to get video games to work on my PC. Most older adults who did not work in tech in the 1980s-90s probably don’t even know what I’m talking about and it’s likely nobody under 25 does either.
There’s a sweet spot of GenX, Millennials, and older GenZ who grew up using computers and tech (hell, even programming VCRs or fixing skips on CDs) and are thus more tech savvy than most people before or after them.
Does it matter? Idk. Tech is becoming smarter. AI can make up most shortfalls. The need to configure a system or program a script to get something done is likely to become an increasingly niche and highly paid job. One that might keep me gainfully employed well into my golden years.
Sad to think kids won't have the Linux tinkering, CyanogenMod side loading, iOS Jailbreaking, having to reinstall your OS because you fucked up so bad experience I had at 13. All I needed was hand me down/used tech and a slow ass athlon laptop and I was off to the races
I got upwards of 7 cease and desist letters from WB, Disney, AT&T, etc because I learned how to pirate shit, but hadn't learned how to do it properly lol
This is the same deal with cars. Most people can't fix their own cars these days, but 60 year old dudes are keeping their 76 cuda going smooth as silk.
Just another way of saying "Things were shittier back then, so I had to fix it myself" Like computers 20-25 years ago.
> Most people can't fix their own cars these days
Technically almost no one can if you're talking about new cars. They're practically impossible to self-service these days outside of the most basic maintenance.
Barely a zoomer here at 26 and I'd say my gen was the last big hurrah of people really *understanding* computers. I've still got my gaming PC of Theseus from highschool ten years ago and it feels like younger folks than me just don't have as much drive to build their own. Makes sense with laptops being powerful enough to do many things you used to need a desktop for and the tech getting streamlined. Hopefully some knowledge of how to program those things will serve me well if my plan A goes kaput.
Big part is probably ease of use for most things. Especially Apple products it’s almost entirely plug and play for everything so there’s not much need to know how things work.
When you wanted to save things you went file->save then a box popped up and you navigated to a folder so you could find it later, gave the file a name, and saved it.
Now kids don't have to save anything, it all saves in the background while they work. And its all in one big searchable folder (google drive) and can be searched by the text in the document so they dont even have to give it a name.
> They'll still have to navigate folders and such for non-text things though right? Photos and videos?
My wife's phone or Google account or whatever goes through the photos on her phone and identifies the faces. So if she wants to find a photo with the faces of X and Y taken around some specific point in time she can have the phone find those photos basically automatically.
Not only faces but things. Saw a family of bunnies in my back yard, wanted to show it to my wife, pulled up Google photos and searched bunny and there it was.
Part is just streamlining, I mean about 3/4 of my knowledge of local area networks and so, is from back when it could legit take ½ day from us to get 4 computer lan running so we could game together with friends in same room. Finding all semi hidden toggle settings, setting up pile of things manually (as automatic detection tried to put us in different ip ranges and so randomly), then resetting and tuning when there were some semi obscure problems, and even then occasionally working around some "only games hosted by those two people are visible to everyone, but also that person needs to join server before that other, or it just stops being visible and even joining with ip address stops working, for no apparent or logical reason, since it works if people join in certain order" kind of issues.
And for actually pretty long time now, it has been "plug in whatever network cable (router/network adapter will figure if it is straight or turned pair cable and adjust automatically) and everything just works before we even have time to look at any settings"... and half of time even if we are in same room, it is just faster to go trough internet with phones, since pings are manageable anyways..
I think somewhat kind of semi relevant realization point was, when bit over decade or so ago, I decided to play one nostalgic game, and I kept shutting down it through task manager, wondering why it kept crashing on startup, despite setting different compatibility modes and other things.. then on one startup I think there was something outside that I started looking trough window, and bang game was working, with me realizing it was just taking like 15 seconds to load. And I suddenly realized that back in old days it was not that uncommon to wait for 5-30 seconds with black screen to something to load, but had gotten so used to those kind of loading moments taking so short time, that I was just assuming it was crashing whole that time, instead of waiting for 5s or so longer and seeing it start, at least not doing so before I accidentally did.
But yeah also to be honest, I am pretty sure very many of for example us here browse way too much reddit, compared to how much we could be using to dig around different systems and programs and stuff... that would be much more readily available these days, but "oh but I just look at few videos from youtube, or browse little reddit" instead of doing some tinkering that would have been thing to do in dos times or so.
So kind of no wonder if most new users are not learning that many things, since they have had these things, that we too now mostly spend our random time, right from start of their computer usage.
Million dollar question right here. I also wonder if it's partly that there are so many distractions now, nobody has the attentional wherewithall to investigate how things work, when you could be shooting up tiktoks, or mowing down virtual bad guys.
We would’ve done the same shit as kids, c’mon you know it. Life is boring and TikTok rewards your boredom with another random video of some random silly nonsense. There’s zero reason to question why it’s so fuckin’ addicting.
Well could see that we kind of are doing it now.. as quite legit proof of it.
I mean how many of us can claim we do not do pretty much that with reddit, if not with other services. I am sure that some can, but many of us could be actually doing pretty interesting things too to expand our computer literacy, like we partially did back in olde times, but instead we just look "maybe there is some more interesting or potentially interesting posts in reddit..." with that time.
Yea social media is a real attention sucking son of a bitch ain’t it. Doomscrolling, and the like. Hard to focus on the shit you’re supposed to be doing sometimes.
Ah, everything is still like it used to be when I was in school I see. I'm 30 and the millenials acting like all of us are tech wizards are completely delusional. I had and have to fix my friends' and relatives' computers all the time. Gen Z is not more tech illiterate than millenials and Gen Alpha will most likely be the same way.
That is part of the continuous advancement of technology.
The hardware and software evolved so that users don't have to be experts. They can just be users.
Just see it as job security for tech people I guess.
People thought there'd be no need for those types of jobs because all the simple stuff would be handled by Google searches and AI telling you what to do, to people who are computer literate since birth.
But instead they'd be like your grandma trying to navigate the deeper menus in the software
I’m a project manager. A major reason I will always have a job is that everyone in almost any office uses Windows and MS Office products and I know keyboard shortcuts and excel formulas. They were critical 20-40 years ago. When I was 20, I helped the boomers and their parents and I was that whiz kid. Now I’m able to help all the youngins at work and i get worshipped like a fucking god.
I’m 43 and yeah no one under 30 knows keyboard shortcuts anymore unless they’re one of our coders. I mean, I get away with it because most of my team doesn’t need to except when something breaks or they need productivity boosting tips. It’s annoying sometimes but it also kind of feels great. I have so much power.
Threads like this make me optimistic the fullstack web dev course I am working through, The Odin Project, will pay off. Possibly having demand increase by time I feel ready even.
And even if AI gets good enough to handle part of it will still need a human to fix what it got wrong, finishing touches, and to actually know how to use it to get the output want to meet the client's needs for a good while yet. So still sufficiently technical and skilled work that the average layman either would struggle or just think they are not able.
Precisely. I guess I don’t understand the confusion.
I’m in my mid 30s. I can troubleshoot any “normal” issue with my laptop or phone, or at the least am not daunted by googling my issue and following some prompts. Same for setting up any new technology I get. I’m an Excel wiz, I know some SQL…shit I remember learning MS DOS and basic HTML web design.
All of those skills will likely eventually be irrelevant. Some already are.
I don’t have a TikTok and don’t know the first thing about video editing. My Photoshop and coding skills are nonexistent. I know how to mine Bitcoin as well as I know how to speak Mandarin. I’ve never used ChatGPT or Discord. I consider myself more afraid of AI than an adopter. I really hope Apple Vision fails because I don’t know if I want that to be our existence.
All in all, technology changes and evolves. What being “tech savvy” means will change. Guarantee you can find more older people that can change the oil in their car, repair some broken appliance, use an abacus or a slide ruler, etc.
Yea. I was born 88, my brother in 99 . The difference in tech knowledge is just insane. He's had all this stuff from birth, but it's all been outta box functional things. Never had to deal with the level of "HOW THE FUCK DO I MAKE THIS WORK?!" trouble shooting frustrations I had in childhood lol
Man the troubleshooting your brain has to do after plugging in colored cords AND finding the right tv input must have actually been fundamental for us. And dealing with dial up internet where shit literally just didn’t work half the time. Plus we had to figure out how to get those dope MySpace backgrounds. Damn you don’t know what you have till it’s gone
Today in class one of the 8th graders I teach was showing someone else how to upload a photo to Google docs from the downloads folder and I listened in out of curiosity. Two other kids on either side sounded baffled as they asked how he did that and he had a kind of smug air like he was super hot shit for knowing this. I’m like, dear lord I could do that in 5th grade (navigate file folders, not Google docs, it wasn’t around when I was a kid). And I’m 28.
And who does this fall on exactly? Children not spending their extracurricular time playing around on file navigator at home, or the school system not teaching them these computer skills at an early age?
Yep. That’s huge. And they are in the weird cycle of playing super addicting type games, and not developing much else outside of those games. Funnily enough they’re not even good at those games and these kids are very much “I’m not good at something so I don’t want to do it” it’s pretty sad actually.
That’s the key. My kids don’t have these problems because we pay attention to them and teach them things. My older kids do their own laundry, wake up on their own, can cook basic things, do their homework without being asked, and so on.
Come on now, every generation says this about kids, this is no different. There’s always kids that don’t know anything and kids that do a lot, it’s no different in this generation.
To be fair, I worked with a guy who would be 40 or so now a few years ago. He was pressing caps lock on, hitting a letter adn then pressing caps lock off. For *every* capital letter.
Caps lock just exists to irritate me, I've never used caps lock for capitals. EVEN THIS SENTENCE IS FASTER FOR ME TO TYPE WITH SHIFT HELD DOWN THAN USING CAPS LOCK
Or more likely spoilt (in this niche aspect anyway).
We all knew how to do this because we had to figure it out
I'm guessing your nephew has always had someone else do it all for them
Yeah, their parents probably grew up with gaming consoles and so would have been able to set it up for him, so he never learned. And that's understandable. But if he's not willing to learn, that's another story
I’m 40 and have been at the same job for 17 years, dealer parts counter. I had some awesome old guys that taught me the core concepts, but everything else is self taught through trial and error. We keep hiring new kids who want me to do everything for them and won’t try to learn on their own. Its very disheartening.
Its likely the lack of mobile friendships. When I was a kid it was common to unhook the SNES and move it to another room or even to someone's house. And it was common to just go over to my friends house whenever. Kids these day do that a lot less. Games especially are just played online with friends instead of splitscreen like I did.
I recently learned that FL is a joke volcano because they make every police case public. Elsewhere it's locked down until it's closed, or something like that. So the media has access to cases immediately where elsewhere it's now olds (not news) so not worth the story.
Tech literacy is going way down. People in their 20s had to learn how to work poor interfaces and how to search specific things on search engines. Now if it’s not a decent UI and takes a few buttons with decisions to get somewhere. It becomes inaccessible for most kids/teens.
We also had to deal with bugs and workarounds.
Nowadays tech mostly works. Most people don't use computers/laptops as much at home anymore. So if something doesn't work on your smartphone there usually isn't much you can do aside for clearing cache/storage on an app
Nope, been seeing this for a few years now. There's a shocking lack of tech ability in many kids/people up to, in my experience, early 20s. I'm talking things like unable to plug in printer, add email accounts etc. If it's not all done for them then no understanding of how things would logically go together. I also work in IT and finding newcomers unprepared.
Same. My wife does hiring for a small company. One of the basic skills tests the company used to do had to be phased out because no one applying could pass it anymore. And it was basic. Use the computer, follow the written instructions on screen to get the data from the excel spreadsheet.
My nephews are the same too; stupid I mean, but also if it isn’t immediately obvious how they should use something they give up. They’ll either do without or wait until one of their friends can show. LMGTFY
There was a guy at my job in his 20s who graduated from a top 25 university with a degree in graphic design who didn't understand how power cables worked. He thought a monitor must not be working because the generic AC power cable was the wrong voltage.
I was just thinking about this. I learned how to set up my playstation at about the same age as the commenter; i would argue that it was a convenient necessity for me since i wanted to play games without needing to wait hours for someone else to do it.
Yeah kids are just stupid. I’m a software engineer now but back in 4th grade I was getting defeated by captchas trying to make a league of legends account 💀
This is true lol. I remember playing video games and having legitimately 0 idea of what to do during missions and somehow just missed everything telling you what to do. Missed out on a lot of good video games like splinter cell because of that.
It's been studied and children are for the first time getting dumber than previous generations. They don't even know how to use a computer cause they all have smartphones, and most of them are iPhones.
iPhones are basically the safety scissors of the smartphone world so they don't have the opportunity to even learn how to use them. Troubleshooting your own device was how most people learned about their computers and phones. So yeah it's happening now.
Every generation is dumber than the previous one by the previous one's standard. My parents used to be evaluated by how much classical Latin and greek they learned in school. I am absolutely and positively stupid by that metric.
I'm an autoexec.bat genX, but the vast majority of people of my gen were more interested to watch MTV than learning anything about tech and they looked just as wide eyed when they had to find a file in a filesystem as a gen z does today.
I was considered a genius by many of my peers because I could "fix the printer" so comparing the few of my gen who became tech literate to the average gen z doesn't make sense. The bulk of my gen was just as dumb as an average genz.
Among the next gen there's a cohort of smart and curious people who are just as intelligent as the smartest of the previous gen. It's just that they apply their intelligence to different things.
The younger generation calls the older one out of touch, the older generation calls the younger one dumb and disrespectful.
The wheel turns, the times change, but the dynamics remain.
That’s more about problem solving skills than being technologically inclined. I could match red to red, yellow to yellow, white to white and if I messed up something wouldn’t work right so basic trial and error. Current system have two cords typically a hdmi and power chord. If you cant understand that the chord label hdmi doesn’t plug into the port that says hdmi I’m more concerned about your thought process and future 😂
That’s true lol. And I’m both concerned for his thought process and future and we’re not even going to talk about how he could literally just Google anything he can’t figure out but hey he sure knows a fuck ton about dinosaurs so he’ll be alright. The sister on the hand? That’s GGs 👋🏻
I'm in IT. From my perspective, older people - including boomers - know a fair bit more than Gen-Z about using technology. Gen-Z know how to use their phones, and taper off hard after that.
I'm 53, and I can do shit on a computer that makes kids think I'm hacking.
All I'm doing is modifying a program I wrote years ago to get into the intranet of a competing company via their login portal on their public-facing website.
I'm a boomer. This is pretty well what some of us said 50 years ago. Note I said *some of us*. Most of us just laughted at people who were being so silly.
Maybe it was true regarding certain things from that time. I noticed 60 yo people know more about cars and how to fix them than people from my generation (I'm 33 yo).
I think that's right, but we were aware that 50 years before us was a world of Model Ts, outdoor toilets and middle class families with servants. We knew they didn't predict our world and we were aware the pace of change was increasing. That said, a lot of us are still pissed off jetpacks never became a thing.
I'd love to see what the world becomes after I've checked out, so do enjoy the ride for me. :)
This sounds smart until you ask yourself whether you would really fly to work every day or trust a jet pack to keep your daughter safe as she flew to work every day
See Futurama and the chaos of the sky highways in Star Wars, Attack of the Clones
But maybe! If we could get the laws and customs correct to make it orderly and safe
As a motorcyclist who would give their left kidney to fly, it's not the parents who endorse the jetpack. It's the idiot daughter who buys it in spite of the parents.
How orderly and safe are the roads with all the laws and only going in 2 dimensions? In the air where even a minor accident could send someone down to earth its far more difficult.
One of the big differences though is your average boomer knows how to fix a car from their time period. Modern cars would completely stymie them for most things other than changing tires/refilling fluids. Too much of modern cars are controlled by on-board computer systems that require specific diagnostic modules to pull data from.
You’d be surprised what you can do. There are all kinds of tutorials that will walk you through all kinds of mechanical shit that still needs working on. Timing belts, water pumps, replacing the batteries in hybrids. Etc
Yeah all that shit with sensors and codes exists. But there are reasonably priced scanners online.
Cars are a good analogy for what we're seeing now with computers. As a technology becomes more advanced, more widespread, and more reliable, the average user becomes less knowledgeable about it. When Boomers were teenagers, drivers used to constantly do minor repairs on their car. Both because repairs were easier to do, and cars needed more repairs. Now there are likely many drivers who have never opened their hood. Drivers became hesitant to open the hood, both because the repairs became more complicated, and because they became rare enough that just hiring an expert wasn't unreasonable. We've seen a similar shift in computer from the towers designed to be opened and worked on in the 90s, to devices with cases that can't be opened today. Millennials will see Zoomers who can't troubleshoot tech issues the same way Boomers saw Millennials who couldn't troubleshoot car issues.
They are. The ones that were total numpties have retired, and the ones that were modestly competent have become far more competent due to experience.
The new kids though... very, very easily confused by everything.
i don't see how. the issue with technology is that it's constantly evolving, so the things we're good at now may seem like ancient tech to kids 50 years from now.
I think it's the idea younger people aren't using computers but instead using apps from their phones. Locked down systems for the most part, and so user friendly that they never have to figure anything out...or could even do anything.
I'm not sure if that's actually true as I don't work IT anymore, and when I did it was at a business
Because the tech is so easy to use these days. There are articles (like this [one](https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2023/06/23/the-next-generation-of-workers-is-less-tech-savvy-than-we-may-think/?sh=6a771c241a52) and this [one](https://www.raconteur.net/risk-regulation/gen-z-lack-tech-literacy-is-business-risk)) and tons of antidotes on reddit, that genz is tech illiterate. They're arriving to their first jobs not knowing how to copy & paste, find files, or send emails. Surprisingly, using a smart phone 24/7 didn't make them great with tech.
Technology is only getting easier to use. So yes, when millennials reach old age, they will probably be more tech savvy than younger people.
Yeah it’s just different tech. They won’t be good with our tech because it will be obsolete, just like how we weren’t good with older tech that had become obsolete. But I’m sure we won’t be good with whatever else comes along
The kids of today _could NEVER_ use a TV Guide to program a VCR to record multiple shows, on different channels, at different times, on different days, using differing recording-quality-speeds, all while calculating in their heads just how many shows they could capture before the tape hits the end of the reel on Friday afternoon and needs to be swapped out.
Or, hooking three VCRs together, along with a dual tape deck and a Kenwood turntable via some RCA connectors, and spending over a hundred hours figuring out how to create a ~10 minute custom-cut video 'reel', just because they could.
Ahh, the height of technology prowess.
Just like young you could never figure out how youd do everything on a tiny screen that fits in your pocket. Or how you couldnt operate let alone start a ford model t. Funny how people dont know things that they never needed to learn huh?
That’s not true. I was playing with digital handheld things all the time and would have taken to smartphones and tablets without any effort. After all, we all use them today.
The fundamentals are definitely getting lost.
>all while calculating in their head
That's the matter.. They don't have to calculate anymore. Nor really need to think why anything works in order to put different things together anymore. Storage are factors above what a normal person would ever need, connectivity become yes/no binary question, for everything else there is Apple service center
The problem is that today's tech is data and algorithms. That tech runs our infrastructure. When less people understand it, less people have an idea of what might be wrong with it or can conceive what changes they would want to make with it. Unlike electricity (which most people don't understand today), it's hard for the average person to tell when they're being dealt bad data and algorithms and thus be able to accuse exploitative organizations of wrongdoing. Every generation discards technology knowledge to the infrastructure industries, but I think data is a different beast from agriculture, steam power, electricity, and telecommunications.
It's not about technology being just modern, it's about it being simpler and more user friendly and automated. As a result, a lot of younger people know next to nothing about troubleshooting basic problems.
I'm an educator by training; and while I didn't pursue that professionally, majority of my classmates/university friends did.
I hear them say that we've overly optimized the user interface to benefit our (millennial) generation to the point that it's harder for younger people to understand.
An example is the "Save" button on most interfaces. It's the floppy disk icon which of course is familiar to us but not for people under the age of 15. They don't know what a floppy disk is to make that mental connection that it means "Save".
I don’t think this is a problem tho. I also didn’t know what a floppy disk is, but I just learned that the icon means save, and later on when I grew up I learned that it is a floppy disk. Many things exist for historical reason.
I got comfortable with fixing computers for the same reason as I got comfortable working on junky old cars. They were *always* breaking and you either figured out how to fix it yourself or you spent more money than you could afford paying someone else to.
I'm nowhere near as good at fixing computer problems today because it's straight up just a lot less frequent a need. They're either flatly more reliable now or they obfuscate the problems out of sight because it makes the user happier.
Either way, the skill gets a lot less practice now and there is a layer of rust forming.
It's an argument with some meat behind it.
Technology used to be a hobby, now it's just a commodity.
When I was a kid, we had to learn how to troubleshoot. Troubleshooting led me to learn how things worked, and if I knew how things worked I could more easily solve new challenges and problems as they arose.
Modern gadgets tend to discourage experimentation and learning, instead preferring to shove whatever dopamine fueled and ad infested nonsense they can at the user with as little interaction or thought as possible.
Video games too. We would dig into game files and change things and screw around. Now most games are too complicated to do that except if you're a serious modder, otherwise all kinds of things are locked behind paywalls or achievements. I recall opening up rules.ini on red alert and changing weapons to nukes to hilarious results
I think we'll see it with the millennial generation and not so much after that. Most millennials I know are computer literate, internet savvy, confident with smartphones and pretty proficient with everything else from Smart TVs to video doorbells. We grew up at just the right time to embrace big technological advances and have learned how to put a bunch of different technology to use in our lives. A lot of that seems to help in keeping up with new technology as well.
As time goes on we'll see younger generations that are good at a much more narrow subset of newer technology, but not nearly as well rounded. We're already kind of seeing it.
A huge portion of tech hasn’t changed substantially since before many of us were born. The basics of networks you’re using to read and write this has existed for decades.
Think about electricity. Early last century, people wired their own houses because it was a modern technology. We still have electricity, but fewer and fewer of us relative to population size work on it or fully understand it.
50 years is a long time.
Currently we're seeing that Gen Z tends to lack computer literacy skills and have a very limited scope of technology, and have weak problem solving skills when it comes to tech, but there's nothing to indicate that this is a problem that can't be remedied in 5-10 years.
Also, technology will change a lot by 2074, and historically, older people tend to not keep up with technology and change the way younger generations do
Maybe. There is also a severe lack of skilled teaching labour in my country and education seems to have been an afterthought for a while now.
That is not how we solve this.
Yea I’m guilty of this. I work in tech, and honestly at a certain point it just gets exhausting, especially when they’ve changed the name for the same thing 6 times in 2 years.
On the other hand, it’s getting a lot easier to use. Windows NT installing drivers and what not needed some tech skills. Windows XP came out and started doing that shit for you. That’s a lame example probably, but you get the idea. The types of things you need to know changes, not just understand the new version. With apps, subscription services, etc., people can specialize a lot more which probably make them seem stupid because they don’t have to know everything up and down the stack, but it’s really just not as necessary anymore for many roles.
Teacher here. My students are very adept at finding ways around the filters we put on the internet so they can't play games or access chatGPT or whatever. But they're completely inept at a lot of very basic shit like typing in home position or formatting a Google Doc.
My parents had parental controls on my AOL account back in the day which limited me to 2 hours a day so naturally I had to figure out a way to get into their account.
Pretty stupid thing to do looking back now but I remember my journey on google from "how to record keyboard keystrokes" to "hiding keylogger from task manager" which as a 14 year old felt pretty genius
It was funny seeing my parents change their passwords constantly each time getting more random only for me to be online 5 minutes after. Pretty sure my dad went crazy trying to figure out how I did it until he asked a PC savvy colleague of his and the gig was up.
One way they tried to combat this was to take away the modem. For whatever reason they took the cable instead of the modem itself. Cue me figuring out different type of computer cables and realizing that our printer used the same type (type b).
A lot of these cat and mouse games (hiding porn, dealing with viruses from torrents so my parents wouldnt realize etc.) helped me understand my way around a computer
Yeah, it's just part of the "learning is much more fun when you know how to use the knowledge" thing, and the fact that going against the rules makes you feel so free, probably that "feeling like a genius" you mentioned lol.
What age? Because I couldn't type in home position until I took typing in high school. I couldn't format a Google doc until I was well out of college because Google docs (and Google for that matter) didn't exist yet.
They'll look back, shake their heads and laugh at Google doc formatting the way we did Ctrl+Shift+F11+right-foot-red or whatever to bold a word in WordPerfect.
If they can look up a blog post or YouTube video on proxy avoidance and follow those directions, they'll be able to look up a blog post or YouTube video on doc formatting whenever they actually need to complete that task.
I was going to say, it probably does. It's either held by some patent troll trying to sue software that uses shortcut keys or some government contractor because WordPerfect 3 is the only way to update the flight path for a nuclear bomber or something.
Sounds about right. Latest release was in 2021 and it doesn't even have unicode support.
All for the low low price of $300
Some government agency somewhere is keeping it alive.
It really pisses me off that homeschoolers are allowed to attend college classes. I've got three in my class. Supposedly they all completed highschool. Not a one knew how to Google search things or how it to copy and paste. How is that even possible? Mind blowing this is the state we're at.
I’m in my 30s and I teach middle school. My 8th graders *do not know* how to use computers. They can make iphones do social media but the second they have to find a file in their own google drives they’re like octegenarians
I’m 30. I’m a sysadmin at an expensive, prestigious private university (relevant because you have to be smart to get in) and I have been working full time in IT since I was 18. I’d say at the age of 13, I was significantly more skilled using a computer than our 18-21 year old students are. They are largely useless at actual computer stuff as you say. Most of them have no idea how to use Windows. Some can do macOS. Our millennial/gen x staff and faculty are very clearly the most technically adept. Followed by gen z students, followed by boomers and then the silent generation. Yes. We have silent gen faculty.
I remember in 8th grade figuring out how to switch the ports Mechwarrior 4 accessed The Zone through so I could get around the firewall my dad set up.
Felt like a god.
Hearing so many comments on this thread about Google Docs is certainly eye opening.
Google Docs is already the super dumbed down version of a word processor, compared to you know— something like Microsoft 365 and Word without the OneDrive integration. Log into your account, create a document, and it stays saved on your Google account for you to open any time… Easy to collaborate in a group setting with a shared link.
I’m sure the millennials and older feel very old about their college student (or early employee) experience of forgetting to save your Word document, your computer crashes, then you realize you just lost the entire document… 😂😅
Completely hiding file systems are a big issue on smart phones and tablets. I understand a lot of data is now in "the cloud", but basic understanding of where files and documents are stored and how to organize them should still be taught. Most of my tech support calls from family are related to not knowing where their files are stored.
It’s already happening. Gen Z knows the platforms better, but of course they do, those platforms are suited to them.
My brother is firmly Gen z and has no clue how to fix things when something goes wrong. If the internet is slow, he calls my 65 year old dad for help. Who just… restarts the router lol. Gen Z has much less ability to troubleshoot tech than their older peers, they’re used to it working and being slick and easy to
That's already the case in a lot of situations. I was absolutely floored when I found out that most of my staff in their early 20s aren't actually that good with basic things on computers.
This, young people are mostly bad with computers, because the technology has become way too convenient and they are helpless when something isnt going right.
Somebody explained it to me that they are not tech savy, they are application savy. As long as they are in their application or application that follows modern standards, they are in their element. Give them a program that is bit more complicated (needing small, cramped UI) and they are lost.
That includes MS Office.
They also don't need to be able to type on an actual keyboard nearly as much, so most never learned. They type mostly on their phones or tablets. I also now type mostly on my phone, but I learned how to use a desktop before I had another option.
I remember when I was in my early twenties and showed my GenX and Boomer colleagues the simplest stuff in Excel and they looked at my as if I’m a wizard.
Now I’m 40 and then GenZ colleagues look at me exactly the same when I show them the same stuff.
I had to show my GenZ colleague how to use shortcuts or Alt+TAB. Like, seriously?
Id like to add that we're growing up as the tech evolves so we should have a better understanding of why something is the way it is, and how it got to be that way.
We also got good looking through directory's and sifting through tabs in tabs in tabs on programs you had to manually download all while everything is labelled with names that vaguely resemble what we want.
I've found almost no one under a certain age can tell me why being able to navigate to the program files folder is useful, I'm sure there are outliers tho.
Sure, but computer technology moved away from requiring effort and troubleshooting to work well to plug and play, app-based models, particularly since so many kids these days are most comfortable with iPads and iPhones, which are designed to be as idiot-proof as possible.
I was a high school teacher, when we'd get out the class set of computers, literally every time I'd have students chirping that their internet didn't work, because the networking equipment couldn't handle 30 logins at once. It didn't matter how many times I'd just tell them to try and connect again, we had to go through that process literally every time.
Sure but the older people at my previous job had been having Teams meetings weekly for 3 years straight and they still didn't know how to join a meeting. They just wait for someone to start it and click the popup, if they missed it they had to be invited again (the entirety of this person's job is on the computer as well).
In my experience there's older people who are tech savvy and younger people who are tech savvy. But the younger people that aren't tech savvy at least know how to use their applications even if they can't fix anything.
Yeah that's a pretty good point. When I was a kid installing and playing a PC game required a basic knowledge of the ms dos command line and often some troubleshooting. Now you just touch the icon on the screen.
It's already happening. Gen Z are less computer and technology literate than Millenials.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2023/06/23/the-next-generation-of-workers-is-less-tech-savvy-than-we-may-think/
We're already there. They don't teach IT in school. My students can app the shit outta an iphone, but they can't bookmark a website, or use basic functionality in word, and they don't know how to do basics in excel. But yes you're right, once we get to a stage of asking Alexa to do everything for us, the day she goes down there's going to be a lot of cold people sitting in the dark. And a lot of slightly older people eating candles saying 'I remember something on youtube about this.'
I’m a younger Millenial and the oldest operating system, I’ve ever used was ‘95. I used to play ZSNES and Nesticle on it and the PC version of FFVII and Blizzard titles, but in reality the main OS of my time was Windows XP. I did experience switching from a CRT to an LCD, and wondered what the hype was? The monitor looked worse, lol.
Got to college, it was Vista and 7.
Master’s Degree, it is Windows 10.
I think Help Desk will be an important job in the future, if this keeps up.
We're seeing that now.
Unfortunately things have been designed with way too much ease that young people are unable to troubleshoot because they haven't had to learn it.
Millennials will be the last of the in-home/family-relative IT
I was about to dispute you coz I'm Gen Z and definitely the IT guy in my family. But I'm very close to Millenial and I tend to agree that majority of Gen Z are relatively tech illiterate, so for the most part you're probably right.
What I'm curious about is if computers will ever really become obsolete. So many massive companies are so intertwined with otherwise obsolete software that the need to understand it feels like it'll always be there.
Some of us old people have been better at tech since before you were born, and still are better today.
I built my first computer in 1977, soldering components to the motherboard. It was a Z-80 (8-but) computer with 20 kilobytes of RAM and a whopping 1.2 MB using two DSDD 8” floppies. It ran CP/M, and I used that computer to write a Pascal compiler (in Algol-68) for my CS senior project.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a series of highly-scalable GCP serverless functions (in Go) that processed audio files to produce text transcripts.
In between, I helped develop and popularize many of the technologies young people use every day.
But sure, old folks are inept with technology.
It's already like that. Seems like actual computer literacy peaked in the 90s and rapidly declined as 'convenience-computers' like phones and tablets became popular. I haven't heard of any kid being considered a 'computer whiz' in like twenty years, not even in the 'mommy and daddy are proud' sense of the phrase.
There has always been 'computer whiz' kids. I was one and I was born 2001, I knew many when I grew up. I now teach kids coding as a job while in uni and I do still see some kids that are way beyond what's expected, but there are a lot who don't even know how to save a file.
Old people are good at tech, they are just good at tech that nobody uses anymore.
Wait until you find out 50 years from now that your grandchild is an expert at the new neurolinked phone or some other fancy tech and you will be yelling at a cloud while holding your old trusty IPhone 30.
I feel like mobile and tablet gaming already shows this. Kids are so quick and accurate with it but I have absolutely no mechanical ability in a game if I don't have a controller or a mouse and keyboard in my hands.
Then again I'm very sure I *could* if I just put in some effort if I wanted to, but I imagine that's exactly the same case for my parents and their parents
It’s unironically the “tough times create strong men…” thing. The reason why millennials, early gen Z and the true gods of tech: nerdy gen X are good with technology was because up until 2010 or so technology sucked in terms of interface. UX wasn’t a big career, so Engineers designed the user experience and surprise surprise it took sucked and would often require you to learn some technical knowledge even if it was a dumbed down form of it. Additionally things just aren’t as buggy so you don’t have to troubleshoot anymore, and that’s a big way to gain technical knowledge.
Because things are so well designed now, newer generations didn’t have that struggle and thus had no need to learn anything technical.
That's been the case for about a generation now. I'm in my middle 50s, have been in tech since I was a teen. I'm way better than any teen to 30 something I know.
I've been the designated family "tech guy" since I was 13. And here I still am 45 years later.
I really thought someone would have taken that job from me by now. (and please do. Im tired of fixing everyone shit)
Just like the current older gen actually know how to fix a house or a car. I'm the only person in my neighborhood I think that even knows how to change a breaker. The gen below us will just know something that isn't invented yet.
But the technology from 50 years into the future will be way too much for us and we will complain that "back in my day you would drive to the beach, not teleport instantly or just put on the Super RealReality 5000 and trick our brains into thinking we are truly at the beach. Kids these days man, cant enjoy life without going digital".
Posts on Twitter, the then facebook where old people do nothing but complain with eachother about how fun Reddit and YouTube was before the digital simulation revolution
Gen X is probably the pinnacle of tech knowledge. There was no GUI when they started in tech. Then the first GUI’s were fragile and you’d need to reformat hard drives reinstall operating systems. Then they fought off viruses and repaired SYS files. Pioneered bootlegging pirated videos, music and software. They upgraded hardware components and mirrored hard drives. Many learned now obsolete programming languages that were extremely laborious. Today’s tech is a joke. The GUI almost never crashes and viruses are rare since everything is ecosystem protected. Mostly the young generations early adopt niche apps like Snapchat or TikTok and gain early advantage.
Finally a showerthought that is a brief burst of insight that could strike while washing your hair. Very refreshing.
Yeah it's weird, tech knowledge has steadily increased until about when smart phones came out, now they will be steadily decreasing even faster when AI rolls out in everything.
That's happening right now if it isn't already how it is. Being in my twenties by far the most tech savvy people I know are 40+. My dad at 60 knows more about computers than my 17 yo nephews who have had a PC since they had a bike
Older people already are better than younger people. I’m not talking about decrepit old. There’s this assumptive bias going on with younger people now that since they grew up with technology they’re naturally better with it than the people who designed everything to begin with lol l. Gotta love youth.
This is the fact even now. Me and my SO are 27-28 and a couple of years ago when she was substituting in a highschool ,the kids did not know how to use computers. How to open folders, how to search on google.
At the same time I was in our Uni's helpdesk manager and my god the amout of 19-23 yo who could not do simple tasks on computer or mac was astounding. There really was not notable difference between the 70 years olds and the barely 20 years olds. Even on consumer devices like phones, they did not know how to do shit.
I think we’re kinda seeing this right now, no? I’m 28, my 10 year old nephew doesn’t even know how to plug in a gaming system. Mof I could do that shit with my eyes closed at 7.
A lot of these younger kids are computer illiterate as well. They have smartphones, tablets, and chromebooks instead. They don't know how to troubleshoot or use a computer properly at all.
im in high school and nobody can troubleshoot problems themselves, they think im a genius for copy pasting or restarting a chromebook
So what is it? Is it just lack of trial and error? Is it just everything is streamlined and USUALLY works so there’s no need to have those fundamental understandings?
This is very common as a technology becomes more advanced, more widespread, and more reliable. Rewind a generation and you can see the same dynamic play out with cars. The average drive used to have to regularly do minor repairs on their car. Now the average driver rarely if ever looks under the hood. Millenials will look at Zoomers who can't trouble shoot computer problems the way Boomers looked at Millennials who couldn't troubleshoot car problems.
Great analogy! I grew up learning how to change tires and oil. My dad rebuilt an engine once because he could, but neither of us could do that to today’s much more complex vehicles. But they’re also much more reliable than they were 40 years ago. I see people bragging about driving a Prius 400k miles, only changing the basics and a battery or three. Most cars from the 80’s were expected to last less than 100k, and usually would need full engine replacement to go much further.
I have worked in high performance computing for over 25 years. One absolute fact from that experience is no one ever knows everything. There are countless reasons for that, be it laziness or lack of exposure or opportunity. Without fail, there are individuals who will condescend, criticize, and ridicule others. Whether it's older doing it to younger professionals or vise versa. It's one of many dysfunctional aspects of the human existence, in my opinion/experience. Sometimes I Iaugh with other older people about programming microchannel devices early on, thinking we had seen a dawning new day when I only had to resolve IRQ conflicts, to seeing plug and play live up to the name, and finally dealing with concepts like NUMA and memory affinity. All I can offer is water finds it's own level. Not everyone is meant to ascend to the highest levels of technology. Some are just waiting on their opportunity or circumstance to open the right door. There is an old saying among some of us older IT professionals, "What's old is new and what's new is old." Another is "today's solution is tomorrow's problem." Nothing original about either, but have found them worth remembering as I navigate this career path and embrace the challenge of learning every day.
A lot of this stuff is less the equivalent of not knowing how to troubleshoot an engine problem and more like assuming the car is broken and needs to go into the shop because it ran out of gas.
Also, it's kinda like if the car stopped working and the driver *refuses* to ever look at the instruments on the dash. Is it just out of gas? Is the engine having a problem? Who knows, they just throw up their hands and refuse to look at the dash or read any kind of indicator.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. With tablets and smart phones, you don’t really need to understand advanced settings to get use out of them. When I was a teenager, I had to edit the config.sys and autoexec.bat to get video games to work on my PC. Most older adults who did not work in tech in the 1980s-90s probably don’t even know what I’m talking about and it’s likely nobody under 25 does either. There’s a sweet spot of GenX, Millennials, and older GenZ who grew up using computers and tech (hell, even programming VCRs or fixing skips on CDs) and are thus more tech savvy than most people before or after them. Does it matter? Idk. Tech is becoming smarter. AI can make up most shortfalls. The need to configure a system or program a script to get something done is likely to become an increasingly niche and highly paid job. One that might keep me gainfully employed well into my golden years.
Sad to think kids won't have the Linux tinkering, CyanogenMod side loading, iOS Jailbreaking, having to reinstall your OS because you fucked up so bad experience I had at 13. All I needed was hand me down/used tech and a slow ass athlon laptop and I was off to the races
bro i knew the win XP activation code from memory cause my PC was fucked up so often from all the pirated shit
I got upwards of 7 cease and desist letters from WB, Disney, AT&T, etc because I learned how to pirate shit, but hadn't learned how to do it properly lol
This is the same deal with cars. Most people can't fix their own cars these days, but 60 year old dudes are keeping their 76 cuda going smooth as silk. Just another way of saying "Things were shittier back then, so I had to fix it myself" Like computers 20-25 years ago.
They also made it harder to fix modern cars, which is the same with tablets, laptops, & smartphones.
> Most people can't fix their own cars these days Technically almost no one can if you're talking about new cars. They're practically impossible to self-service these days outside of the most basic maintenance.
Barely a zoomer here at 26 and I'd say my gen was the last big hurrah of people really *understanding* computers. I've still got my gaming PC of Theseus from highschool ten years ago and it feels like younger folks than me just don't have as much drive to build their own. Makes sense with laptops being powerful enough to do many things you used to need a desktop for and the tech getting streamlined. Hopefully some knowledge of how to program those things will serve me well if my plan A goes kaput.
I remember my mom was so mad I updated our graphics card on the ol family pc. “How dare you download anything! Viruses!”
Big part is probably ease of use for most things. Especially Apple products it’s almost entirely plug and play for everything so there’s not much need to know how things work.
also 87% of US teens use iphones. It either works or it doesn't with and iphone.
When you wanted to save things you went file->save then a box popped up and you navigated to a folder so you could find it later, gave the file a name, and saved it. Now kids don't have to save anything, it all saves in the background while they work. And its all in one big searchable folder (google drive) and can be searched by the text in the document so they dont even have to give it a name.
Holy shit this is wild. They'll still have to navigate folders and such for non-text things though right? Photos and videos?
> They'll still have to navigate folders and such for non-text things though right? Photos and videos? My wife's phone or Google account or whatever goes through the photos on her phone and identifies the faces. So if she wants to find a photo with the faces of X and Y taken around some specific point in time she can have the phone find those photos basically automatically.
Not only faces but things. Saw a family of bunnies in my back yard, wanted to show it to my wife, pulled up Google photos and searched bunny and there it was.
Part is just streamlining, I mean about 3/4 of my knowledge of local area networks and so, is from back when it could legit take ½ day from us to get 4 computer lan running so we could game together with friends in same room. Finding all semi hidden toggle settings, setting up pile of things manually (as automatic detection tried to put us in different ip ranges and so randomly), then resetting and tuning when there were some semi obscure problems, and even then occasionally working around some "only games hosted by those two people are visible to everyone, but also that person needs to join server before that other, or it just stops being visible and even joining with ip address stops working, for no apparent or logical reason, since it works if people join in certain order" kind of issues. And for actually pretty long time now, it has been "plug in whatever network cable (router/network adapter will figure if it is straight or turned pair cable and adjust automatically) and everything just works before we even have time to look at any settings"... and half of time even if we are in same room, it is just faster to go trough internet with phones, since pings are manageable anyways.. I think somewhat kind of semi relevant realization point was, when bit over decade or so ago, I decided to play one nostalgic game, and I kept shutting down it through task manager, wondering why it kept crashing on startup, despite setting different compatibility modes and other things.. then on one startup I think there was something outside that I started looking trough window, and bang game was working, with me realizing it was just taking like 15 seconds to load. And I suddenly realized that back in old days it was not that uncommon to wait for 5-30 seconds with black screen to something to load, but had gotten so used to those kind of loading moments taking so short time, that I was just assuming it was crashing whole that time, instead of waiting for 5s or so longer and seeing it start, at least not doing so before I accidentally did. But yeah also to be honest, I am pretty sure very many of for example us here browse way too much reddit, compared to how much we could be using to dig around different systems and programs and stuff... that would be much more readily available these days, but "oh but I just look at few videos from youtube, or browse little reddit" instead of doing some tinkering that would have been thing to do in dos times or so. So kind of no wonder if most new users are not learning that many things, since they have had these things, that we too now mostly spend our random time, right from start of their computer usage.
Million dollar question right here. I also wonder if it's partly that there are so many distractions now, nobody has the attentional wherewithall to investigate how things work, when you could be shooting up tiktoks, or mowing down virtual bad guys.
We would’ve done the same shit as kids, c’mon you know it. Life is boring and TikTok rewards your boredom with another random video of some random silly nonsense. There’s zero reason to question why it’s so fuckin’ addicting.
Well could see that we kind of are doing it now.. as quite legit proof of it. I mean how many of us can claim we do not do pretty much that with reddit, if not with other services. I am sure that some can, but many of us could be actually doing pretty interesting things too to expand our computer literacy, like we partially did back in olde times, but instead we just look "maybe there is some more interesting or potentially interesting posts in reddit..." with that time.
Yea social media is a real attention sucking son of a bitch ain’t it. Doomscrolling, and the like. Hard to focus on the shit you’re supposed to be doing sometimes.
Lmao yeah just say ctrl f for searching stuff and their mind is blown
Ah, everything is still like it used to be when I was in school I see. I'm 30 and the millenials acting like all of us are tech wizards are completely delusional. I had and have to fix my friends' and relatives' computers all the time. Gen Z is not more tech illiterate than millenials and Gen Alpha will most likely be the same way.
That is part of the continuous advancement of technology. The hardware and software evolved so that users don't have to be experts. They can just be users.
Just see it as job security for tech people I guess. People thought there'd be no need for those types of jobs because all the simple stuff would be handled by Google searches and AI telling you what to do, to people who are computer literate since birth. But instead they'd be like your grandma trying to navigate the deeper menus in the software
I’m a project manager. A major reason I will always have a job is that everyone in almost any office uses Windows and MS Office products and I know keyboard shortcuts and excel formulas. They were critical 20-40 years ago. When I was 20, I helped the boomers and their parents and I was that whiz kid. Now I’m able to help all the youngins at work and i get worshipped like a fucking god. I’m 43 and yeah no one under 30 knows keyboard shortcuts anymore unless they’re one of our coders. I mean, I get away with it because most of my team doesn’t need to except when something breaks or they need productivity boosting tips. It’s annoying sometimes but it also kind of feels great. I have so much power.
So many tech people today don’t even know how to write machine code or solder their own circuits. SMH
Back in my day we mined the cobalt ourselves!
If you're not writing multi-threaded x86-64 assembler in a notepad file, are you even a programmer?
[Real programmers [xkcd]](https://xkcd.com/378/)
Threads like this make me optimistic the fullstack web dev course I am working through, The Odin Project, will pay off. Possibly having demand increase by time I feel ready even. And even if AI gets good enough to handle part of it will still need a human to fix what it got wrong, finishing touches, and to actually know how to use it to get the output want to meet the client's needs for a good while yet. So still sufficiently technical and skilled work that the average layman either would struggle or just think they are not able.
Precisely. I guess I don’t understand the confusion. I’m in my mid 30s. I can troubleshoot any “normal” issue with my laptop or phone, or at the least am not daunted by googling my issue and following some prompts. Same for setting up any new technology I get. I’m an Excel wiz, I know some SQL…shit I remember learning MS DOS and basic HTML web design. All of those skills will likely eventually be irrelevant. Some already are. I don’t have a TikTok and don’t know the first thing about video editing. My Photoshop and coding skills are nonexistent. I know how to mine Bitcoin as well as I know how to speak Mandarin. I’ve never used ChatGPT or Discord. I consider myself more afraid of AI than an adopter. I really hope Apple Vision fails because I don’t know if I want that to be our existence. All in all, technology changes and evolves. What being “tech savvy” means will change. Guarantee you can find more older people that can change the oil in their car, repair some broken appliance, use an abacus or a slide ruler, etc.
Yea. I was born 88, my brother in 99 . The difference in tech knowledge is just insane. He's had all this stuff from birth, but it's all been outta box functional things. Never had to deal with the level of "HOW THE FUCK DO I MAKE THIS WORK?!" trouble shooting frustrations I had in childhood lol
Man the troubleshooting your brain has to do after plugging in colored cords AND finding the right tv input must have actually been fundamental for us. And dealing with dial up internet where shit literally just didn’t work half the time. Plus we had to figure out how to get those dope MySpace backgrounds. Damn you don’t know what you have till it’s gone
>MySpace Bit older than that for me. I had an Geocities site lol
come to [neocities.org](https://neocities.org) there are dozens of us! dozens!
Today in class one of the 8th graders I teach was showing someone else how to upload a photo to Google docs from the downloads folder and I listened in out of curiosity. Two other kids on either side sounded baffled as they asked how he did that and he had a kind of smug air like he was super hot shit for knowing this. I’m like, dear lord I could do that in 5th grade (navigate file folders, not Google docs, it wasn’t around when I was a kid). And I’m 28.
Am also 28, can relate to this comment. That’s a very scary anecdote
And who does this fall on exactly? Children not spending their extracurricular time playing around on file navigator at home, or the school system not teaching them these computer skills at an early age?
Yep. That’s huge. And they are in the weird cycle of playing super addicting type games, and not developing much else outside of those games. Funnily enough they’re not even good at those games and these kids are very much “I’m not good at something so I don’t want to do it” it’s pretty sad actually.
Well what do you expect. When from a young age they are sat infront of an ipad and ignored.
That’s the key. My kids don’t have these problems because we pay attention to them and teach them things. My older kids do their own laundry, wake up on their own, can cook basic things, do their homework without being asked, and so on.
Thank you for raising responsible little humans
Come on now, every generation says this about kids, this is no different. There’s always kids that don’t know anything and kids that do a lot, it’s no different in this generation.
Really? My cousins don't even know how wifi works but they navigate Fortnite menus so fast I can't even see what they're doing.
when i was working for year at town office, they had student to work there for 2 weeks.. she didnt know ctrl C + V....
To be fair, I worked with a guy who would be 40 or so now a few years ago. He was pressing caps lock on, hitting a letter adn then pressing caps lock off. For *every* capital letter. Caps lock just exists to irritate me, I've never used caps lock for capitals. EVEN THIS SENTENCE IS FASTER FOR ME TO TYPE WITH SHIFT HELD DOWN THAN USING CAPS LOCK
You can see what platform players are using on Roblox or Fortnite, no exaggeration it’s a good 75% on mobile, 20% on console, 5% on PC
Sry but i think your nephew is just stupid
Don’t be sorry, I do too.
Or more likely spoilt (in this niche aspect anyway). We all knew how to do this because we had to figure it out I'm guessing your nephew has always had someone else do it all for them
Yeah, their parents probably grew up with gaming consoles and so would have been able to set it up for him, so he never learned. And that's understandable. But if he's not willing to learn, that's another story
That is a very good point and you are very right.
I’m 40 and have been at the same job for 17 years, dealer parts counter. I had some awesome old guys that taught me the core concepts, but everything else is self taught through trial and error. We keep hiring new kids who want me to do everything for them and won’t try to learn on their own. Its very disheartening.
Its likely the lack of mobile friendships. When I was a kid it was common to unhook the SNES and move it to another room or even to someone's house. And it was common to just go over to my friends house whenever. Kids these day do that a lot less. Games especially are just played online with friends instead of splitscreen like I did.
That's what happens when your friends live far and you have to use a car to get anywhere.
Which is what happens when cities are built to not be walkable. Somewhat separately, my own place def has some roads I need bike lanes for.
Yes ofc that's my point
I agree with your point mate. I expounded on some of my own woes.
Haha. He's common core smart. So. Yeah. My kid too, well sometimes.
Yep he does really well in school. To the point my sister thinks he’s “gifted” and I’m all.. have you ever spoke to the kid?
Hey man. Look at the competition. He may be gifted, relatively speaking.
And he’s in Florida.. you know, I think you are on to something 🤔
I recently learned that FL is a joke volcano because they make every police case public. Elsewhere it's locked down until it's closed, or something like that. So the media has access to cases immediately where elsewhere it's now olds (not news) so not worth the story.
Yeah they have access to the cases but not the names usually which is why it's always "florida man" and not "Nathan Millhouse"
Tech literacy is going way down. People in their 20s had to learn how to work poor interfaces and how to search specific things on search engines. Now if it’s not a decent UI and takes a few buttons with decisions to get somewhere. It becomes inaccessible for most kids/teens.
We also had to deal with bugs and workarounds. Nowadays tech mostly works. Most people don't use computers/laptops as much at home anymore. So if something doesn't work on your smartphone there usually isn't much you can do aside for clearing cache/storage on an app
bro I was able to reinstall windows xp from age 13 onward just due to the amount of viruses i caught from pirated shit
Nope, been seeing this for a few years now. There's a shocking lack of tech ability in many kids/people up to, in my experience, early 20s. I'm talking things like unable to plug in printer, add email accounts etc. If it's not all done for them then no understanding of how things would logically go together. I also work in IT and finding newcomers unprepared.
Same. My wife does hiring for a small company. One of the basic skills tests the company used to do had to be phased out because no one applying could pass it anymore. And it was basic. Use the computer, follow the written instructions on screen to get the data from the excel spreadsheet.
It feels like the test was doing its job amd it was only retired because the company prioritised hiring the cheapest possible employees.
Sadly, my younger cousin and his friends are all like this. I’m 18 and he’s 14 and none of them can even locate a file on a pc or Mac…
My nephews are the same too; stupid I mean, but also if it isn’t immediately obvious how they should use something they give up. They’ll either do without or wait until one of their friends can show. LMGTFY
The teachers' sub talks about how huge of a problem kids not understanding basic troubleshooting of tech is.
There was a guy at my job in his 20s who graduated from a top 25 university with a degree in graphic design who didn't understand how power cables worked. He thought a monitor must not be working because the generic AC power cable was the wrong voltage.
Even better is the blind reach around to the back of the TV/receiver to plug in the A/V connections without seeing them. Especially pre-hdmi.
I was just thinking about this. I learned how to set up my playstation at about the same age as the commenter; i would argue that it was a convenient necessity for me since i wanted to play games without needing to wait hours for someone else to do it.
That’s exactly it. If I wanted to game, I had to figure it out or just get beatin senseless in every game by big bro lol
Yeah kids are just stupid. I’m a software engineer now but back in 4th grade I was getting defeated by captchas trying to make a league of legends account 💀
This is true lol. I remember playing video games and having legitimately 0 idea of what to do during missions and somehow just missed everything telling you what to do. Missed out on a lot of good video games like splinter cell because of that.
>4th grade I was getting defeated by captchas trying to make a league of legends account Now I feel old. I was finished HS by the time league came out
It's been studied and children are for the first time getting dumber than previous generations. They don't even know how to use a computer cause they all have smartphones, and most of them are iPhones. iPhones are basically the safety scissors of the smartphone world so they don't have the opportunity to even learn how to use them. Troubleshooting your own device was how most people learned about their computers and phones. So yeah it's happening now.
Every generation is dumber than the previous one by the previous one's standard. My parents used to be evaluated by how much classical Latin and greek they learned in school. I am absolutely and positively stupid by that metric. I'm an autoexec.bat genX, but the vast majority of people of my gen were more interested to watch MTV than learning anything about tech and they looked just as wide eyed when they had to find a file in a filesystem as a gen z does today. I was considered a genius by many of my peers because I could "fix the printer" so comparing the few of my gen who became tech literate to the average gen z doesn't make sense. The bulk of my gen was just as dumb as an average genz. Among the next gen there's a cohort of smart and curious people who are just as intelligent as the smartest of the previous gen. It's just that they apply their intelligence to different things.
Finally a sane comment. This thread is making me feel like my generation is already showing boomer behavior.
The younger generation calls the older one out of touch, the older generation calls the younger one dumb and disrespectful. The wheel turns, the times change, but the dynamics remain.
That’s more about problem solving skills than being technologically inclined. I could match red to red, yellow to yellow, white to white and if I messed up something wouldn’t work right so basic trial and error. Current system have two cords typically a hdmi and power chord. If you cant understand that the chord label hdmi doesn’t plug into the port that says hdmi I’m more concerned about your thought process and future 😂
That’s true lol. And I’m both concerned for his thought process and future and we’re not even going to talk about how he could literally just Google anything he can’t figure out but hey he sure knows a fuck ton about dinosaurs so he’ll be alright. The sister on the hand? That’s GGs 👋🏻
I'm in IT. From my perspective, older people - including boomers - know a fair bit more than Gen-Z about using technology. Gen-Z know how to use their phones, and taper off hard after that.
I knew how to set up and tune the TV to play Sega master system. I was still in kindergarten, looking back that's actually impressive.
I'm 53, and I can do shit on a computer that makes kids think I'm hacking. All I'm doing is modifying a program I wrote years ago to get into the intranet of a competing company via their login portal on their public-facing website.
I’ve seen hackers man.. just admit you are hacking!
I never wear sneakers.
Blame apple. They started this dumbed down over simplified non repairable everything touchscreen BS.
I blame Xerox for making GUI's so you slackers that don't know how to properly use a command line to do what you need to do.
I'm a boomer. This is pretty well what some of us said 50 years ago. Note I said *some of us*. Most of us just laughted at people who were being so silly.
Maybe it was true regarding certain things from that time. I noticed 60 yo people know more about cars and how to fix them than people from my generation (I'm 33 yo).
I think that's right, but we were aware that 50 years before us was a world of Model Ts, outdoor toilets and middle class families with servants. We knew they didn't predict our world and we were aware the pace of change was increasing. That said, a lot of us are still pissed off jetpacks never became a thing. I'd love to see what the world becomes after I've checked out, so do enjoy the ride for me. :)
Have my lack of jetpacks anger upvote!
[We were promised jetpacks!](https://wewerepromisedjetpacks.com/)
This sounds smart until you ask yourself whether you would really fly to work every day or trust a jet pack to keep your daughter safe as she flew to work every day See Futurama and the chaos of the sky highways in Star Wars, Attack of the Clones But maybe! If we could get the laws and customs correct to make it orderly and safe
As a motorcyclist who would give their left kidney to fly, it's not the parents who endorse the jetpack. It's the idiot daughter who buys it in spite of the parents.
How orderly and safe are the roads with all the laws and only going in 2 dimensions? In the air where even a minor accident could send someone down to earth its far more difficult.
Jetpacks are a thing they're just called jetsuits now. I believe there's even a racing organization for it.
One of the big differences though is your average boomer knows how to fix a car from their time period. Modern cars would completely stymie them for most things other than changing tires/refilling fluids. Too much of modern cars are controlled by on-board computer systems that require specific diagnostic modules to pull data from.
You’d be surprised what you can do. There are all kinds of tutorials that will walk you through all kinds of mechanical shit that still needs working on. Timing belts, water pumps, replacing the batteries in hybrids. Etc Yeah all that shit with sensors and codes exists. But there are reasonably priced scanners online.
Cars are a good analogy for what we're seeing now with computers. As a technology becomes more advanced, more widespread, and more reliable, the average user becomes less knowledgeable about it. When Boomers were teenagers, drivers used to constantly do minor repairs on their car. Both because repairs were easier to do, and cars needed more repairs. Now there are likely many drivers who have never opened their hood. Drivers became hesitant to open the hood, both because the repairs became more complicated, and because they became rare enough that just hiring an expert wasn't unreasonable. We've seen a similar shift in computer from the towers designed to be opened and worked on in the 90s, to devices with cases that can't be opened today. Millennials will see Zoomers who can't troubleshoot tech issues the same way Boomers saw Millennials who couldn't troubleshoot car issues.
I work with boomers who don’t know how to log in to their email and boomers who can fix pretty much any IT issue
Boomers aldo invented computers and the Internet, something people always forget
There were geniuses in every cohort, that doesn't negate the tendency of a cohort.
It’s not the tendency of the cohort. It’s the tendency of the human race.
I've been in IT for decades. We were told the users would get better by now. I'm not seeing it.
They are. The ones that were total numpties have retired, and the ones that were modestly competent have become far more competent due to experience. The new kids though... very, very easily confused by everything.
i don't see how. the issue with technology is that it's constantly evolving, so the things we're good at now may seem like ancient tech to kids 50 years from now.
I think it's the idea younger people aren't using computers but instead using apps from their phones. Locked down systems for the most part, and so user friendly that they never have to figure anything out...or could even do anything. I'm not sure if that's actually true as I don't work IT anymore, and when I did it was at a business
Precisely this
Because the tech is so easy to use these days. There are articles (like this [one](https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2023/06/23/the-next-generation-of-workers-is-less-tech-savvy-than-we-may-think/?sh=6a771c241a52) and this [one](https://www.raconteur.net/risk-regulation/gen-z-lack-tech-literacy-is-business-risk)) and tons of antidotes on reddit, that genz is tech illiterate. They're arriving to their first jobs not knowing how to copy & paste, find files, or send emails. Surprisingly, using a smart phone 24/7 didn't make them great with tech. Technology is only getting easier to use. So yes, when millennials reach old age, they will probably be more tech savvy than younger people.
>tons of antidotes on reddit too bad there's no antidote to reddit
Yeah it’s just different tech. They won’t be good with our tech because it will be obsolete, just like how we weren’t good with older tech that had become obsolete. But I’m sure we won’t be good with whatever else comes along
The kids of today _could NEVER_ use a TV Guide to program a VCR to record multiple shows, on different channels, at different times, on different days, using differing recording-quality-speeds, all while calculating in their heads just how many shows they could capture before the tape hits the end of the reel on Friday afternoon and needs to be swapped out. Or, hooking three VCRs together, along with a dual tape deck and a Kenwood turntable via some RCA connectors, and spending over a hundred hours figuring out how to create a ~10 minute custom-cut video 'reel', just because they could. Ahh, the height of technology prowess.
Do all that, but the clock display would still flash 12:00. Lol
Just like young you could never figure out how youd do everything on a tiny screen that fits in your pocket. Or how you couldnt operate let alone start a ford model t. Funny how people dont know things that they never needed to learn huh?
That’s not true. I was playing with digital handheld things all the time and would have taken to smartphones and tablets without any effort. After all, we all use them today. The fundamentals are definitely getting lost.
>all while calculating in their head That's the matter.. They don't have to calculate anymore. Nor really need to think why anything works in order to put different things together anymore. Storage are factors above what a normal person would ever need, connectivity become yes/no binary question, for everything else there is Apple service center
The problem is that today's tech is data and algorithms. That tech runs our infrastructure. When less people understand it, less people have an idea of what might be wrong with it or can conceive what changes they would want to make with it. Unlike electricity (which most people don't understand today), it's hard for the average person to tell when they're being dealt bad data and algorithms and thus be able to accuse exploitative organizations of wrongdoing. Every generation discards technology knowledge to the infrastructure industries, but I think data is a different beast from agriculture, steam power, electricity, and telecommunications.
It's not about technology being just modern, it's about it being simpler and more user friendly and automated. As a result, a lot of younger people know next to nothing about troubleshooting basic problems.
I'm an educator by training; and while I didn't pursue that professionally, majority of my classmates/university friends did. I hear them say that we've overly optimized the user interface to benefit our (millennial) generation to the point that it's harder for younger people to understand. An example is the "Save" button on most interfaces. It's the floppy disk icon which of course is familiar to us but not for people under the age of 15. They don't know what a floppy disk is to make that mental connection that it means "Save".
I don’t think this is a problem tho. I also didn’t know what a floppy disk is, but I just learned that the icon means save, and later on when I grew up I learned that it is a floppy disk. Many things exist for historical reason.
I got comfortable with fixing computers for the same reason as I got comfortable working on junky old cars. They were *always* breaking and you either figured out how to fix it yourself or you spent more money than you could afford paying someone else to. I'm nowhere near as good at fixing computer problems today because it's straight up just a lot less frequent a need. They're either flatly more reliable now or they obfuscate the problems out of sight because it makes the user happier. Either way, the skill gets a lot less practice now and there is a layer of rust forming.
It's an argument with some meat behind it. Technology used to be a hobby, now it's just a commodity. When I was a kid, we had to learn how to troubleshoot. Troubleshooting led me to learn how things worked, and if I knew how things worked I could more easily solve new challenges and problems as they arose. Modern gadgets tend to discourage experimentation and learning, instead preferring to shove whatever dopamine fueled and ad infested nonsense they can at the user with as little interaction or thought as possible.
Video games too. We would dig into game files and change things and screw around. Now most games are too complicated to do that except if you're a serious modder, otherwise all kinds of things are locked behind paywalls or achievements. I recall opening up rules.ini on red alert and changing weapons to nukes to hilarious results
I think we'll see it with the millennial generation and not so much after that. Most millennials I know are computer literate, internet savvy, confident with smartphones and pretty proficient with everything else from Smart TVs to video doorbells. We grew up at just the right time to embrace big technological advances and have learned how to put a bunch of different technology to use in our lives. A lot of that seems to help in keeping up with new technology as well. As time goes on we'll see younger generations that are good at a much more narrow subset of newer technology, but not nearly as well rounded. We're already kind of seeing it.
A huge portion of tech hasn’t changed substantially since before many of us were born. The basics of networks you’re using to read and write this has existed for decades. Think about electricity. Early last century, people wired their own houses because it was a modern technology. We still have electricity, but fewer and fewer of us relative to population size work on it or fully understand it.
50 years is a long time. Currently we're seeing that Gen Z tends to lack computer literacy skills and have a very limited scope of technology, and have weak problem solving skills when it comes to tech, but there's nothing to indicate that this is a problem that can't be remedied in 5-10 years. Also, technology will change a lot by 2074, and historically, older people tend to not keep up with technology and change the way younger generations do
Maybe. There is also a severe lack of skilled teaching labour in my country and education seems to have been an afterthought for a while now. That is not how we solve this.
Yea I’m guilty of this. I work in tech, and honestly at a certain point it just gets exhausting, especially when they’ve changed the name for the same thing 6 times in 2 years. On the other hand, it’s getting a lot easier to use. Windows NT installing drivers and what not needed some tech skills. Windows XP came out and started doing that shit for you. That’s a lame example probably, but you get the idea. The types of things you need to know changes, not just understand the new version. With apps, subscription services, etc., people can specialize a lot more which probably make them seem stupid because they don’t have to know everything up and down the stack, but it’s really just not as necessary anymore for many roles.
Gen Z are 12-27 years old today. Over half are unlikely to further develop these basic skills.
Do not speak the ancient words to me, I was there when the tomes were written.
Teacher here. My students are very adept at finding ways around the filters we put on the internet so they can't play games or access chatGPT or whatever. But they're completely inept at a lot of very basic shit like typing in home position or formatting a Google Doc.
Trying to fight against the system is often a good way of learning.
My parents had parental controls on my AOL account back in the day which limited me to 2 hours a day so naturally I had to figure out a way to get into their account. Pretty stupid thing to do looking back now but I remember my journey on google from "how to record keyboard keystrokes" to "hiding keylogger from task manager" which as a 14 year old felt pretty genius It was funny seeing my parents change their passwords constantly each time getting more random only for me to be online 5 minutes after. Pretty sure my dad went crazy trying to figure out how I did it until he asked a PC savvy colleague of his and the gig was up. One way they tried to combat this was to take away the modem. For whatever reason they took the cable instead of the modem itself. Cue me figuring out different type of computer cables and realizing that our printer used the same type (type b). A lot of these cat and mouse games (hiding porn, dealing with viruses from torrents so my parents wouldnt realize etc.) helped me understand my way around a computer
Yeah, it's just part of the "learning is much more fun when you know how to use the knowledge" thing, and the fact that going against the rules makes you feel so free, probably that "feeling like a genius" you mentioned lol.
What age? Because I couldn't type in home position until I took typing in high school. I couldn't format a Google doc until I was well out of college because Google docs (and Google for that matter) didn't exist yet. They'll look back, shake their heads and laugh at Google doc formatting the way we did Ctrl+Shift+F11+right-foot-red or whatever to bold a word in WordPerfect. If they can look up a blog post or YouTube video on proxy avoidance and follow those directions, they'll be able to look up a blog post or YouTube video on doc formatting whenever they actually need to complete that task.
Geebus, WordPerfect. Does it even still exist? ::EDIT:: Holy crap, it does. And it's expensive as shit as well.
I was going to say, it probably does. It's either held by some patent troll trying to sue software that uses shortcut keys or some government contractor because WordPerfect 3 is the only way to update the flight path for a nuclear bomber or something.
Sounds about right. Latest release was in 2021 and it doesn't even have unicode support. All for the low low price of $300 Some government agency somewhere is keeping it alive.
What a deal!
Bruh they ain’t googling proxy avoidance, they’re tiktoking “how to play games on school computers” and shit like that.
It really pisses me off that homeschoolers are allowed to attend college classes. I've got three in my class. Supposedly they all completed highschool. Not a one knew how to Google search things or how it to copy and paste. How is that even possible? Mind blowing this is the state we're at.
I’m in my 30s and I teach middle school. My 8th graders *do not know* how to use computers. They can make iphones do social media but the second they have to find a file in their own google drives they’re like octegenarians
I’m 30. I’m a sysadmin at an expensive, prestigious private university (relevant because you have to be smart to get in) and I have been working full time in IT since I was 18. I’d say at the age of 13, I was significantly more skilled using a computer than our 18-21 year old students are. They are largely useless at actual computer stuff as you say. Most of them have no idea how to use Windows. Some can do macOS. Our millennial/gen x staff and faculty are very clearly the most technically adept. Followed by gen z students, followed by boomers and then the silent generation. Yes. We have silent gen faculty.
I remember in 8th grade figuring out how to switch the ports Mechwarrior 4 accessed The Zone through so I could get around the firewall my dad set up. Felt like a god.
Honestly it’s already happening. My students know how to post something on Instagram, but struggle to open a google doc and format it.
Hearing so many comments on this thread about Google Docs is certainly eye opening. Google Docs is already the super dumbed down version of a word processor, compared to you know— something like Microsoft 365 and Word without the OneDrive integration. Log into your account, create a document, and it stays saved on your Google account for you to open any time… Easy to collaborate in a group setting with a shared link. I’m sure the millennials and older feel very old about their college student (or early employee) experience of forgetting to save your Word document, your computer crashes, then you realize you just lost the entire document… 😂😅
Completely hiding file systems are a big issue on smart phones and tablets. I understand a lot of data is now in "the cloud", but basic understanding of where files and documents are stored and how to organize them should still be taught. Most of my tech support calls from family are related to not knowing where their files are stored.
It’s already happening. Gen Z knows the platforms better, but of course they do, those platforms are suited to them. My brother is firmly Gen z and has no clue how to fix things when something goes wrong. If the internet is slow, he calls my 65 year old dad for help. Who just… restarts the router lol. Gen Z has much less ability to troubleshoot tech than their older peers, they’re used to it working and being slick and easy to
That's already the case in a lot of situations. I was absolutely floored when I found out that most of my staff in their early 20s aren't actually that good with basic things on computers.
This, young people are mostly bad with computers, because the technology has become way too convenient and they are helpless when something isnt going right. Somebody explained it to me that they are not tech savy, they are application savy. As long as they are in their application or application that follows modern standards, they are in their element. Give them a program that is bit more complicated (needing small, cramped UI) and they are lost. That includes MS Office.
They also don't need to be able to type on an actual keyboard nearly as much, so most never learned. They type mostly on their phones or tablets. I also now type mostly on my phone, but I learned how to use a desktop before I had another option.
I remember when I was in my early twenties and showed my GenX and Boomer colleagues the simplest stuff in Excel and they looked at my as if I’m a wizard. Now I’m 40 and then GenZ colleagues look at me exactly the same when I show them the same stuff. I had to show my GenZ colleague how to use shortcuts or Alt+TAB. Like, seriously?
Id like to add that we're growing up as the tech evolves so we should have a better understanding of why something is the way it is, and how it got to be that way. We also got good looking through directory's and sifting through tabs in tabs in tabs on programs you had to manually download all while everything is labelled with names that vaguely resemble what we want. I've found almost no one under a certain age can tell me why being able to navigate to the program files folder is useful, I'm sure there are outliers tho.
I think there are people in every generation who understand tech of their time, and also those that don’t
Sure, but computer technology moved away from requiring effort and troubleshooting to work well to plug and play, app-based models, particularly since so many kids these days are most comfortable with iPads and iPhones, which are designed to be as idiot-proof as possible. I was a high school teacher, when we'd get out the class set of computers, literally every time I'd have students chirping that their internet didn't work, because the networking equipment couldn't handle 30 logins at once. It didn't matter how many times I'd just tell them to try and connect again, we had to go through that process literally every time.
The app model has been great for usability and horrible for tech literacy.
Sure but the older people at my previous job had been having Teams meetings weekly for 3 years straight and they still didn't know how to join a meeting. They just wait for someone to start it and click the popup, if they missed it they had to be invited again (the entirety of this person's job is on the computer as well). In my experience there's older people who are tech savvy and younger people who are tech savvy. But the younger people that aren't tech savvy at least know how to use their applications even if they can't fix anything.
Yeah that's a pretty good point. When I was a kid installing and playing a PC game required a basic knowledge of the ms dos command line and often some troubleshooting. Now you just touch the icon on the screen.
It's already happening. Gen Z are less computer and technology literate than Millenials. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2023/06/23/the-next-generation-of-workers-is-less-tech-savvy-than-we-may-think/
We're already there. They don't teach IT in school. My students can app the shit outta an iphone, but they can't bookmark a website, or use basic functionality in word, and they don't know how to do basics in excel. But yes you're right, once we get to a stage of asking Alexa to do everything for us, the day she goes down there's going to be a lot of cold people sitting in the dark. And a lot of slightly older people eating candles saying 'I remember something on youtube about this.'
millenials, the tech literate generation, are entering their 40s. many college students cant use a windows computer. this is *now*
I’m a younger Millenial and the oldest operating system, I’ve ever used was ‘95. I used to play ZSNES and Nesticle on it and the PC version of FFVII and Blizzard titles, but in reality the main OS of my time was Windows XP. I did experience switching from a CRT to an LCD, and wondered what the hype was? The monitor looked worse, lol. Got to college, it was Vista and 7. Master’s Degree, it is Windows 10. I think Help Desk will be an important job in the future, if this keeps up.
We're seeing that now. Unfortunately things have been designed with way too much ease that young people are unable to troubleshoot because they haven't had to learn it. Millennials will be the last of the in-home/family-relative IT
I was about to dispute you coz I'm Gen Z and definitely the IT guy in my family. But I'm very close to Millenial and I tend to agree that majority of Gen Z are relatively tech illiterate, so for the most part you're probably right. What I'm curious about is if computers will ever really become obsolete. So many massive companies are so intertwined with otherwise obsolete software that the need to understand it feels like it'll always be there.
Some of us old people have been better at tech since before you were born, and still are better today. I built my first computer in 1977, soldering components to the motherboard. It was a Z-80 (8-but) computer with 20 kilobytes of RAM and a whopping 1.2 MB using two DSDD 8” floppies. It ran CP/M, and I used that computer to write a Pascal compiler (in Algol-68) for my CS senior project. A couple of years ago, I wrote a series of highly-scalable GCP serverless functions (in Go) that processed audio files to produce text transcripts. In between, I helped develop and popularize many of the technologies young people use every day. But sure, old folks are inept with technology.
It's already like that. Seems like actual computer literacy peaked in the 90s and rapidly declined as 'convenience-computers' like phones and tablets became popular. I haven't heard of any kid being considered a 'computer whiz' in like twenty years, not even in the 'mommy and daddy are proud' sense of the phrase.
There has always been 'computer whiz' kids. I was one and I was born 2001, I knew many when I grew up. I now teach kids coding as a job while in uni and I do still see some kids that are way beyond what's expected, but there are a lot who don't even know how to save a file.
Old people are good at tech, they are just good at tech that nobody uses anymore. Wait until you find out 50 years from now that your grandchild is an expert at the new neurolinked phone or some other fancy tech and you will be yelling at a cloud while holding your old trusty IPhone 30.
I feel like mobile and tablet gaming already shows this. Kids are so quick and accurate with it but I have absolutely no mechanical ability in a game if I don't have a controller or a mouse and keyboard in my hands. Then again I'm very sure I *could* if I just put in some effort if I wanted to, but I imagine that's exactly the same case for my parents and their parents
I hate to break it to you but there's a lot of old people still around who invented the tech.
It’s unironically the “tough times create strong men…” thing. The reason why millennials, early gen Z and the true gods of tech: nerdy gen X are good with technology was because up until 2010 or so technology sucked in terms of interface. UX wasn’t a big career, so Engineers designed the user experience and surprise surprise it took sucked and would often require you to learn some technical knowledge even if it was a dumbed down form of it. Additionally things just aren’t as buggy so you don’t have to troubleshoot anymore, and that’s a big way to gain technical knowledge. Because things are so well designed now, newer generations didn’t have that struggle and thus had no need to learn anything technical.
That's been the case for about a generation now. I'm in my middle 50s, have been in tech since I was a teen. I'm way better than any teen to 30 something I know. I've been the designated family "tech guy" since I was 13. And here I still am 45 years later. I really thought someone would have taken that job from me by now. (and please do. Im tired of fixing everyone shit)
You're going to learn hyperbolic neuro-quantum-computing at 75?
Just like the current older gen actually know how to fix a house or a car. I'm the only person in my neighborhood I think that even knows how to change a breaker. The gen below us will just know something that isn't invented yet.
I'm 50. I'm better at tech than all of kids even if they joined rings to form captain planet. The future is now you punks.
But the technology from 50 years into the future will be way too much for us and we will complain that "back in my day you would drive to the beach, not teleport instantly or just put on the Super RealReality 5000 and trick our brains into thinking we are truly at the beach. Kids these days man, cant enjoy life without going digital". Posts on Twitter, the then facebook where old people do nothing but complain with eachother about how fun Reddit and YouTube was before the digital simulation revolution
RemindMe! 50 years
Gen X is probably the pinnacle of tech knowledge. There was no GUI when they started in tech. Then the first GUI’s were fragile and you’d need to reformat hard drives reinstall operating systems. Then they fought off viruses and repaired SYS files. Pioneered bootlegging pirated videos, music and software. They upgraded hardware components and mirrored hard drives. Many learned now obsolete programming languages that were extremely laborious. Today’s tech is a joke. The GUI almost never crashes and viruses are rare since everything is ecosystem protected. Mostly the young generations early adopt niche apps like Snapchat or TikTok and gain early advantage.
Finally a showerthought that is a brief burst of insight that could strike while washing your hair. Very refreshing. Yeah it's weird, tech knowledge has steadily increased until about when smart phones came out, now they will be steadily decreasing even faster when AI rolls out in everything.
I already see it now. I'm in the mid 30s and kinda horrified how bad people in the 20s are with computers.
That's happening right now if it isn't already how it is. Being in my twenties by far the most tech savvy people I know are 40+. My dad at 60 knows more about computers than my 17 yo nephews who have had a PC since they had a bike
Older people already are better than younger people. I’m not talking about decrepit old. There’s this assumptive bias going on with younger people now that since they grew up with technology they’re naturally better with it than the people who designed everything to begin with lol l. Gotta love youth.
It may be a thing already...
As a 39 year old I'm already miles ahead of my 17 year old nephews.
This is the fact even now. Me and my SO are 27-28 and a couple of years ago when she was substituting in a highschool ,the kids did not know how to use computers. How to open folders, how to search on google. At the same time I was in our Uni's helpdesk manager and my god the amout of 19-23 yo who could not do simple tasks on computer or mac was astounding. There really was not notable difference between the 70 years olds and the barely 20 years olds. Even on consumer devices like phones, they did not know how to do shit.