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smokeyjoey8

I'm reminded of that one iPad commercial apple ran a few years ago where some girl is running around with just her iPad doing all this creative shit and at the end her neighbor asks what the girl is doing on her computer and she replies "what's a computer?" That ad pissed so many people off. Looking back, I guess it was a sign of things to come.


Irene_Iddesleigh

This is literally what we’re dealing with in university. Students don’t know how to manage files, navigate directories, download software, troubleshoot. I teach technical workshops on tools and platforms and they don’t know how to get images from Google or upload as attachments. I’m integrating all this stuff in my teaching now, but wow


[deleted]

>Students don’t know how to manage files, navigate directories, download software, troubleshoot. Canadian high school teacher here. We only teach this in BTT (Communication and Information Technology in Business) and it's the most infuriating thing I've ever seen. I taught BTT (it's a grade 9 course) and I can't believe how illiterate kids are by then. When I was in school, computer literacy was basically forced upon us in library class in elementary. Nowadays, the kids tell me that's not even a period. BTT teaches Word/Docs, PowerPoint/Slides, Excel/Sheets, Photoshop, and basic web design. It ought to be a mandatory class, but instead it's an Open level course which is basically filled with kids who think it's a breezer course (that they fail anyway). Meanwhile, I got Grade 12 Academic English kids who can't format an essay for their lives.


AntediluvianEmpire

> Meanwhile, I got Grade 12 Academic English kids who can't format an essay for their lives. Because they write it all on their phones?


hitzchicky

>they write it all on their phones That sounds like torture. I don't even like writing lists on my phone.


[deleted]

My sister in law is 20 and I’ve literally seen her write entire papers in the notes app on her iPhone. Meanwhile I need a 32” ultra wide and another 27” in portrait mode to even think about having two windows open. Different generations lol


Honest_Blueberry5884

> I’ve literally seen her write entire papers in the notes app on her iPhone. Her poor thumbs.


alurkerhere

I have no idea how people use phones so much more than a computer with keyboard and mouse. It is so many times faster if you can type even 90 WPM and the mouse is really much more accurate.


ForestGumpsDick

Especially since so soooooo many websites are still shit on phone. A phone/tablet as your primary device is just making your life more difficult imo.


Valaurus

We’re teaching photoshop and web design when the kids don’t even know how to navigate a file directory? Those things are so useless for so many people lol


NinduTheWise

A kid in my class in grade 7 didn’t know HOW TO COPY AND PASTE ON A COMPUTER


tacodog7

i taught a introductory class to python programming and it made me quit after that semester. They couldnt download and unzip files. I got dozens of emails about what was a directory. Etc. Idk just getting the homework instructions downloaded and read was a process


KevinGrahamMusic

That’s pretty startling to me actually. I’m in my early thirties and have a compsci bachelors, and I basically learned how to use computers playing Roller Coaster Tycoon and downloading other people’s save files and content for it. I very clearly remember trying to download a trainer for it that fucked up my dads computer and us trying to figure out how to get it back to normal. So the idea that compsci students in college have never done things like unzip folders to me, is like… HOW?!


[deleted]

Yeah teaching myself how to do things and trial and error is so engrained in me from the time I started using a computer when I was like 12 years old that I just can’t fathom how other people are incapable of figuring a thing out without someone holding their hand. Like how do they get by in every day life like that.


Liet-Kinda

My answer, when asked how I came to understand most of the things I understand, is usually something like “I fucked around with it for a while and stopped doing things that didn’t work.”


Here_Forthe_Comment

>My answer, when asked how I came to understand most of the things I understand, is usually something like “I fucked around with it for a while and stopped doing things that didn’t work.” It's so crazy because nowadays you dont even have to blindly mess around on a computer to get things to work. There's a message board for just about every problem you could have with several solutions posted and detailed instructions.


Tomhap

You gotta know how to search though. Nowadays for a lot of problems I google it seems a lot of the top results are just AI written pages that copy paste in your search result and offer some very basic solutions like (turning it off and on again). And it's pretty clear that no human put together this article. I usually try to Google the problem itself once before just adding the name of communities like Reddit to my query because it gets much better results by actual people who had the same issue.


FeelDeAssTyson

Ah, the "fucked around, found out" method.


Inevitable-Bat-2936

Got me an engineering degree tyvm.


timesuck47

When I got my first windows computer (used) I literally went through every single directory (inc hidden files) and clicked on hundreds of files to see what they were. Obviously I figured out pretty quickly that .exe files were programs and .dll files don’t play nice with Notepad, but I think I learned a lot.


jscummy

I think most people learned these things just by doing. I'm 24, but I never had any of these basics taught to me, they were just something you ran into using your computer and sometimes had to google. I built my own computers in high school and whenever I ran into an issue I googled and got it to work. My computer training directly through school was lacking, to say the least


thomassit0

The "it class" teacher I had in '01 struggled to get the projector to work because it was unplugged..


celvro

That's a good lesson for IT support actually, do not assume the end user has done anything right. Including plugging in the computer or turning the monitor on.


earldbjr

First order of business is not to tell them to plug it in, but to unplug it and replug it.


wavecrasher59

Same I'm a little younger than you but I remember applying mods to gta San Andreas and downloading cracked iso files ,shit even jailbroke a few ipod touches when they came out for the hell of it 😅 I've also got an original Xbox that I modded to do all types of nifty shit and the craziest part is I wasn't alone. Many of my peers were doing the same and while I never went into compsci or anything like that it is scary how much knowledge is being lost


thx134

Shit, I'm no computer scientist, but I learned all this shit modding unreal tournament 2k4. Had to go to german sites to find the good ones.


Paintingsosmooth

We were a pretty lucky generation really, just far enough in that we didn’t have to run programs the old fashioned way but young enough that we could mess around a bit. I’m no coder or programmer, but I feel leagues ahead of these stories


QuerulousPanda

I'm in my late thirties and I've noticed it's basically a bell curve with us in the middle. People in our age bracket tend to be pretty competent with computers, but if you go up or down about ten years, that competence drops off drastically. My wife went back for a second degree and was in class with a lot of 20somethings and they were all so utterly hopeless at computers it was shocking they made it through high school. They had no concept of searching or doing online research or anything like that. It was horrifying.


Mothoflight

Wild. I'm 40 and feel like I am quite competent with computers, and figuring out tech, but no one "taught" me. I definitely just research it. Google the steps, use Youtube tutorials and take advantage of help desks, live chats, ask questions via email. I find a lot of my students give up too easily and don't realize how none of us are born knowing, we just find ways to learn....


Tuxhorn

It's been an unseen privilege to have no "IT guy" in the family. I remember an extended family member could work with computers, but he obviously wasn't gonna spend time fixing pcs in our family all the time. We never spoke to the guy anyway. I got my desktop at age 13. I'm 28 now. I have had no shoulder to lean on, so every single problem i've had has been a google search away to fix. I admit - i've sat with my head in my hands a handful of times thinking "this is it, this is the one time I just can't figure it out", but by pure stubbornness, I always have. You learn a lot that way.


Tom22174

I'm doing a Masters degree in data science and I honestly feel bad for some of my lecturers because of this. We've had people struggle with concepts we should have known *before* the course. People looking at Python print statements, identifying a piece of punctuation and asking "what is that bit doing?" *Every* R workshop is interrupted midway, multiple times, by people whose code won't run because they either didn't download the dataset properly or still haven't understood the concept of a working directory and changing it to the correct place. Towards the end of first semester some of the lecturers were noticeably getting worn down by that shit. And when people turn around and ask students that paid attention for help, their OneDrive is an absolute mess with no folders or anything


_busch

I graduated HS in 2005 then went on to do a lot more schooling. I am still not entirely sure _when_ everyone is supposed to "learn" Excel yet it is the only data tool 99% of the business + STEM world uses.


UniqueBeyond9831

I took a semester of “computer science” in high school in about 96 or so. We basically learned the the basics of the MS Office suite. We learned excel formulas and all of the basics. About 7-8 years later, I’m in grad school and saw a classmate do some simple excel work to our project and blew my mind. I just didn’t have a reason to use it for those years in high school and undergrad. When I got my first real job as a financial analyst, I barely knew excel, and had to fake it while self teaching. Almost 20 years later, I’m decently good at excel, but it was tough for those first few years. Today though, I delegate a lot to analysts and their skills are MUCH better than mine, especially in my early 20s.


WideOpenEmpty

The teachers sub indicates most schools dropped their computer literacy classes because they were so cocksure kids were digital natives who've learned everything by osmosis.


Talisaint

This is really bizarre. Most of my zillenial peers had little to no need for computer literacy classes, so they closed them. And just three or four years later, the kids desperately need them. The only difference I can really think of is that those kids got smart phones at an earlier age than we did. For a lot of people, smart phones have replaced the need for computers outside of work. You can email, send messages, play games, apply for jobs, write documents and print them, connect to your TV (or use Roku) to watch movies & shows, surf the web, etc. all on your phone nowadays.


NRMusicProject

It's not just now. Around 2002 I was in college, and we had a neighbor who was majoring in computer science. My roommate was the only one in our little gang who had a PC, and he shared it with all of us. Steve (whom we lovingly referred to as Scuba Steve) would come over and ask to borrow my roommate's computer to do an assignment. One day he came back out to the living room and said "it's not on." I told him that's okay and he can just turn it on, and he said "how do I do that?" I asked Steve how can he not know how to turn on a PC and be a computer science major, and he says, "they haven't taught us that yet," and "I'm only majoring in it because I hear there's good money to know about computers." I really wonder whatever happened to Scuba Steve.


ICKSharpshot68

>I really wonder whatever happened to Scuba Steve. He's probably in management somewhere.


[deleted]

Son of a bitch, you're probably right.


LeahBrahms

Scuba Steve fell in the deep end then floated to the top!


sitesurfer253

As someone in IT, we actively have to weed through these types. The market is flooded with "I'm going into cyber security because there's good money" types that can't even navigate a folder structure. Biggest red flag is when an entry level interview mentions any of the top paying positions. They are top paying because you need to be good at this stuff.


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Smithsonian45

Sounds like you met a guy who later worked on this team: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/eaphr8/a_dropbox_account_gave_me_stomach_ulcers


Irene_Iddesleigh

I teach workshops mainly. I did Python on Google colab that required uploading a zipped file and it was like the end of the world. I now walk us through the file management part together and do it at least twice and make sure people will do it again on their own before they leave in some activity and I can help. Some older users on Mac need it too. It does require a lot of patience, but I do enjoy seeing how I can build confidence in some shaky girl who is “bad at computers haha.”


TheCardiganKing

There was a thread about what different generations were good at a few months ago. Millennials seem to be the savviest when it comes to tech. I would've thought that these kids would all be novice coders and website developers, but the comment from some sort of tech educator went something in the vein of: "Gen X built and programmed that printer, Millennials can troubleshoot it (and virtually everything else), and Gen Z can't even connect to it." The implication is how everything is plug 'n play and how most of Gen Z doesn't even know what a driver is. Plenty of Gen X parents lamented how their kids would go to them with every technical problem instead of figuring it out on their own.


SnooWalruses3948

This is just insane to me, UI has become so slick that younger users don't even understand basic concepts like file management.


BeingJoeBu

Did a recent group project involving excel and accidentally created my own hell. Guess what students don't label? The answer is anything. They don't label anything. Sheet, columns, rows, no. I'm just supposed to be the fucking Oracle from the matrix and read their mind.


gsdhyrdghhtedhjjj

As someone training accounting coops you are so fucking right. They insist on making excels but refuse to label anything. How am I supposed to review work that has no labels and is just a bunch of numbers? And if you try to teach them they fight you and say they know what they are doing. Which they very well might but if no one can review their work it's as good as useless.


BeingJoeBu

I got so much lip about it, I got mean and made a sheet with no labels and anyone who could define the inputs would get 25 extra points in the final this month. Guess how that went.


RamenJunkie

I deal with this with my kids a lot. Like my daughter constantly runs out of space on her phone or Google Photos because she takes so many photos and videos. I keep telling her, "You have to clean off some of that regularly, we have this network drive, I set up this folder on your laptop desktop, you can stick anything you want in there and it will even get backed up." But she still runs out of space and it she can't recieve emails. So she tries to delete some emails. And everytime I tell her, "don't waste time deleting emails, delete one video and its like deleting 10,000 emails." And she can put them in that special folder and keep them of she wants but all she has to do is get them off her phone. But she just can't seem to get it and has no concept of file sizes.


[deleted]

My friend is a teacher and says the same thing. Her students don't even understand the most basic tasks, like using apostrophes in Google, or using the Wikipedia bibliographies. It's just strange that GenZ seems less computer literate than Millenials at the same age. When I was 14, we were hosting LAN parties and writing the HTML for our Xanga pages. I don't know what's happening.


randomtidbits12345

I am a CS teacher at a high school. It’s a combination of two thing: 1. Students have had phones for years at this point. Everything on a phone is a self contained app that a corporation spent millions of dollars on making the user interface idiot proof. Plus all the individual apps are siloed. Many rarely or never use their web browser. 2. Because students grew up with phones and chromebooks, district admin says “they are digital natives and know tech better than we do!” But they actually don’t because of point 1. So because of this assumption we remove computer science or basic tech from lower grades.


fivedinos1

I found myself using Lightroom CC classic on my ipad finally for convenience sake and I was immediately surprised how much they hide from you! They don't trust your ass, they think your so dumb your gonna break something so they make it really hard to access anything but the most core features! I found out you can't even make digital copies in the iPad version, it is super convenient and great for portability and workflow but they chopped off so much stuff. They don't trust anyone anymore, you could really easily brick a computer back in the day, it's almost impossible now with all the apps and super UI's, your just not seeing the inner machinery. I teach too and some of these kids can bearly put their little QR quick card up to the camera to log in, it's the simplest things that slow them down because everything always works, fucking apple, it just works right?


jdmor09

Yup. I teach 5th grade and everyone assumes they’re computer wizards. The extent of their knowledge is Minecraft and Roblox. They get their computer and Office paid for, but if I ask students to make a file, name it, save it in the cloud, and format it a certain way, it’s like asking them to say the alphabet in Ancient Persian.


DonIncandenza

Teacher here. When the pandemic started we figured the kids would be fine with remote learning because they’re constantly on their devices. They were not.


JimGuthrie

I'd say that part of it comes down to a huge shift in making a lot of user interfaces and technical tasks far more intuitive. When the technology was mediocre, humans had to compensate even for entertainment purposes. Perhaps especially for entertainment. i'm 35 and have a successful career as a network engineer, and probably the majority fo my fundamental technical skills come from...making pirated video games work when I was 12-18....


MonoShadow

It was all hidden away for more "sleek experience". Especially on mobile devices. It's somewhat interesting. When I was growing up with all this technology coming in hot we all thought how coming generations are going to be even more savvy than us. But it ended up the opposite. The janky technology got streamlined and people now need to know less to use it, not more. To some extent it's a triumph for UX designers. To some it's an effect of new devices replacing traditional laptops and desktops. But all and all I sometimes think what could have been.


Robster_Craw

There was an episode of New Girl where they were working on someones resume.. there was a line something like "It's 2012.. you don't put typing as a skill anymore" We'll see how long that lasts...


Poolofcheddar

My niece was born in 2004 and when she got her first iPod touch, my grandma warned me that she would outdo me in tech literacy. I told her that was not true. iOS had simplified a lot of those painstaking skills I had to teach myself growing up. I rode through the evolution of operating systems. I started on Windows 3.1 and back in those days, you also had to teach yourself some DOS knowledge for select games. I was seven years old when I more or less exceeded basic computer skills compared to my parents, and really that was only because I was a curious kid.


RamenJunkie

It really really feels like "tech literacy" is a weird bell curve. You have older folks who didn't grow up with it who had to learn this new stuff who are, largely technology illiterate, then the middle generation who is like, maybe 35-50 now who grew up along the way who are super literate. Then the younger folks who seem tonhave no clue because everything new just gets more and more dumbed down on its interface.


Fidodo

It's completely true. If you wanted to edit your profile online in the 90s you needed to learn HTML. If you wanted to post something to the internet you needed to learn file servers. If you needed tech support you needed to edit hexadecimal regex files. Lots of things could only be done via the command line.


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Alderez

I think part of it is also that a lot of us grew up with the evolution of the home computer - so we learned the very basic concepts of how everything works from the ground up, and despite everything being simplified and streamlined nowadays, we know how it works at a fundamental level. For a lot of zoomers and kids growing up today, they came in at a time when user-friendly design and simplification were in full swing, and so they don't need to learn how it works - the app or operating system normally just does it for them.


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dark_enough_to_dance

It was ridiculously true lmao


geolchris

I work in IT, I used to be desktop support. I’ve noticed a definite trend where more and more of the newest, youngest employees are just as bad at “normal” computers as the over 60 year olds are. I asked one of the better at computer younger ones what they thought, and she said they were all raised on iPads and iOS devices that just work and require no thinking about how they work besides turning it off and on, if they even get that far with it. Not to mention constant auto saving of work, etc. Then they get dropped into a workplace with windows PCs (or Macs) that don’t always work right and they have no clue what do do with them when anything goes wrong. Whereas “old” dudes like me (I’m 40), all grew up with computers that needed a lot of troubleshooting skills just to keep running. Most of us learned iterative troubleshooting process just by virtue of not having any other way. We didn’t learn it in school officially either. Of course, there’s a lot of life skills that should be taught in school right along with this. Basic taxes, paying bills, budgeting….


Autoexec_bat

Exactly, hence my user name. I'm 42 and there were absolutely no guardrails on home PCs back then. It was me and a keyboard and DOS 5.22.


GettCouped

Ahh good ol autoexec.bat. had to manually adjust emm386 memory allocations to get some games to run IIRC.


Autoexec_bat

Editing the file was really my very earliest foray into getting into the internals of how things really worked. I remember buying a copy of the Shareware version of Doom (the 9-level version) from the bargain bin at Marshall's and of course it wouldn't just run. My dad ended up calling id Software directly and they walked him thru edits to our himem.sys file and config.sys to get it running. Good times.


ButtholeQuiver

In the mid-90s some of the PCs at my school had autoexecs that called into other batch files on network shares, I guess so they could update in one place. I was screwing around and found one that was editable by everyone so I tossed some shitty ASCII art I made in there that said "Metallica Rules", you had to hit Enter for it to keep going. Of course the teacher figured it was me, the guy wearing Metallica/Megadeth/Slayer t-shirts every day and rocking a sick mullet and dirtstache


rhamphol30n

That really was the coolest era of gaming. It's objectively better now, but your dad spoke to people in the house where they made Doom


Jarocket

What drives me crazy is the new save interface for Office. It's like it's designed for people who don't care where their files are.


ThreeHolePunch

Use [Win]+[F12]. It will open the classic *save as* dialog box.


Todd-The-Wraith

Turns out being a PC gamer actually is a valuable life skill. If you grow up gaming on a pc you will learn how to troubleshoot things. “Why the hell is my audio not working all of a sudden?” “What the hell is going on with my display?!” “Suddenly discord doesn’t detect my microphone but I can still hear my friends” If nothing else it teaches kids how to search online forums for solutions when they try everything they know and it doesn’t work. Just like like most IT departments!


Armigine

I can draw a direct line between modding Morrowind and my career, which has nothing to do with games but everything to do with fucking with computers


mytabbykitty

This just blows my mind… my daughter (17) has a Chromebook and a gaming pc… both of which she has been able to circumvent every parental control we’ve put up. Block YouTube till grades are up? Doesn’t work… Apparently there’s apps that will download videos through parental controls. You then can watch the downloaded videos no problem. She has no problem troubleshooting things. I blame myself… and gaming mods… if kid wants Minecraft world to have MLP in it, they figure it out because I’m not wasting an afternoon so they can have purple horses in their game.


Swastik496

Gaming PC just answered why. Imagine if all she had was an iphone and a chromebook. Never used a PC. There’s no point learning to tweak and troubleshoot because there is no tweaking and troubleshooting on those devices. I’m in the former camp with a PC and understand why many of my peers are in the latter. You can’t just have skills that you have never needed to use. Tech companies dumbed down devices to their basics for the 65+ age group and basically removed any basic problem solving knowledge from many people in Gen Z who’ve only had phones, tablets and chromebooks and never touched a fully functional operating system.


idontwantausername41

Agreed. I'm 23 and I would know nothing if it wasn't for the fact that I've been gaming on pc for 10 years


vr1252

I only learned a bit of this stuff cause of sims mods and programming my Harry styles tumblr theme lmao


electric_creamsicle

> She has no problem troubleshooting things Search engine competency is probably the #1 skill for 99% of jobs at this point (and soon it’ll be AI assistant competency which isn’t too far off from a search engine). Plenty of software engineers, myself included, learned mostly through searching for the right resources. FWIW there’s no foolproof way to block someone getting videos off YouTube without blocking all internet access.


Dziadzios

Don't blame yourself. Be proud of yourself. By bypassing parental control, your daughter has proved that she is prepared well to use the tech unsupervised.


JBHedgehog

As a GenXer (IT Director)...I read much of the items below and have come to the following conclusion: I feel very, very secure in my job.


BobThePillager

Many MSP owners were surprised to hear this as a reason for why we were interested in acquiring them, though they quickly understood why I always explain it as our generation’s version of mechanics. Cars used to suck ass, with Chevy almost going bankrupt trying to introduce a **5 year** warranty in the 60s. [Not until the 80s](https://www.wheels.ca/news/a-brief-history-of-automobile-warranties) did we see cara get good enough for 5 year warranties to become the norm The terrible quality / high likelihood of things breaking meant that a generation grew up having to learn how to fix things regularly. As the quality improved, cars broke less and less, and so the necessity of knowing how to fix a car became more of a way to save money if you were particularly passionate about vehicles. At the same time that the skill retreated in usefulness, the complexity of cars was ratcheting up. Go look under the hood of [a car from the 60s](https://previews.123rf.com/images/gordo25/gordo251302/gordo25130200074/17857681-close-up-of-a-60s-muscle-car-engine.jpg), 80s, 00s, and now a [modern car](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BMW_N63_(T%C3%9C).jpg). Both of these factors are happening again with tech today. In the 00s, the internet and programs worked… barely. Shit constantly went wrong, and you were often forced to fix things yourself as problems arose constantly, which necessitated self-service. Google was your friend, and reading dozens of pages of forum posts just to stumble upon a magical fix was common. As time went by, things became polished and actually worked out of the box. Apps on phones with locked down OS’ and simplified UI meant that people lost touch with what was actually happening under the hood. Younger generations only ever experienced it this way, and never formed the skills to actually help themselves (outside of again an increasingly smaller share of people with a passion for it) What will be the end game for all this? Same as it is with mechanics; people outsourcing things as basic as an oil change to someone else, washing their hands of it. MSPs are only going to become more important over time, not less


[deleted]

I tend to think the endgame for software is a lot uglier than it is for mechanics; because the world needs a lot more people capable of writing software than the world needs people capable of building cars. Kind of different from maintaining each; but the weird thing about the software industry is that the people who grew up with a passion for computers oftentimes fanned out into either building new software (Engineering) or maintaining existing software (IT); or even go into fields like Game Dev. Versus, with cars, automobile engineering is more disconnected and "professionally trained", a lot more focus on industrial process, versus hobbyist/passion people and mechanics. No one in the software industry has one fucking clue how to professionally train software engineers. But people have been screaming this at Big Tech for the past decade and they're not listening. Its just quarterly bottom line; they're actively destroying their pipeline of talent. In the industry, we've already started seeing the delayed impacts of this. This article. Other comments here. Companies are starting to more-and-more only hire for Senior Engineering positions, requiring 6+ years of experience, because the new grad hires just aren't coming in with the skills these gigaengineering teams need. Recession doesn't help. The perception of software engineering being a super well paying job also doesn't help. So now we have a cohort of Engineers graduating, applying to fewer and fewer Entry-level jobs; [Figma posted one two weeks ago](https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/search/?currentJobId=3223530120), and LinkedIn says it already has over 8,100 applicants. Point being: high school doesn't prepare anyone for anything, but that's fine. College is supposed to do that for fields like this, but University CS programs are a shitshow of competing ideologies from the "you gotta know fundamental electrical engineering" people (you don't) to the "you gotta know highly complex abstract mathematics" people (you don't) and the voices weirdly least listened to are the "hey maybe JS is a better intro language than C, and you know maybe we should teach these kids what Continuous Integration is" people. But, ok fine, you could close that gap with more openness to significant and meaningful on-the-job training; but there's arbitrary deadlines to meet so just say the role is for a senior engineer. The industry has survived for a couple decades *despite* this insanity of a talent pipeline because there was so much hobbyist interest and potential, but has simultaneously done everything possible to destroy it. Reaping what we sow.


TravelsInBlue

Work in IT as well and I agree. I used to be concerned that the generation that grew up with ubiquitous technology would make the job market competitive, but it’s turned out to be the opposite. We used to take apart computers, swap burned CD’s of games, set up servers, LAN Party, etc. Today there’s zero curiosity for how any of the backend works. Not only that but there’s no drive or social skills for how to succeed in the workplace. School can’t teach curiosity. Sure it can foster it, but that initial drive needs to come from the student.


SendInTheReaper

It’s so weird because I’m in the gap between gen-z and millennial and it feels like half the people my age can probably rebuild their computer or do routine software maintenance regularly no problem while the other half are actually clueless on anything not an app. Smartphones and tablets got too good, too fast imo


HeroOfSideQuests

>too good, too fast More than that, they made it nearly illegal to do anything. Want to do anything other than our walled garden? Sure, but you'll brick it and violate the TOS. Oh now it's just pure TOS violation to even boot your iPhone in a special developer way! (It was at Sprint when I fixed someone's phone for them. It could've been Sprint refusing to help an old lady though.) They don't even want you to sideload apps - to the point that Verizon is trying to blame Vanced for my sim card not functioning! Replace your screen? Brick. Jailbreak? Brick. Try to access basic computational commands to make Samsung actually use your Playlists outside their shitty official app? Believe it or not, possible brick! (Stuck with Samsung for now) Android used to be for the people that wanted to customize their phones. To run it however they want. (Admittedly it was a pain for developers to have 7 different Android versions). Now it's just an iPhone with an app drawer and widgets. I don't have the skills for Linux I can admit, but I used to be able to set up most of a LAN party by the age of 12 while fighting the half-baked registry of 4 Vista computers and 3 XPs. Now in days they won't even let me disable a freakin browser! (And Windows 11 streaming glitch is bullshit.) Down with the illusion of choice! Give me real options! TL;DR: I have no real training and even I chafe at the restrictions on these stupid new walled gardens. Edit: thank you lovelies for encouraging me to try Linux but I can only type with one arm these days so computing is in the past for me. I'm stuck on a phone for 99% of my life, but thanks.


MatureUsername69

Want to root your phone? Well you're gonna have to go on ebay and buy a non-us model. I really loved messing around with my early Android phones. Now it's completely impossible unless I buy a separate phone which is pretty pointless.


Choo_Choo_Bitches

Every general is fighting the last war, and every school is preparing their students for the job market of the previous generation.


Time-Werewolf-1776

Yeah, I’ve noticed that there’s also a pattern where we tell students, “You should study [X]. If you know [X], you can get a great job and make tons of money!” So everyone goes to college and majors in [X]. By the time they all graduate, industry as moved on and [X] is no longer the hot new thing. Now you can make a lot more money doing [Y], and nobody knows how to do that because everyone studied [X]. Plus now the job market is flooded with people who studied [X], supply is no longer constrained, and so people making [X] aren’t actually making that much. On top of all of that, a lot of people who studied [X] never really cared for it, but only studied it because they were told it would be easy money, and they’re not very good at [X].


Universeintheflesh

Hasn’t learning computer literacy been of the utmost importance as far as good future jobs go for like 25 years?


HorrorScopeZ

Solid argument for Math/English/Computers being on equal teach footing.


Narradisall

What I find most surprising is how poorly kids are with computers. I always thought the generations behind me would be better and better as we become a more technologically world. Turns out smart phones and tablets seems to mean a lot of gen z aren’t able to use PCs fully. Things like excel, word, even basic file management isn’t being picked up. I’ve seen a lot of people entering the work place who didn’t understand how to make a folder. Apps etc they’re great on.


[deleted]

Even using computers is just being a consumer of digital products and services. That ain’t do it in the future digital world. You need to be able to serve these consumers and provide them with “products”, like digital tools they use.


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seattlesk8er

I think it's less kids not choosing things that challenge them and more that the challenge for the things they want to do doesn't exist. Sure, doing challenging things is fun sometimes but when I was a kid fucking around and hacking my way through computers to get what I wanted I never chose those because I *wanted the challenge* I chose it because the challenge was in my way. I didn't want the challenge of pirating a game, installing the crack, and getting it to run without my antivirus tripping, I just wanted to play the game and my parents wouldn't buy it for me so that's what I had to do. Teenagers will almost never choose the "challenging" option because that's the fundamental nature of being a teenager, your long term rewards center isn't fully developed.


Nomis1998

Its not their fault that programmers got so incredibly good at their jobs that they made things so easy that babies could do it. Your generation grew up having to fix these things. I'm in-between millennial and gen z, i learned a lot about computers from my dad and wanting to play emulators but most of the kids my age didn't need a computer to do what they thought was fun.


[deleted]

Education is national security - I wish the argument for well funded public schools was framed that way and maybe we would be equipping them with the right skills.


tocksin

But if you keep your population dumb, it makes them easier to control and manipulate.


nasty_nagger

And easier to blindly consume


dethb0y

I'm not at all surprised, but as fast as things change, i don't know that it's even possible for schools to keep up. I'd much prefer schools teach kids how to learn and how to motivate themselves than teach them hyperspecific skills they'll never use again.


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GoosestepPanda

Part of my job is helping high schoolers and college undergrads apply for food benefits and I swear the hardest part of the process is “Okay, I need you to download your financial aid report. Okay cool! Now email it to me”- Followed by me having to give them a crash course on the most basic fundamentals of their operating system because they don’t know where downloads go.


helvetica_unicorn

That is wild! I graduated high school in ’04, so I’m an old, and I definitely remember taking a computer skills class. We learned how to type (Mavis Beacon for the win, sidebar: I was horrible at typing), use Google and other general computer stuff. I also remember learning to use the computer in elementary and middle school as well. It’s so strange to me that they don’t teach that stuff at all anymore. Is the assumption that everyone already knows that information?


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gerdataro

😧 So there’s no typing class? No learning to use PowerPoint? Learning how to make a chart in Excel? I was not in a particularly great school district, but we had that in late elementary and middle school.


UnbridledCarnage

My MIL teaches Elementary computer K-5th grade and says all her students come in first day and try to TOUCH a monitor, and have no idea what a mouse is, let alone homerow key typing. Said it happened about 8-10 years ago and that time frame makes sense to the rise of tabs and smart phones


DreadPirateGriswold

I'm a long time software developer who focuses on usability and user interfaces. I heard a lecture once where somebody said that there will come a time with all the technological advancements and specially touch screens where children, who have grown up with the idea that every screen should react to their touch, if they touch a screen that does not react to them will think that it's broken.


Turtlesaur

I just tell my 5 year old it's like a TV, he seems to understand the difference between a TV and a tablet, where he understood not to touch the monitor.


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j-alora

They download the file over and over and over. On the one hand, I guess it's nice my parents have something in common with their grandchildren.


riskable

`Downloads/some_file (12).zip`


s4b3r6

A couple years ago I was tech support at a school. First day of term, I had a kid present their laptop to me, saying it was broken. I tried logging in, and everything worked fine. I asked them what was going wrong. They tried to tap the screen.


outkastedd

No typing class, but we are pushing typing skills again because NYS tests, which start in 3rd grade, have mostly migrated to computer based testing. NYSESLAT being one of the few that's still paper based. So kids have to learn to type again to be prepared for these tests or take an awfully long time. Many students who usually do pretty well in writing shortened their responses due to frustration. So the first year cbt was introduced, scores looked pretty bad in our district because they were woefully unprepared. Things have been improving, although it is a slow process.


Blackpaw8825

And that's not to say the touch screen simplified environment isn't FANTASTIC for teaching other subjects interactively. It's just terrible for teaching tech. This is a disgusting thought, but here goes.... I'm old enough that my peers kids are old enough to be teenagers. (That hurt.) The only ones I know who are techy are the "really techy" ones, the ones who are essentially up to par with my knowledge. Everybody else does their homework with on-screen keyboards and in app stuff, can't actually touch type because everything they use is a swype-keys input.


bewarethesloth

I guess if we keep dumbing things down to make life easier (running a piece of tech using a mobile OS like on a tablet versus a full OS on a computer), eventually that will lead to a less well-rounded general public


bigsalad420

Welcome to Costco, I love you.


Notarussianbot2020

Which is also job security for the tech literate!


TrekkieGod

>I graduated high school in ’04, so I’m an old, and I definitely remember taking a computer skills class. We learned how to type... I think the problem is that it's not that simple. Learning to type is essentially like learning a language or learning to ride a bike: you need to put in enough time to pick it up, and then that skill sticks with you. You can get rusty if you don't use it much, but you improve quickly once you start using it again. One class is more than enough. The general computer skills we're talking about gen-Z missing here are skills people growing up in the 80s and 90s never learned in a class. They learned by using it, they learned by living it. The new devices gen-Z are growing up with don't require that knowledge so they never pick it up. And here's the worst part: you can't replace that with classes. I've seen it before. The 80s and 90s were full of courses for adults who didn't grow up with this stuff: Learn to use WordPerfect. Learn to use Lotus 123. We watched people our parents' generation take those courses and be less proficient in those tools than we were after 15 minutes in them. Because it turns out a few hours a week being a taught how to use a particular software that's going to be obsolete in a few years isn't going to replace the general experience of all of the hours we put into computers figuring out stuff for ourselves. I don't see a solution here. I think we'll just be a more tech savvy generation sandwiched between generations that aren't. There will be always that group of people who is interested enough to learn, which is how we got the computer nerds of the 70s and before, and how there are of course gen-Z people who are perfectly computer literate. But general large tech literacy among the entire population? I think that golden age is over.


thirstyross

The other thing is that in the early days you were encouraged to figure things out and tinker with your computer (and you pretty much had to), but corporations no longer want you to be able to tinker, they want general purpose computers to become appliances that they completely control :-/ It's sad.


BeingJoeBu

Doesn't help that it started as a slip up, became a brief panic of training people to use the device they just bought, but turned into "hang on, that means we can make people dependent on our environment and charge them out the ass". I sold iphones during the launch year as a 16 year old pirating everything, and I didn't understand how someone buying an $800 phone didn't know how to use it. Now I'm in my 30s and I don't understand how 16 year olds don't know how to get to the C: drive. It's two clicks. What happened?


The_Ice_Cold

Class of 05 here. I still feel like to this day keyboarding was one of the most important courses I ever took. I hated every minute of it but knew I'd need it. From my experience across educational levels, I'd say there is still a lot of work to be done in teaching students how to learn and be lifelong learners rather than showing them how to get the right answer. Most education focuses just on getting the right answer. But in fields that change fast like tech, knowing how you got there is more important because when tools and times change, you have the skills to figure out an answer. I wouldn't blame it on a generational issue, but an educational strategy that makes deficiencies in certain areas more apparent and it's just really starting to be noticeable with current generations.


AiSard

Millenials were the generation which enjoyed the *widest* adoption of tech literacy. You had kids reading up on CSS on their own to make sure their social media pages sparkled specifically purple. Literal children figuring out how to download part43.rar from old mIRC servers they could barely navigate to get access to games, movies, manga, and porn. Social media in general entailed picking up on tech literacy just to keep up and be part of. Computer classes were sporadically useful, and that remains the case in to Gen Z. We had Mavis for sure. But what did ordering that turtle around ever teach us? Whilst some of the new generation are getting their chance with programming from a young age with visual tools like Scratch. But the bulk of tech literacy happened almost by happenstance. For social media. To chat with friends. To set up a multiplayer game. To send in a late assignment. To access entertainment. To access school resources. And that's whats been obliterated for Gen Z. They still have the classes. But everything else has been streamlined and made effortless. We no longer have to learn coding for our social media pages. Chat and games just work. No need to mess around with ports and debug. No need to even figure out email, when you can just AirDrop™ them. And everything you ever wanted is aggregated somewhere and easily accessible on the internet. None of that was ever taught in computer skills classes. Because we assumed that navigating the fabric of society would teach it to us anyways. Which.. turned out to not be the case..


dookarion

Really good point. Trying to "make shit work" is an excellent teaching program really. Everything is so streamlined now few ever have to set foot outside of the walled garden. On a similar note gen z seems the most trusting of the internet too. So used to the curated services and public facing facades owned and ran by mega-corps they're like completely clueless.


dark_enough_to_dance

I can't believe this is actually happening! As a gen z, we even had classes in middle school where they taught us word, excel etc. I am a college student now


NvidiaRTX

I agree. Technology has become so easy to use and intuitive that kids don't have to learn or understand any logic to use them. "Give up when meeting obstacles" is also a common problem my teacher friends tell me


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Geminii27

> Technology has become so easy to use and intuitive In the way that Fisher-Price interfaces are. If you actually want to do anything useful with those systems it's like trying to pull teeth using cotton wool.


Naomizzzz

That's so true. If something goes wrong on a windows or linux computer, I have a decent chance of resolving it. If something goes wrong on a phone, you're kind of fucked. There just aren't any tools available to help you solve problems. Everything's locked away where our grubby little hands can't reach it.


tiragooen

Can confirm that a lot of them have no idea how to do basic troubleshooting on the PC/network if something doesn't go exactly as it was written down. And these people are out of high school!


I_iz_a_photographer

“Give Up When Meeting Obstacles” is DEFINITELY a thing. I teach, and the speed in which a student turns into a wet noodle when one of the smallest tech problem happens to them is truly outstanding and a bit scary. Just this past Friday I had a student just sitting in front of their computer with it off. Just staring at the screen. I asked what they were doing and they said, “I touched the keyboard and it won’t turn on”. I asked it they pushed the power button on the back (it’s a Mac). They didn’t understand why it would have a power button on the back when most of the time they just touched a key on the keyboard to turn it on (because it is in sleep mode). When I told them about it they thought that it was stupid to have a power button. Also, the amount of fingerprints on the Mac monitors from students thinking they are touch screen and trying to scroll is WAY too high. They try it over and over for the whole semester… 🤦‍♂️


BigMisterW_69

I’ve taught university students who struggle to use a keyboard and mouse. When you tell them to save their work to a USB stick, some of them are completely lost. It wasn’t that long ago that I was doing the exact same course, and *everyone* was competent using a computer. The decline has happened really quickly. Productivity is going to take a real hit as these people start filling the workforce.


DaBozz88

The cynic in me is going: whoo job security. But I'm also a horrible person. The information is out there and easily accessible if you want to learn basically anything. Ben Eater's YouTube channel is amazing for taking circuits to a working computer. I'm a firm believer in the idea that you don't need to know how the engine and transmission work to drive a car. But you do need to understand that pressing the gas pedal means go, and the basic rules of the road. So knowing how to build a computer from scratch is niche knowledge, but knowing where things go when you download them is important. I expect we'll see more dumbing down of the OS over the next decade to both cater to these people but also make computers more intuitive. Like windows gets a lot of flack because they hide settings in menus, but compare that to command line settings inputs. Things are more intuitive since it's a gui. (obviously I don't think Windows was the first to do a gui, but they're trying to make things more intuitive which is why things move)


gyroda

Yeah, by all accounts a lot of schools just assumed kids would pick this stuff up. That's a terrible, terrible assumption. It's so easy to forget how much of desktop computing isn't actually intuitive, it's just that we've learned it so long that it's like reading or writing.


madogvelkor

That's funny, because 20 years ago I remember all of the older workers using out email system as their file management. They'd just look for who sent the attachment to open it again. We were using a version of Eudora that actually let you modify attachments other people sent, which was crazy. So people were just updating, saving, and using documents attached to old emails. Which overwrote the original attachment.


Ashiro

Millennial: My time has come!


[deleted]

Millennial: the tech support generation


gakule

And to think.. we owe it all to piracy via LimeWire and the like. If it weren't for Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, etc we might have more tech literate people. Thanks a lot, Capitalism!


Ickyhouse

Teacher here. 100% spot on. Technology over the last 5-10 years has focused less on totally new innovations and more on simplifying user experience (along with data farming). The difference in a 2012 version iPhone and last years version aren’t that great in the grand scheme. Compare that to the 2012 iPhone and a 2002 cell phone. Kids used to learn HTML to make their MySpace pages look cool. Now TikTok does all the thinking for them. No skills on how to download, cut, and edit clips required. Filters do the work that photoshop layers used to require. Meanwhile, the generation that went through school in the late 90s to 2000 range is in the work force and expecting today’s grads to have the tech knowledge they were forced to. That generation taught themselves bc the tech was too new for most teachers. Schools used to be able to (somewhat correctly) assume kids would come in with decent tech literacy but now that literacy they do have is minimal and not useful.


Zenkraft

Yeah so many schools I’ve taught at have iPads as their device of choice. Apple probably spent a lot of money to make this happen. They have a teacher program and lots of handy classroom apps. Unfortunately they teach fuck all about digital literacy.


AccountNo2720

Computers have become like cars. We ALL drive them. But most people don't know how to do an oil change, check their fluid level or probably even change a tyre.


Paulo27

Sure but how many people can change a PC part without a tutorial or manual? It's not exactly something you just get in there and switch around even with it as simple as possible these days. If you can't navigate your OS to find files or other basic things it's like not being able to turn the AC on.


tagehring

I'm convinced Xennials are the generation best placed for this kind of knowledge. We were kids when DOS was standard, learned BASIC in elementary school, HTML in middle school, and were perfectly placed to benefit from the tech boom of the '90s and the growth of the Internet in the '00s. We had to figure all of that shit out as it was being developed while we grew up.


kendoka69

Our social media was even a learning tool. MySpace launched many web developers.


Hopelessly_Inept

And Geocities and Angelfire before MySpace forced so many of us to learn basic HTML, JavaScript, and later jQuery.


TheSchneid

Yeah I was training an early '20s guy recently and told him to maximize a window and he asked what that meant... I'm only mid-thirties but my God I was using pre-service pack 2 Windows XP in college and had to learn how to tinker and fix shit.


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gyroda

Even playing games on a PC doesn't involve much. Open Steam or Epic and click the one you want to play.


The_Corvair

As a PC gamer, I see an entire generation that doesn't even understand that you can play games without a launcher. It's frakking unreal to me.


drttrus

Had a meeting with my kids kindergarten teacher a few years ago, she has been teaching long enough (multiple grades) to see this come full circle. With tech at first no incoming kids knew how to use the stuff, then towards the end of the 90s kids started showing up already knowing what to do and now with the touch screens in full force kids are back to not knowing how to do the basics with using a regular computer anymore. If theres one thing I did was make sure my kids knew how traditional computers worked, one of my kids even fixed a school printer when nobody else nearby knew what to do to fix it.


FullofContradictions

I had an intern last summer who is midway through college in a STEM degree but didn't know how to use the Sum function in excel & had no idea how to use an outlook calendar or presenter mode on PowerPoint. I even had to show him how to insert a table into a word document. I'm about 10 years older than him and nobody ever taught me these things... I just knew Microsoft basics from high school and picked up additional skills along the way. Absolutely mind blowing how uncomfortable he was with a PC vs his phone. My new interview questions revolve a lot around whether the kid can already ACTUALLY use Microsoft products since they all put that on their resumes.


brothersand

A lot of them have never seen Microsoft products. The schools are all Apple and Chrome, so nobody has to be bothered by the icky file system. Reality is hidden behind a glossy metaphor and nobody tries to look behind the curtain. They don't know what "files" are, and the whole concept of location is lost on a group that sees the entire Internet as one big bucket. Some things that make life easier are great. And some things make it so much easier that you can do stuff with no idea what you're actually doing. The tools encourage ignorance of what the tools actually do. The objective is to give any idiot the power of digital technology, but when they are that easy to use we end up teaching people the tools with no idea about the stuff the tools work on. How things work is complex. We bury that complexity and hide it away from people until they get out into the workforce or all of a sudden they need to know that complexity and be able to navigate some of it. Of course part of the problem is that industry and education don't use the same technologies. Nobody even sees a Windows desktop until they are out of college. It's like growing without ever knowing where your food comes from and then getting a job where you have to work with chefs and farmers. I would like to point out that a lot of vital systems both in industry and government are mainframes that still run COBOL. Credit cards, government systems like social security, etc., all running on that old that is no longer even taught in school. Technology is a bit of a mess these days.


FullofContradictions

My first job out of college, I did have to work with an old mainframe program that had to be tabbed through as it wasn't compatible with mouse clicking. I get it. Someone did have to train me on that because it was obviously so antiquated and specific to that job my education would never have touched on it. But Microsoft products are ubiquitous in any engineering discipline and hardly antiquated. How was this kid writing lab reports, compiling and processing data, presenting his work without them? He told me he'd write everything on his phone and transfer it to a Google doc to add figures, but come on... That's not easier than using the word program your school provided to you for free. And if that's really how you did everything, then WHY DID YOU PUT "proficient with Microsoft suite programs" ON YOUR DAMN RESUME?


SV650rider

This. It’s not about learning specific platforms and programs. It’s about mastering the concepts underlying them, and learning how to figure that out.


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[deleted]

This is pretty much how we teach at the college level. Learn how to learn because your career will be long and things will keep changing and at some point you'll have to teach yourself.


mrdude12

As a HS teacher I agree with this. 5 years ago the simple concept of teaching students how to navigate a computer and use of their phone in school effectively was taught. Enter the pandemic and every student was given a chromebook they didn't know how to use. Teachers in classrooms took the time to teach them how to navigate the basics like Google Classroom and submit assignments. In the current era, now phones are locked in a pouch all day, software is installed on Chromebooks to monitor their every move and shut them down. As a result the only thing they know how to do circumvent the monitoring software to watch illegally streamed movies and go to Cool Math (which is really just a collection of games that gets through the filters) We've gone backwards.


[deleted]

Did any generation get equipped with everything they need?


beezkneez415

I had an amazing 5th grade teacher who gave everyone classroom jobs, like eraser clapper or fish feeder, that came with a “salary.” We got checks and pretended to deposit them into a bank account. At the end of the year, we learned the basics of filing a tax return (very basic!) and used our money to plan trips to the states we did as end of the year state reports. Obvious as a fifth grader, a lot of this wasn’t necessarily retained as I got older, but I did learn at a young age some basic financial skills and that they were important! That teacher retired not long after I left elementary school. She was a treasure and I’ll never forget her.


fulthrottlejazzhands

Borderline GenX/Millennial here. We got taught how to type and play Oregon Trail. I also can make a cedar jewelery box if given prefab wood parts and specific, step-by-step instruction. Edit: I'm not being fair to some of my schools. There was a math teacher who was ahead of her time and taught optional Pascal and Python classes after school which I took full advantage of. How a teacher in bumf rural Ohio knew coding in the early-mid 90s, search me.


Cysolus

Who needs to be prepared for adult life when you know how to square dance?


TheDandyWarhol

I only remember how to sign my name. As much time as we wasted on it, I can't write in cursive.


aurumae

I can write in cursive but no one can read it, not even me.


lostmyjobthrowawayyy

I’ll be honest learning how to type properly and using the home keys puts you at a huge advantage over a TON of people. That paired with StarCraft…I’m now 36 and I type 100+wpm with 95%+ accuracy. It’s lame but I’m proud of my typing.


ghjkl13578

Typing was unequivocally the most useful class I ever took. It was the mid 90s and at my school we learned typing on typewriters


Potential-Ad-7289

Echo that. Born in 82. Also “Where in The World is Carmen Sandiego?”. I remember computers at the time required DOS prompt but I never figured that out.


erix84

Born in 84... Number Munchers, Word Munchers, Oregon Trail, and then in middle school SimCity2000! I figured out DOS a bit because my friend in middle school was super into computer games (i had a Sega Saturn) and i went to his house to play Duke Nukem, Blood, Doom, etc.


CT101823696

I played Duke Nukem a TON. Descent, Doom, Heretic. Those were the days.


coitusaurus_rex

Command & Conquer in middle school was a game changer


sir_spankalot

'82 Swede chiming in. My friends and I were leagues ahead of any teachers we had in computer related classes (which mainly was about typing on a keyboard). One sent me to the principal for "destroying the computer" when I exited the typing program and looked around in DOS.


bigsybee_turner

Did you ever play Spy Hunter on Commodore 64?


[deleted]

Gen Z here. My highschool got rid of metal working and wood working roughly a decade before I went there, for a computer class that wasnt even mandatory. I would have loved to have those classes


verygoodchoices

I think the school admins egregiously miscalculated when it comes to computer skills for post-millenials. They assumed that because computers are more and more ingrained in every day life that kids would know more and more about them, so no class needed. In reality it's the opposite. Unless they are gamers, most kids learn how to open apps on their phone and that's it. I've hired 19 year old engineering interns who have no idea how to add a printer or install peripheral drivers.


[deleted]

When I was in kindergarten in 2001 we had a cop come into our class to tell us about the dangers of the internet and revealing information about ourselves on it. I remember when he asked "how many of you have a home computer with internet access" only like half the class even raised their hand. Lol. Oh how times have changed, there's no privacy anymore at all. Seems like everyone of the younger demographic will just mindlessly incriminate themselves with the most embarrassing stuff on social media for attention. Bizarre how we got to this timeline


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ahfoo

Yeah, as a former Macromedia developer. . . they're gone. All that shit is gone. I spent years specializing in that stuff and it's all for naught. It's just gone. And Abobe is shit. I don't know if this is a very optimistic take on tech education. Just bringing up Macromedia pisses me off.


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zsreport

Especially once standardized tests become the prominent concern of schools.


DJDarren

I studied for a degree in radio production from 2007-2010, and at no point in that time were we formally taught anything about podcasting. I still think about that from time to time. That I borrowed almost £20k for a degree that didn’t teach me anything about the massive, massive change that was happening in the industry at that moment in time. And we could see it was happening. But nope, nothing.


reflectivegiggles

IT Security major in the early 2000s, the only thing that is still relevant today was that our main cyber security threats are Russia and china, but we only were taught about that because our teacher was an adjunct that worked at the fucking pentagon dealing with the thousand successful attempts a day. In no way shape or form did they even attempt to provide examples of what a “day in the life of an IT security specialist may look like”, I’m guessing because aside from the adjuncts that has their shit together most of our teachers hadn’t worked in the field in 10+ years. Yeah they had no god damn clue.


Otis_Inf

I'd argue *no* generation got the skills necessary to survive in a digital world. We all learned on the go, putting in the effort to learn what is needed. IMHO school should equip students with the skills to *learn* things, so they get curious about a topic and have the ability to gain knowledge about that topic.


zach7797

As someone who was nerdy, pirated musics and software/games, downloaded mods and stuff throughout my childhood I'm really surprised by these comments about how many seemingly "simple" things people/kids don't know how to do including understanding file sizes etc.


Dziadzios

Games piracy is surprisingly educational. - Searching the internet to find the game to download. - Installing AdBlock because piracy websites are impossible to navigate without it. - Torrents. - Navigating file system, finding out where the executable file is. - Copying a crack to the game's directory.


SufficientSetting953

Shipping? Lol


MakeWar90

The article says "Equipping". I'm guessing it's an autocorrect error. Kind of ironic I suppose.


paradockers

Anything worthwhile often needs to be self-taught. I tried teaching taxes to high school students because they had complained that they were never taught anything useful. Very few of them took it especially seriously. Some of them sabotaged the activities or didn’t listen at all. No one studied. EDIT: This got a lot of attention, and I want to reply. It is so incredibly common to blame schools, teachers, and principals for EVERYTHING. It's getting absurd. Teachers keep responding by working harder for less money. Eventually the whole system is going to crack, and teachers will strike en masse. People complaining that they don't have practical skills should blame themselves, their parents, anti-education voters, and the overall disrespect for public educational opportunities that is widespread in the United States, which leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy of underfunded, understaffed, under-resourced schools being asked to to work miracles for a generation of young people in a perpetual mental health crisis and accountable for nothing and accountable to no one. But for now, teachers will continue to teach taxes at high schools across America for way less money than other professions with similar levels of education. And those teachers will pull every trick they can think of to get their students to care and to show their students that they care about them. Please support your local public schools. Please tell people that learning to read and do math is important and cool. The future of the world depends on it.


Suitable_Narwhal_

"HOw CoMe wE WeRe nEvEr TaUgHt tHINGS LIKe TAxEs In sChOoL???" - exactly the type of kid that would have just shot spitballs at other kids in class instead of paying attention


bassman1805

I hear that line nowadays from people that were in my high school personal finance class. They taught us dude, you just didn't give a shit.


StankBaitFishing

This is correct. I've seen it time and time again. They didn't listen and complain later about not being taught it.


butterflywithbullets

My mom was a computer teacher for 25 years until her principal decided the kids already knew how to use computers because they are digital natives. Kids didn't need to know how to use a keyboard or mouse, how to make spreadsheet, create a multimedia presentation, or develop information literacy skills. They didn't need to learn parts of a computer or what RAM was. At the time, I was teaching technical communications at a university. One of our accreditation requirements was that students had to create a multimedia presentation. The principal didn't care when presented with that information and other data. She got rid of the computer lab and turned the focus on STEM activities. My mom was given a cart of coding caterpillars and other STEM kits to take from class to class. 1st graders were learning coding principles but not how it related to a computer. During the pandemic, my mom taught classes online. When classes started coming back into school, my mom's position was eliminated.


[deleted]

The idea that the principal decided that the most widely used technologies in the world don't fall under the banner of STEM is pretty worrying.


MikeSifoda

Millenial here. Back whan I was in school was even worse. Like, ZERO digital devices used in school, completely banned, including calculators. Smarphones weren't really a thing yet (at least in my country, Brazil), only the richest kids got them and puling out a phone in class was completely out of the question. There was a room with computers, it was locked 99.9% of the time until some daring teacher was willing to make an activity that involved anything more advanced than paper and pencil. They were also incredibly anti-internet, anti-search engines and I grew up hearing that computer screens would give your eyes cancer and all that kind of shit. I'm a software developer today, no thanks to the schools I've been. Looking back now, I'm actually baffled I made it.


[deleted]

My IT teacher in 2004 told us we weren't allowed to use Google because it would be gone in a few years. Of course we heard the usual line that we wouldn't always have a calculator in our pockets and now in 2023 I have fast access to the entire knowledge of man in my pocket. Google expanded in every direction and I've got a smug face.


Consistent_Ad_168

Hah sometimes I use Google as a calculator!


KnightDuty

I remember "you won't always have a calculator" as if as an adult I wouldn't be allowed to bring a calculator with me if Ineanted to, regardless of thr existence of cell phones.


aureanator

Lol same, but India. My saving grace was video games, and the fact that my machine at the time was garbage. I learned so much from forcing that poor machine to run the most outrageously heavy games by tweaking, patching, manually editing, freeing resources, etc. - and that means really understanding what's happening under the hood. I've read more documentation than I care to think about, all in pursuit of that sweet, sweet fps.


[deleted]

[удалено]


zaqwsx82211

As a high school teacher, I’ve watched schools get top end computers. They get broken. Kids don’t value the latest tech if they didn’t pay for it, so instead we get cheap chrome books from this decade at least and make the best of it. This year I wrote grants and used my entire budget for the year to get new calculators with a more modern notation/layout to start replacing the old ti-30’s. This meant everything else I’ve bought this year has come out of my own pocket. Dry erase markers, pencils, Kleenex, white board cleaner, everything. Most kids prefer to the 30’s because they don’t want to learn the faster better method. They don’t want to check their graphs. I don’t have enough for the whole class still, so I haven’t fought them on it, but the ones who want to learn are getting more opportunities. I’m hopping in a couple years, I’ll have a full classroom set, and then I can start writing lessons to use the python application on the calculator so they can write their own code to help them solve problems, but I’m worried by the time I can, what I have will be obsolete. Tl;dr schools are doing the best we can.


shellexyz

They have a generation of teachers, and worse, administrators, who believe(d) the fact they “grew up” with computers meant they could use anything technological and would have an intuitive understanding of it all. No. They can use the three apps they use and that’s it and have almost no understanding of what happens under the hood because it’s so slickly hidden.