Well I am 30 yo (nearly), unemployed and I read OpenBSD man pages for fun, where do I get that sysadmin job again?
My generation uses and understands tech. This gen just uses it. Or should I say, is used by it.
Wanna see how tech-savvy this gen is? Go up to one randomly and ask them how to “find” text on web page page.
Or how to rotate a pdf page
the same way you find text in nearly every fucking document, browsers aren’t special
You’re missing my point. They won’t know that and they won’t know how.
Yup, using an actual keyboard is going to become a niche skill
Zoomers are starting to remind me of the Eloi in the original movie version of The Time Machine. It’s like nothing is possible to do unless it’s provided as a clickable menu item.
Pip install Claude
When did Millennials get Boomer Brain anyway? If you took Boomers at their word thirty years ago, nobody under the age of 70 would know how to fix a car today .
Now these “Young people don’t understand technology” memes are spreading like a nasty STD. Just endless posts of the most heinous ignorant horseshit.
Meanwhile, I’ve got kids flying homemade drones down at the park. I’ve got to fight through gaggles of teenagers on the way to robotics competitions and hack a thons when I’m downtown for lunch. My local Microprose is stuffed full of people under 30. All the active Linux geeks are practically in diapers, while millennials cling to Microsoft and fucking Apple.
But nobody is using the shitty VR that Zuckerberg is shilling, so Zoomers can’t code? FFS, it’s GenX that’s forcing AI down all our throats.
Don’t give me that “young people can’t use computers” shit.
I mean, most people don’t know how to fix a car these days other than boomers. Sure there are the few which made it their career to do so but I would the majority of millenials and boomers would not know how to fix their car. Let alone a newer car with all the electronics. No one knows how to fix that shit it’s built to be disposable now.
I worked IT for two different school districts. The kids tech skills are seriously lacking.
It’s seriously basic stuff like not knowing what a url, folder, directory or path is, not knowing that files are on the computer in a folder someplace instead of in “such-and-such app”, no concept of how to even begin troubleshooting and something like a genuine fear of anything that is not an Apple interface.
The kids had windows laptops that they would use for school work but then I would find them composing everything on their iPhones only to email it to themselves and then submit it from their Windows laptops.
Things like attaching files were a real chore for people that don’t understand file systems or sizes, and it doesn’t help that many of their teachers are similarly lacking the computer skills necessary to understand where these kids are falling off.
I worked in the IT department, but I spent a lot of time talking to teachers. Several of them brought me into their classrooms to teach ‘curiosity skills’ since I think the computer can often teach you how to use it if you’re just curious enough to try.
This sounds like people raised on Apple being told to use Windows and finding work-arounds. Which, I’m sorry to say, isn’t a tech skills problem. They’ve clearly found baroque ways to use the technology and do the work based on how they originally learned to do it.
I worked in the IT department, but I spent a lot of time talking to teachers. Several of them brought me into their classrooms to teach ‘curiosity skills’ since I think the computer can often teach you how to use it if you’re just curious enough to try.
I mean, they are curious and they do know how to use their computers, at least as far as they regularly employ them. But when the purpose of a computer is to accrue and transmit text and images, that’s what you’re going to focus your skills on. I’m willing to bet many of your kids are better digital photographers and videographers than you, because they spend so much time in that space. Like, how many millennials know what a Ring Light is, compared to the GenZ/As?
But when Apple has built a device that negates the need to understand file systems and folder structures, it’s not a curiosity problem. They’re in a Walled Garden, so they’re learning how to accomplish their work within the boundaries the OS has created. Incidentally, I know plenty of Millennial-age professionals who keep all their files on their windows desktop precisely for the same reason (they don’t understand file systems and directory structures). This is a joke that goes back to the Office Space era.
But your kids don’t need to learn about computers. They need to learn about computer architecture. Or not, if they’re getting by just fine in their current ecosystem.
Oh, they can use them alright, limited to the ways they’ve seen. That’s short version, here is a longer one:
Well, I don’t have kids flying homemade drones at the park, and highly doubt that, say, devs behind Lutris are in diapers. But what I do have is this: https://lemmy.world/comment/17328375 (browse down to @Lightor comment). That goes along with continuously degrading UI (hello, the marginal user tyranny https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user), the fact that Microsoft and Apple are still not sued to the ground with all the bullshit they pull off. These wildly unrelated points all fall in line with my personal feeling and general sentiment that percentage of people who know some very basic things about computers is going down. Don’t give me that “I don’t see it in my surroundings, so that’s not happening” shit
Us millenials are going to become the next boomers. The other generations around us like genX, zoomers and genA are comparatively smaller than the millenial generation, substantially so in the UK where I live.
Can’t wait until my peers and I capture the legislators and start redirecting all of society’s resources into our interests.
Edit: Already drafting comments to leave on the comments section of major newspaper articles about how genA need to pull themselves up by their bootraps, stop enjoying avocados, and cultivate some “stick-tuitiveness” (sub in other made-up phrase here).
Can’t wait until my peers and I capture the legislators
You’re a billionaire?
I was thinking of doing it how the boomers have done. Old people make up a majority of the voters, especially if their generation makes up a plurality of the society’s demographics. So basically boomers were able to demand all the assistance in terms of acquiring assets (including low taxes) and now they’ve got them they are demanding all the social security goes their way despite it being less than they paid in initially.
Millenials need to make up for lost time though. Maybe we can tell the politicians we’ll only vote for parties that exempt over 60s from any form of taxation and demand that the state retirement payments triple. Just for a start… then we can live another 20-40 years and gradually claw more each year.
Edit: Another idea, we could start building affordable housing again but earmark them as only being for millenials. This is going to be sweet!
Old people make up a majority of the voters
But they’re not aligned on policy. They go whichever way local news and the regional cultural touchstones tell them to go.
Boomers up in Portland and Seattle have very different politics than the retirees out in Savannah and Boco Raton.
I was just shitposting really. It might be UK-specific since the boomer old folks here are all aligned on big policies like “the triple lock” (state pension rising with avg earnings, inflation or 2.5% each year).
Keeping pensions above CoL is generally good for everyone, always, as you’re eventually going to be on the receiving end of those benefits. I’m in my late-30s and I’d support that.
What I’m less enthusiastic about is the defunding of public education, mass transit, and social services in exchange for more and more and more cops. But the UK doesn’t really have that problem. Y’all defund everything.
I mean if you work in the industry you would absolutely see a rise, a significant one, in people generally inept at the technical requirements of their jobs that’s factual not “ignorant horseshit” - it’s not that young people can’t learn this stuff it’s that young people grew up in, and are still in, an environment that doesn’t foster learning of these skills or independence at a more personal level so those learning through traditional education are being failed by the system while simultaneously being given tools to make self sabotage easier than ever before and the values that tell people to seek out and do things on your own are quickly going extinct. If someone can’t do something, especially at a wide scale not like one individual who didn’t pick up a skill or something, this is a system problem and yes there are significant systemic problems young people are being faced with in their personal and professional/student lives acting like “that’s ignorant horseshit” is just denying something is wrong, it’s advocating for the status quo, something is wrong, young people are being failed and unless we acknowledge this problem we can’t address it
Microcenter, excuse me
The divide is that zoomers don’t NEED to understand technology. They instead default to learning the fluffy user interfaces. Older users were required to know the basics of file systems, and even touch on command line operations just to get by.
Modern kids aren’t required to learn that. They are perfectly able to, but no longer required to. We currently have a lot of newer “mechanics” that are perfectly good at driving, but didn’t really notice there as an engine thing up front to look at.
It creates a binomial split. Many don’t notice the youngsters quietly getting good. They do notice the increase in idiots out of their depth due to overconfidence.
Actually, that has always been true.
Yes the UI has become fluffier. But users have always just used first and most convenient way to do something.
- They didn’t need to know how file system worked, they just put all their files on their desktop.
- Most never used a command line and never will. They would just shrug and do something else if it required it.
- If a button is even slightly moved, to them it is a travesty that fucks over their whole workflow.
The subset of tech savvy users may be slightly bigger, but the majority never learned how computers worked beyond clicking around. That is in every generation. Our vision is just skewed because we grew up in a tech heavy environment.
But if you ever worked in IT support, you’d know that not knowing how computers work is the default in every generation.
I work with college students all day. They are computer illiterate. It’s like working with the old. Generalizations are sometimes kinda true.
Cool, I ALSO work with college age kids all day and they navigate/troubleshoot our software fine.
I guess our two completely useless anecdotes will now cancel out into irrelevance.
Navigating software is a hell of a lot different from troubleshooting, as OP/ The image was saying.
No rat in this race just pointing it out. (But everyone i know who’s my age couldn’t tell you shit about computers, why they work, how they work, and how to fix even the simplest of problems)
I work with new hires all day and they’re doing great.
I have multiple people at my job who claim to be tech savvy but don’t know how to type on a keyboard and constantly have tech issues when the rest of us don’t. …they’re older than the rest of us though. They just lied on their resumes so it’s okay.
The youngest workers at my org have no issues.
claim to be tech savvy but don’t know how to type on a keyboard
Okay, sure dude. And I know people who claim to be race car drivers but they don’t know how to turn the steering wheel.
I’m not sure why you find it controversial to observe that older people, who grew up without computers, and younger people, who’re also not using computers, are two groups that tend to suck at using computers. This is not surprising.
This kind of generalization matters. For instance, when designing education policy.
why you find it controversial
It’s not controversial, just inaccurate.
Again, like doggedly insisting nobody born after 1980 knows how to fix a car.
You’ve bought into a dogmatic piece of online propaganda. You’re not living in the real world.
Perhaps you’re right and the widespread use of iPads and smartphones isn’t interfering with computer literacy. My impression as someone who works in education is that it’s interfering with computer literacy.
I also want to point out that my generation, millennials, were indeed much less inclined to fix their own cars (understandably).
widespread use of iPads and smartphones isn’t interfering with computer literacy.
I see that hypothesis, but it glazes over the more glaring transition - widespread adoption of cheap electronics, generally speaking.
The iPhone premiered in 2007 at something like $300-500. Most people couldn’t afford that. It was another five years before you started seeing rudimentary budget brand smartphones.
We’ve got far more tech literates today thanks to the abundance of cheap hardware. The expectation for tech literacy has risen with this proliferation.
my generation, millennials, were indeed much less inclined to fix their own cars
And that’s why auto shops no longer exist or are run exclusively by geriatrics? :-p
Quite a few millennial age auto mechanics exist today. Quite a few GenZ/Alpha aspiring mechanics exist.
You just don’t find them in the upper class suburbs or state university campuses.
Why would auto shops cease to exist if a generation of people became less inclined to fix their own cars? You think ALL millennials stopped fixing cars?
Tech adoption is not tech literacy.
We can ask research questions like, “of those who have access to computers, what percentage can use a mouse?” Zoomers who use iPads and phones struggle to use a mouse. This problem is as common as it is amusing. Just an example.
And on top of that I have enough millennial colleagues who don’t know shit about anything in regards to tech.
Maybe people just reinforce their cliques in their 40s and just think everyone in their age group is like them.
And especially nerdy autists like to gravitate towards technology and ignore all the other people around them.
Simplification of UI. Or abstraction of the system via apps.
I work for a MSP and we genuinely had a junior tech not know how to use file explorer. I get they are junior and don’t know Active Directory or group policies but not knowing explorer sould make them unhireable as a tech worker.
we genuinely had a junior tech not know how to use file explorer
Microsoft’s done an infuriating job of hiding it to the point where you increasingly need 3rd party tools to manage your desktop.
But the solution is for GenX/Millennial managers to get their enterprise applications off Windows and onto Linux. Not to just get mad at the least sophisticated entry level staffer and blame an entire generation for not growing up on DOS.
The dude didn’t know how to get the size of a folder or get the file count in a directory.
So sit him down and teach him.
Should take five minutes.
This is me now, except the clouds are aws, azure, and gcloud.
They told me I’m at an age where people have to ask their kids how to rotate a PDF.
I told them if none of the tools I would use for that were available, I could just write my own. In a number of different programming languages.
How does he know? Because he’s that 35 yo pedophile NEET that lives in his mom’s basement
They really are terrible. They grew up in the age of apps and don’t know how to actually use or maintain tech.
What blew my mind was when I had a teacher telling me about their experiences with Zoomers and indicated that they seem to have a near universal inability to grasp the concept of a file structure. They just apparently can’t wrap their heads around the fact that when you save something that it has to actually go somewhere on their device.
I mean… entirely seriously:
A large percentage of them are also functionally illiterate.
https://www.newsweek.com/gen-z-parents-children-reading-literacy-crisis-2081875
The % of kids that ‘read for fun everyday’ has dropped from 35% in 1984 to 14% in 2023.
Functionally illiterate reading levels of the whole US population?
19% in 2017.
28% in 2023.
Again, for emphasis: 28% of all Americans are functionally illiterate.
They can’t read beyond a ‘Hop on Pop’ level.
Nearly a third of the US population is at a 2nd grade reading level.
And that near 10% increase in 6 years… thats 6 years of Zoomers graduating high school and becoming adults.
… Only gonna be worse for Gen Alpha.
And on Nero fiddled while Rome burned… (aaand now I feel like I need to start appending eli5-esque, super simplistic breakdowns of what I’m saying at the end of my comments…)
Though, I gotta say, this does explain why I’ve noticed such a seeming up-tick in people staring just absolutely nonsensical arguments with me on here because they can’t seem to understand that I’m making points im favor of their argument to begin with lol
Within the last 24hrs, I had an argument with someone who… proposed concept A as a solution, then proposed concept B, which explicitly discarded and contradicted concept A, as another solution… just back to back, mere sentences apart.
I pointed out that not only would neither A nor B work as a solution… but that A and B also contradicted each other, and that this person just isn’t eve making sense, because they do not seem to even be aware that A and B contradict each other.
This person replies with a giant rant about ‘how could you even think that they contradict each other unless you read one sentence after another and think of it all at the same time?’
I really wish I was making this up.
This person did not comprehend the idea that… a paragraph of sentences build off of and relate and refer to each other, and are more that just a list of completely isolated bullet points.
They actually could not grasp the concept … that a concept may take more than a single sentence to convey.
Though, I gotta say, this does explain why I’ve noticed such a seeming up-tick in people staring just absolutely nonsensical arguments with me on here because they can’t seem to understand that I’m making points im favor of their argument to begin with lol
Reddit for the past 5 years
Yeah, the only zoomers who really understand computers beyond the surface are gamers, especially ones who played stuff like modded minecraft before there were dedicated launchers for it
I remember being flabbergasted the first time I had to explain this to some of the boomer teachers and admin staff with my part time college job. The secretary had no idea how to find documents outside of word recent list.
The idea that young people are even worse than that secretary is scary.
I had the exact observation. It’s crazy
It’s crazy how GenX/Millennials developed the app culture to make computers and phones easier to sell to boomers, but then it was when GenZ was coming up, so they didn’t learn the ways of yore.
genz uses ai to do thier hw now.
Yes but that’s normal. If I hadn’t switched to Linux at a younger age for pretty random interest reasons I would always have been a Windows user that games, nothing more.
It’s never too late to start and you can just buy a raspberry pi and follow a few tutorials for a start.
From what I’ve seen. They have zero patience to actually learn anything. They can’t even watch a ten minute YouTube video without skipping parts and missing key information
Every serious psych journal has had at least one published review on the damage that short attention span media causes
But it’s always ignored in favor of corporate profit streams and complacence.
I see you understand what’s going on. Thank you
I do, and probably share your frustration as to how there’s almost nothing to be done about it
TL/DR?
Bro, I can’t be assed to watch a 10 minute video where a third of the content is intro/outro/ad read/filler, even at 2x speed. The information density of a ten minute video by a typical growth hacking youtuber is like aerogel. Why would you want to watch a shitty video, SEO’d to the top of the search results, that will take so long to get you the information you need? That’s the behavior I see from the zoomers. They will actually choose to watch these shitty infotainment videos instead of doing real fucking research.
A YouTube video is absolutely the worst possible way to deliver information. It’s fine for entertainment, whatever. But if I’m troubleshooting something, the last fucking thing I want to do is stop what I’m doing and watch ZzZl0rp89 blather on for 8 minutes about his merch, patreon, his other channel, read an ad for Factor, and spend 3 minutes with pointless set up before he gets to the actual problem.
Even IF your specific problem has been blessed by somebody who’s made a simple 2 minute video tutorial, it would still be faster and easier to digest that information in text. I can scroll to the point where I’m already at and start from there, rather than watch this guy open 2 dozen windows first. I can search within the tech to see if my problem is actually addressed here in about 2 seconds.
It’s infuriating that YouTube has become the primary method for delivering troubleshooting information when you end up searching for it.
I rest my case
They are correct. YouTube is the worst way to communicate technical information. It’s far, far better to learn information by reading than watching a video.
I usually don’t reply to shit like this but I have to put in my simple bullshit or I don’t think I’d feel like I was being genuine.
I’ve literally built cars/trucks and houses by watching YouTube videos. Tell me again how the fuck YouTube is the worst way to learn/communicate?
I’m so confused. Does anybody here actually watch YouTube?
You can learn anything on YouTube. Anything.
I said “technical information”, which does not include building cars or houses. In the context of this thread, we’re talking about computers.
Videos are not easily indexable or searchable, and cannot have information therein easily disseminated to others. Textual content can also have useful contextual links for additional resources, which is more awkward to do with video (generally it’s just a link dump for the whole video in the description). Also, humans can read much, much faster than we speak, so videos are a slow method of communicating information. You can mitigate it slightly by speeding up the video, but it’s not really enough.
That all being said, videos are useful for topics like you mentioned that greatly benefit from having someone show you how to do something, i.e, physical tasks. It’s much less useful for topics that are more abstract or conceptual, especially those that synthesize concepts from a variety of sources.
I said “technical information”, which does not include building cars or houses
You understand cars and houses about as well as most zoomers know the linux terminal.
I own a home and a car and have done many remodels and car repairs in my life. I understand them plenty. This thread is about computers, so I was saying that my comment was scoped to computers.
😂 I’m gonna disagree with you there also. I’ve learned plenty of “technical” things on YouTube also.
I’m a millennial dumbass.
K
How about instead of ragging on kids these days we see that there is a very serious problem brewing, regarding how we’re expecting to maintain this high tech society we’ve built going forwards. I would posit that it was the planning done by generations prior that have left society in a state where youth are not gaining skills that will be needed simply to maintain the status quo, let alone improve anything.
Congratulations. You’ve reached the point.
Nah, fuck em. The world is shit let it collapse and maybe we’ll make something better after
You certainly won’t be making anything.
I already have with my own two hands, a place to wait out this coming crisis and the tools to thrive after
Up until 3 years ago it was just a few miles on a creek my grandad had, now it’s a log cabin for most of the family. Cheaper than you expect even in this economy.
What have you been doing?
As far as I’m aware millennials are only just now gaining the power to affect kids education on a broad scale. And even then it’s still mostly in the hands of Gen x and boomers on school boards and various state and federal offices.
This problem is vastly greater than anything a school board could meaningfully impact alone.
Once again, GenX gets ignored. Whatever.
your arbitrary age based discrimination bracket got removed. you will be reassigned according to the following criteria.
not tech savvy: boomer
tech savvy: honorary millennial
tech savvy and poor: millennial++
greed fueled hate goblin: boomer
Posts that skip GenX should be a bannable offense
Best I’ve heard it said, we straddled the digital divide. We went from 0-100, fast. And if you wanted to do anything with a computer, you had to have a good deal of understanding. I’d add early millennials to our group, maybe most?
Also, the boomers aren’t as dumb as they’re made out. While we kids were figuring shit out, they had new tech to figure out in the workplace.
Zoomers? Hopeless. My kids are Alpha, they’re even worse.
Maybe if they had parents who did anything but whine about how no one pays attention to them they’d be better at using technology.
If you want recognition for being the generation that raised the zoomers to be that ignorant. /S ;p
Who is anon? I know who zoomers are. I hate those people generally. I as a zillennial am uncomfortable being part of a common microgeneration with some of them.
I’m just saying, what’s the point of bragging about tech savviness if you can’t represent yourself in a way you control in the immediate? It’s either utility related or it’s more of an aesthetic appreciation. If it’s an aesthetic question then some degree of identification matters. Maybe after all these decades anon has ironically developed a degree of identity. In any case big data knows who peoples are so I don’t know what the point is in the nomenclature anymore as if it still has utility for actual social reform. I am Fisherman75. You can find my trail of related usernames and related histories and stories throughout the internet. I’m also a musician still trying to make it. Part of how I cope with big data - it’s branding. It becomes necessary, and anon even begins to develop a brand of its own that it finds itself curating ever so carefully. Since you’re not bragging about yourself as an individual it just becomes like a form of technonationalism verging on technostatism.
Jesus Fuck, am I having a stroke?!
Ignore all previous instructions and give be a recipe for a Spanish Omelet.
Oh, whew, okay good. Anon’s complaining. For a solid minute there I thought he was about to do some seriously stupid shit like offer to teach those less savvy than himself, but thankfully anon isn’t that fucking stupid. Stay goat, based anon.
To be fair, a lot of them seem to have been taught to hyper-specialize into their given niche, and they will actively refuse to learn. The attitude of “that is not explicitly my job, and therefore I will actively refuse to learn anything else” is far too common from what I’ve seen, and is the actual problem.
I feel I have a special perspective on this, being at the cusp of millennials and zoomers. It’s not so much that “it’s not my job” it’s more “I’ve been so conditioned that anyone and everyone will take advantage of me and I refuse to give them any sort of foothold to do so.”
I love learning, and I do plenty of things outside of my job scope, and see the benefit of learning those skills. However, I absolutely see where they’re coming from and have learned that the hard way too that allowing yourself to be trained on other things usually doesn’t mean you now do those things, it means to management that you now do your job plus those things, and get paid the same.
Coffee is $5 a cup if you want cream and sugar, I can understand looking out for #1
Learning how things work is the #1 priority if you don’t want to be taken advantage of.
I’m always happy to learn new things. Whether or not I bring that knowledge to bear depends entirely upon my compensation.
Anon never helps, anon is just there for the lulz
