Gen Z/A are good at using tech, but they don't really know anything about how it works. I work in IT support and it can honestly be a tossup sometimes if the person who doesnt know how to clear their cache is a boomer or not.
if a 3 year old can use a smart phone it's not because that child is a genius it's because the phones designer was.
Oh no, does this mean Gen X are going to be the wisened graybeards that holds arcane knowledge and seemly executes feats of magic when related to technology?
X and the millennials both had to deal with computers that were computers, it's the people that grew up in the smart phone/tablet era that have no idea what to do in front of an actual computer...
My litmus test is: “Have you tried Linux?”
Even if they just used a live cd for curiosity, it means they know enough about computers to grasp the concepts that make them versatile, and were exploring around the net enough to read about it.
Going to be? We already are, along with older millenials.
Based on how often I have to explain very obvious error messages to ostensibly qualified system admins: Yes.
(Though I insist I’m the oldest millennial and not Gen x)
Only the 10% or so that paid attention to "nerd stuff".
All the rest are, at best boomer level, at worst smug about being at boomer level.
It’s honestly a toss up whether sysadmins know what the fuck they’re doing. I’m working on a deal now that’s hampered by the fact that a Linux sysadmin for a huge finserv company doesn’t know how to administer a Linux system.
This is why the humanities are important: So you learn how to think about a problem and not just rely on someone writing down every goddamn keystroke for you.
This has been a worrying trend in education. Parents assumed kids just knew how tech worked so they stopped teaching things like typing, office, or how to use the basics. Now we have people graduating who know how to use iPads and Xboxes, but have no idea how to manage a file structure (many honestly just use "recent"), or make a PowerPoint, and a lot don't know typing.
Typing is irrelevant. Office software is irrelevant. There is one thing, and one thing only, that determines whether a person is computer-literate or not: whether the person can put together a custom workflow to solve a novel problem.
I don't mean "programming," per se, and I don't mean "scripting," per se, and I don't mean "piping together commands on a text command-line," per se. But I do mean being able to (a) understand the task you want to accomplish, (b) break it down into its component steps, and (c) instruct the machine to perform those steps, while potentially (d) reading documentation and/or exploring the UI to discover how to do said instructing if necessary.
A computer-literate person can be sat down in front of a computer running an OS and/or other software they've never used before and (eventually) figure out how to use it via trial-and-error, web-searching for tutorials, RTFM, or whatever, without shutting their brain off and giving up or demanding that some other person spoon-feed a list of steps to memorize by rote.
I need to store my emails for later reference, so I print them out.
But I don't want to keep stacks of printed emails around, so I scan the prints and save them as pictures because that's what the scanner does automatically.
But I need to search through the emails, so I found a browser plugin that can scan a picture for text and give me a summary in a new file.
But my company computer won't let me install browser plugins so I email the scanned pictures to my personal address and then open them on my phone and use the app version of the browser plugin to make the summaries and then I email those back to my company address.
But now I want to search through the summaries, which are Word documents, but Office takes forEHver to load on my shitty company computer so I don't want to use the search in it, so I right-click -> Print the summary files and then choose "Print to PDF" and then open them in Adobe Reader so I can search for the information I want that way. I usually have 200 tabs of PDFs open in Reader so I can cross-reference information.
I have a great custom workflow. I'm the most computer literate person in my office.
Reading this felt like the computer version of whatever the SAW movies are.
Torture porn? It's so repugnant but I want more.
I had someone take an email they received about a technical problem someone else was having. They then printed it out, highlighted the important part, then scanned it back in as a picture all offset and grainy, then used that picture in a web chat to request help for that third person without direct contact
They were an IT Manager
Okay, I guess there's one more criterion for computer literacy: being able to distinguish between a reasonable workflow and a batshit-insane one. (That might even include a little bit of understanding of complexity: not enough to be able to classify an algorithm using "big O notation," but maybe enough to avoid a basic "Schlemiel the Painter" situation, for example.)
To be fair, file structure navigation became more of a pain in the ass when Microsoft decided to rework their start menu to feed into their fucking store/web browser. It's not a hard fix but tablet natives wouldn't know any better. At work I still end up accidently searching the web sometimes when im searching for a file that wasn't important enough to pin. I know basic file structure the modern UIs are just trash and not designed for local users.
92 here. My boys 10 and 8 have their own machines, they are told to Google it first before I come help.
"I'm not raising end users...get your shit together kid."
Love,
SysEngineer Dad.
fellow tech dad here. how did you strike the balance between "look up shit online" and "hiding the terrors and lies of the internet from my kids"?
Mine's still little, but knowing sooner is better.
I had a meeting with a young person who had to have the concept of a directory structure explained to them for a half hour...and they're in charge of designing a file browser. 🤦♂️
I don't think the exercise was even successful.
how do people with no skills even get hired? I cant even get interview for job I fit perfectly for every thing they are asking for.
I'm pretty sure the people who do interviews are not the ones who have to train them. Also, if you use chat gpt for writing your cover letter, structuring your CV, running interview prep etc etc. You don't even really need to be literate to come across as pretty put together.
I love that Gen Alpha won't even get this reference because the movie came out 30 years before they were born.
Charlie Chaplain was dead long before I was born but yet I've still seen The Great Dictator.
I wonder: Has this happened with anything else?
Where an older generation struggled to understand at all, a middle generation adapted to it early enough to witness all of the quirks, and then a later generation was born into an already-smoothed out system — and they all lived simultaneously?
Seems like a uniquely modern thing, but then again agriculture and clothing and currency have all had periods of rapid change in the past.
Like were there Generation F dudes out there like “omg we’re the only ones who understand knitting frames smh”?
Ford Model T came with a complete manual for disassembly, maintenance, and repair. It made a generation of Americans fluent in mechanics who then went on to win World War II, to the Moon, and higher up skyscrapers than ever.
“Learn this as a child:”
“Do this as an adult:”
Never again. Right to repair doesn't do much when the manual is so expensive only brand-dedicated repair shops can afford it.
Have you heard about our Lord and Saviour, iFixit?
For real though, look it up. Some 100k or so free repair manuals in twelve languages from phones to washing machines. And often enough, the necessary toolkit in their shop.
This happened with the shift from manual to automatic transmissions. I used to frequently hear/read people complaining that no one knows how to drive a stick anymore.
I used to teach math in the local school. The kids had a great interest in 3D printing because I had a few fun items in my classroom that I had 3D printed. I decided to spend a couple of weeks teaching a bit of CAD through having the kids spend it designing a personalized key chain to print.
It took me 3 days of class time to teach them how to use a mouse.......They couldn't grasp the idea that a touch screen and CAD don't go together, you need that mouse to make it work. It quickly became apparent that things quickly became difficult for them if it doesn't have a touch screen.
And while some classes are always a bit better than others, there was always a noticeable number of them that struggled with using a mouse.
Computer natives are millennials. In due time, millennials will be what cobol programmers are in the coding world.
"On you want your recycle bin emptied? Yeah, thats gonna cost you."
I'm a xennial. I was so excited by computers, and later the internet. It completely absorbed me to the point that I would get up an hour early for school so I could mess around with the computer before catching the bus. A beautiful (ugly) Compaq with a 200n megabyte hard drive, 2 megs of ram. 86 architecture. I was about 11 years old.
I played a few games, but I spent much more time messing around the system in DOS. Making batch files, then working with qbasic. Of course I played Nintendo games as well. After we got internet I used a 28.8kbps modem to upload my own webpage via FTP.
I remember thinking, even as a child/teenager, that the kids of the future were going to be incredible, being born into the digital internet age. I was so wrong. My classmates struggled with computers because they weren't amazed by them like I was. Touch typing class had nothing on ICQ.
I think there are a lot of xennials on Lemmy. It was crushing to see that the generations before and after us can't comprehend the basics of computers. Then smartphones happened and everything got so much worse.
At a recent gaming expo one of the tables was showing a new game for pc. 50% of the kids that approached the table didn’t know how to use mouse and keyboard. The next day they added Xbox controller support and more than half of the people that didn’t know before then were able to figure out how to play.
I think this boils down to not education but poverty. Entry level computers cost way more than an entry level console. Sure you can buy a piece of crap laptop for $250 but it won’t be able to play ANYTHING. A $250 Xbox does everything you need and more. Most games today are not made to be played on $250 computers.
you can buy a piece of crap laptop for $250 but it won’t be able to play ANYTHING
a thinkpad t490 can't play anything new but it can play quite a bit. I play emulators on mine.
Late GenX (really, between X and Millennial): we expected everyone after us to understand tech. Nope.
They're about as well prepared to deal with computers as people who had a teddy bear when they were children are prepared to be a veterinary.
I completely blame schools adopting ChromeOS for this generational failure.
At least give them a functional OS god damn. People out here not knowing you can do more than access like 5 websites and apps with literally anything that has a microprocessor in it.
They get handed locked down chromebooks or iPads at schools. They’re only really exposed to a walled garden, and they also aren’t explicitly taught a lot of concepts that need to be taught (almost all MS/HS I’ve met have passwords which are just sliding their finger across the keyboard - it’s bewildering. I teach “correct horse battery staple.”)
You can’t learn much if you can’t install your own software. Learning is breaking things though, and most schools seem allergic to hiring competent tech teams/setting up sandboxed computer labs. Security concerns are huge - eg, if your kids school uses PowerSchool they probably got hacked this year - but when your teaching physics and can’t install MathLab or whatever…
There are still the little geeks that figure out how to get video game emulators going - Pokémon Emerald is probably more popular among middle schoolers today than it was in 2005.
What's a computer?
It's like an iPad, but has to be plugged into the wall all the time. Rarely has a touch screen, so the only way to make it do stuff is with an external mouse and keyboard. Super useless.
CD drives were too big so drives were developed that only took half a CD, which is shaped like a C.
There exists a generation of people today that do not know that the save icon shows a floppy disk. They have no idea what a floppy disk even was.
I feel old now and will go back into my cave and weep quietly.
This. The fundamentals of things computers do is so heavily abstracted now days, all kids know how to do is work with those abstractions.
Gen Z: Where is my file and what is a directory?
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