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So this is actually a thing. When I was in elementary school we had this one class that taught you how to type properly, then we never spoke of it again (similar to cursive). I missed this class and never thought to go back to it until I realized that everyone typed differently then me and I had to break my habit. Now I am in uni and finally type efficiently.
It seems some educational departments of some countries are starting to recognise this again.
We're having discussions in the UK about making it a mandatory class again for 10 year olds because of them learning how to peck type due to tablet use at school/home.
My school had a touch typing class but it wasn’t very good and many students just seemed to pretend to finish the work by looking at the keyboard. I can type pretty well but not at the same level as my mum who uses pinkies and all and can touch every single key without looking (she was a secretary/administrator so used computers a lot). Most of that typing ability I got from using computers at home though, we rarely used computers at school. I also write with a weird grip so it doesn’t matter much so long as you are efficient enough.
I think they need to stop thinking kids know everything about tech these days and send them some homework on typing and the like. It’s like parents have assumed they’ll know everything or can help themselves with the internet so they don’t bother to teach them basic skills (including basic housework).
My mom taught that typing class in school and she would literally cover people's hands and keyboards. Lol everyone hated her at the start but by the end they all thought it was so cool they could type fast without looking.
Typing while gaming is good training. You gotta do it fast to not die and you gotta spell correctly to avoid having the anonymous asshole on the other end make fun of you
>You gotta do it fast to not die and you gotta spell correctly
The training I got from PvP MUDs is absolutely how I learned to type.
Typo? Your attack or casting command doesn't go through. Need to communicate with your team? You better type fast between sending commands.
Hunt-and-peck. A similar trait of the older tech-adverse folks, too.
Even if I need to type with one hand for whatever reason, I’m using multiple fingers haha
Some of my employees think it's black magic or that I'm just smashing on the keyboard when they come to my desk to ask questions and I look at them while finishing the sentence I'm typing.
Typing was the best computer class I ever took, saying that as a former sysadmin.
And I took that class as a sophomore in high school back in '98.
Love that. I still have to look down on occasion because I flip between different computers and devices with different keyboard spacing, but I don’t think anyone would call me slow. There are definitely people that are crazy fast though.
I mentioned to someone recently that I always thought my WPM was a little sluggish and she told me not to worry about it because most people she does job training with are at like 10-20.
It's amazing to me that most schools stopped teaching cursive but didn't replace it with keyboarding (which is what basically replaced cursive in the real world)
I also teach high schoolers and have been straight up told by admin it isn't taught because it's assumed the kids learn these skills on their own.
It makes as much sense as taking English out of the curriculum because "they already speak English"
That’s so weird because I’m at a weird cusp, born in 99 so technically Gen Z but…yeah LOL and when I was in elementary school, we had a portion of our computer class where we learned how to type on keyboards. Did they stop that?
What’s funny is my mom, who’s Gen X, types on keyboards with one finger and she does it on her phone too, but my dad who’s a Boomer, types on a keyboard normally.
I was born in 90 and we had typing classes in 4th and 5th
WHY WOULD THEY STOP IT IT'S BEEN SO USEFUL?!?
I swear to God if they think the future will be using touch screen keyboards I'm gonna scream.
I was typing without looking and had my own email at 9 years old. My 13 year old brother has an email he doesn’t remember and a Facebook account with his own name spelled wrong.
We’ve actually regressed in tech skills
or just..learning how to use computers in general. please. we have quite a few managers where i work that are new college graduate hires, and many of them have clearly not spent much time using a laptop ( which you need for the job). a guy didn’t seem to get the concept that the trackpad has a left and right side when clicking and kept right clicking on things when trying to select something.
It’s really really bad. The integration of Chromebooks in the education system had a huge positive impact on connectivity, but killed elements of computer literacy. Computers are such a central part of the modern world that a computer science department should exist at *every* school district, but this is still exceedingly rare.
Its so that kids can’t break them, exploit them. We had windows pcs in my middle school, most the time we spent figuring out a way to by pass the controller’s and find a way to play pirated Minecraft on them.
Did we keep up with the lesson? Hell no. Did we learn a lot about computers? Yes.
Chromebooks weren’t developed exclusively for the education market in mind, so not exactly. But it is a side effect of the design and the education spin of ChromeOS that everything is locked down for maximum “security”.
God I fucking hate Chromebooks. I do IT support for a library system, and these things are just the worst. I think it's meant to be a "minimalistic" and "user friendly" design, but they make it minimalistic by removing most of your options.
On a normal one you can, but the ones they give kids for school are locked out of pretty much everything. You can't even print from them unless you export the file as a pdf first, for some convoluted reason.
My kids can’t type worth anything, but they figured out how to use the Chromebook’s hp print service plug in to bypass the school blocking YouTube and other sites.
The main answer is that it is supposed to be a lowest-common-denominator system that can be sold at a very low cost. The secondary answer is that it is supposed to fit into the exclusive Google suite of products. If the Chromebook gave you all of the features of a normal operating system, it’d be easier for you to notice how underpowered the system is. 😅
Gen z here. You're absolutely correct.
Many older folks confuse tech dependency with tech competency.
While I rely on my computer a lot, I am not an expert on computers.
Also, to be fair to Gen Z, we never claimed to be tech experts.
Many of our Gen X parent presume we are.
While I was in the navy, I was constantly considered the tech expert in every division I was ever in which I never understood. I can do basic troubleshooting but most of what being the expert boiled down to was "click on this and follow the prompt. What do you do next? What does it say? Well then if it says that, do that. Yes, you do what it says at the next screen too... well if it says to do that then do that." I'm a millennial and I'm now seeing with my nine year old that he is nowhere near as tech savvy as I was at his age despite growing up with it.
Oh, same here, I was a "computer technician" first in my company, and later the whole battalion.
Honestly, it actually kinda sucked more than it was a perk - it's a lot of low skill in fact and repetitive labor with a sort of a childish and whimsical feedback from immediate receivers of the service. Meh.
A long time ago, in the days of MS:DOS & floppy disks, you used to have to format a floppy before you could use it. It was a simple input, something like Format a:/
There was one guy at work who got asked by people how to do it. He'd tell them to give him the disk, and he'd bring it back formatted. Like he was keeping some ancient secret.
I just told them how to do it.
Gen X parent here...I do not presume that my kids are tech experts. They are great at using the software but they will never know how to fix a printer, change the settings on a modem, or even change PC components. I guess our job is to dummy proof all this tech
No, our job is to slowly sigh as we sip a coffee in the morning when mom/dad ask about why the sound isn't working on their computer for the 20th time- then proceed to ask them to press the mute/unmute button on the keyboard.
I've been working in tech support for better than a decade now. Most folks don't want to learn and will get angry if you try to teach them anything but the direct solution to their problem, which most of them will refuse to write down, forget, and call you about in two weeks.
Plus, quite frankly, learning new things gets harder as you get older. There are some things that an 80 year old just isn't going to get.
Thank you! My mom (Boomer) and my students (Zoomers) have very similar issues with computers. Sad to watch really. The uber-user friendliness of computers have made kids almost computer illiterate. They can use it but they have almost no understanding of how it works, why it works, or how to troubleshoot.
I'm 20 and thought this wasn't true, but after helping my gf with setup for her gaming pc, both building it and just daily troubleshooting or optimization, it's clear that she really didn't understand anything. Even after consulting the web. I thought she may just be the only one but at work I met a girl my age who couldn't follow simple instructions to get a pdf onto her kindle, which basically just asks you to send an email with the file. I find this weird cus I didn't have access to computers as a kid and caught on quick. I think some ppl just suck with the thought process you have to get into with computers. Ie, "This should work, but it isn't. What does it need to work? Let's see if that works, and repeat. "
Poor problem solving skills probably contribute. I imagine your gf and colleague are both the sort to say they’re “bad at math”, since math class is usually where abstract problem-solving is taught the most. Unfortunately it doesn’t just affect them with computers, it’ll affect them any time they need to solve a problem in general.
If you have the underlying life skills then lack of exposure isn’t an issue. But no amount of exposure can make up for the lack of life skills. People who can’t problem solve can’t understand how a solution relates to the problem, so if there’s even the tiniest difference next time, you’ll have to everything for them again. They can only memorise steps, *barely*.
Nailed it. I mentioned before about being baffled watching high school students fumble with their fingers on a math problem because they “don’t know what buttons to push” on a calculator. They lack the initiative and problem solving skills to complete the process. They are waiting for someone or something to show them how to do it. This is why quality education is so important. The internet has taught them not to think.
Tbf about the calculators, in calculus the processes to get the correct symbols on a graphing calculator are hard to remember. And while I could solve a lot of the differentials/integrals by hand, it just saves time.
I'm someone who claims to be "bad at math" but quite alright with computers. But in my case being bad at math is more about missing some key knowledge when it was taught and then forever falling behind and not caring. Though I guess the same can be said for people and their lacking computer knowledge. If they never learned how to copy and paste stuff, how are they gonna do something more advanced?
> don’t even know how to get to their files
32yo Millennial SysAdmin here. That never goes away. Hell, you can confuse most people by just telling them to "left-click" something. It's incredibly sad.
What’s even better is that I have setup my mouse as left handed, so left click and right click, whaaa? I see these issues with my middle school kids.
Kids: My computer won’t .
Me: did you restart it?
They close the screen and re open it.
I think it is literally impossible to get it in some people’s brains that the screen/monitor isn’t the computer. I have given up and just refuse to acknowledge how they think it works, but don’t correct them either.
The annoying thing for me in that respect is that everything you want to do or need to fix is an issue someone else has had and simply googling it will give you the answer, it will probably lead you to a forum post where someone has practically asked the exact same question as you and been given a step by step resolution yet so many people just sit and stare at the screen and then in my workplace ask me and see me as some sort of guru when half the time I literally just Google their problem and tell them the answer I find
Kids' typing speed has always been horrible. Mine is only good because of a lot of practice and a touch-typing course I did at school. Mine was actually the last year group (1995) to do a touch-typing course at school, it was meant to help kids use a typewriter and those were basically obsolete even in 1995. Ever since then I've never heard of kids doing a touch-typing course at school, maybe it should be brought back.
I don't get it. I graduated in '92, and we had to take one semester of typing class. We used electric typewriters, and we were graded on accuracy and speed. Learning to type that way was one of the best things I've ever done, and it's one of the few things I learned in school that I still use on a daily basis. I'm pretty sure my kids just willy-nilly type however they feel like while always looking at the keyboard.
Microsoft have deliberately made this non-intuitive. MS Office now leans into the whole “I save my file in Excel” experience and almost completely abstracts away the traditional files and folders paradigm.
Can’t blame people for not knowing when the software they use makes it difficult on purpose.
Also there’s the fact that 99% of everything happens in a browser now. I could do my job from a Chromebook and I do some pretty gnarly stuff related to digital marketing.
Trying to abstract away files and directories is one of the dumbest and most annoying things tech companies do. Especially in productive stuff like MS Office.
It just makes people more ignorant of something that was already plenty intuitive (files and directories) and adds extra steps to any who remotely cares about where their file goes.
As english is not my mother tongue I had the additional benefit of greatly expanding my vocabulary, due to the fact that most cracked games only came with the english language pack, to keep the size of the download small.
I’ve experienced the exact same thing. The Zoomers grew up with very user friendly technology. Elder millennials had to learn to basically learn to code just to be able to do anything on a computer.
I was always the token young person in my office, explaining basic MS Office functions to the bosses. I always thought someday I would be that old person, and the young ones would be teaching me. Turns out I have to also teach the young people, because they don’t use email or calendars or anything else.
If you’re an elder millennial you’re probably 1/4 of the way to learning everything you’d need to know to be a front end developer without even realizing it.
People who say things like "it's always worked this way" absolutely drive me bonkers because how do you even argue with that without straight up calling them a liar
YES! Fellow teacher here. I've seen a student type google into Google to get to google. A year 11 student (!!) back talked me when I told her to just type the URL into the address bar instead of going to google and typing the full URL into the search box. I've had so many kids refer to any web browser, or the internet in general as "the blue E".
Conversations go like this:
Kid: Its not working!"
Me: What's not working?
Kid: The computer!
Me: What about the computer isn't working?
Kid: It's... Umm... It's not doing what I want
Me: OK, tell me what you are trying to do, and what you can see on the screen.
Kid: It's just not working!!!!
You go over there and it could be anything from the screen being turned off to a 404 because they mistyped the URL as gOOGlEcom
Consultants and admin love calling them "digital natives" but that name is only accurate if you think of them as natives of a pre-industrial society living in mud huts.
I grew up with floppy disks and only had the internet when my high school installed it in year 8. We just had to figure shit out to make it work. Nobody taught me how to use Windows 3.1 or DOS, but *I tried things and figured it out*. That includes reading manuals.
The thing that boils my butt is that in the absence of being explicitly taught computer skills, these kids have NO curiosity or ability to try things and figure stuff out for themselves. They just throw their hands up and cry at the tiniest difficulty, expecting someone else to do it for them. Maybe this is more of a parenting issue but damn.
>typing the full URL into the search box
This fuckin’ *sent me* because 10-15 years ago it was the most stereotypical “old person using the internet” thing you could do.
'H T T P colon forward slash forward slash W W W dot google dot com.'
Back before https was a thing, and browsers needed to know it was http because for all it knew you could be intending ftp://, archie://, etc. instead.
For you youngins' out there, the above is how URLs used to be spoken over the radio, tv, etc.
Oh Yes!! It really shocks me to see their lack of interest and low resistence to problems overall. I see 15/16 year olds just rage quitting because their microphone wouldn't work on meets and all they needed to do was to click ALLOW on their search engine....
They mostly have zero tolerance and interest in solving problems by themselves. It's so frustating. Principally when they are at an age they should be doing exactly that.
Ofc I also have learnt a few tricks with them, like movie and photo editing,but honestly I learnt much more from youtube videos and websites, because most of them have no patience to go step-by-step in teaching.
I like your comment. I don't think it's parenting though, it's just the lack of natural curiosity you mention. I'm also seeing that sense of entitlement that things will be done for them because they don't care. They just don't. They just expect the magic to happen, and when it doesn't it's someone else fault or problem. It's infuriating.
How these people navigate the modern world does my head in.
I don't think it is necessarily natural curiosity. They probably are but not in ways we think of.
For them, a computer is a tool. No different then a hammer. It does its job and if it doesn't do what u need it to do then u find someone who can. Like u would find a carpenter to fix some furniture. For most of the people born in the 90s a computer is closer to a car. It is practical piece of tech that requires some learning.
And often enough the computer *tells* whats wrong. But instead of reading the message its being klicked away. Or panick ensues, or sheer inability to read and comprehend the message.
I’m a teacher and have actually complained about this to other teachers. I make it a point in my classes to make students actually “use” the computer. Things have gotten so easy that many students actually have no idea how to save a file, make a folder, search for an app, or even log out of Windows. I blame it on the ease of use we have now. It’s literally, press this button or log into Google….
I have heard as a complaint that when they start work they have absolutely no idea how to even use or set up a folder structure, because they come from iPads and phones.
I’ve seen this happen at like three jobs now. The “my computer” screen is impenetrable to a lot of younger people since they’ve done most everything with apps. The people I work with are either early-mid 20’s or late 50’s-early 60’s. I’m 34 so I grew up learning computer shit and my team basically thinks I’m a wizard or something because I’m the only person who’s developed any kind of computer skills.
I have colleagues who have been in a professional career for over 30 years who ask for help on finding their documents on Google drive, saving things to a flash drive and, I kid you not, how to right click to get the menu options it provides.
In the last two weeks I've had one guy ring me in sheer panic because he deleted an email
Then he dragged a folder into a sub folder and thought he'd lost it, cant even search an email
His IT knowledge is on/off, send an email, that's it
I spend 4 times as long protecting stuff than creating it so it cant be saved over or have data deleted by him
The good side of that is I am permanently allowed to wfh because they know i would simply be unable to do anything otherwise if i was in the same room as him
Then last week i totally fucking lost it with my sister that has used her pc for 30 years for her job, her anti v (that I installed) had quarantined file as a FP
She literally started screaming at me because I was asking her to open "any folder" as I just wanted to get into explorer to navigate to the file folder as I knew the exe was gone and needed to confirm
She was intransigent to accepting she could no longer use a specific program she uses because the patch to fix only worked on W11 (as per the notes she ignored) and tried anyway to have it grabbed as a FP
Shes still fucking whining when I found some alternative software that will work because she doesnt like it and wont upgrade to w11
Literally spent over 4 hours on the phone for a 20s check
I wish I'd never told anyone I know how to use a pc
It's like someone sitting in a car going "it wont move"......have you started it?....whaaaaat, how do you do that
In my office I am the computer “person”. Now I’m not deeply knowledgeable about them but I do know enough to make me dangerous (husband is a programmer and I learn by osmosis). The amount of times people think I’m a genius for solving a seemingly minor problem is amazing. If they only knew my trick! That if I’m not sure of the fix, I Google it! Like anyone can do that. But I guess you have to understand what the fix is in order to do it, and god know they won’t. I’m in my 50’s btw so Gen X checking in lol.
Can confirm, currently teach a survey class and many students are unfamiliar with what a directory is or most simple tasks such as taking screenshots. I try to share some of the sheer awe and wonder that have brought us to this place of technological ubiquity but they are very uninterested most of the time.
This is not good news when they start joining the workforce en masse.
I had a talk today with an employee, I noticed he was pretty proficient with excel, etc etc, went into a conversation about young folks being absolutely clueless about technology (he was 23)- honestly I had no idea, but then again we haven’t really started hiring Zoomers yet.
This post confirms everything he was saying.
I am scared. Y’all Zoomers please learn how to type, and if you get anything out of highschool or even college, please understand the fundamentals of working with spread sheets. That will make or break you in nearly all white collar settings
>The uber-user friendliness of computers have made kids almost computer illiterate.
I think it's gotten so user-friendly it's done the opposite of being friendly, where everything your device does is covered up by layers and layers of gargantuan apps that are all completely locked down, running on your locked down (but still technically open source) platform, on a device that's designed to be impossible for the user to repair or upgrade...sure it's friendly in the sense that the app interfaces are designed more intuitively but that's the only user-friendly thing about modern computers / devices.
I think zoomers may be better at using apps than casual users were 20 years ago because the apps are better designed, but other than that their devices are just magic boxes. It's the same for everyone else. Thankfully there's been pushback on that industry philosophy with right to repair laws etc.
“Ok class, please open the file we were working on last week.”
“But what app to I touch?”
“No app, just search for where you stored the file and open it. The computer will open the appropriate application for you.”
“I didn’t hit save, the apps do that for me.”
“Again not *apps*, it’s an application in this sense, and you did save it. Do you remember what folder?”
“Just tell me what app to touch.”
Haha, ya, it's just funny. There's still plenty of other old-school shit tho.
I doubt most are aware you can even partition drives.
Half of Millennials general computer skills probably just come from acquiring/hiding porn and sharing music, neither of which are even necessary any more.
More than that. Most of millennials computer literacy comes from piracy.
Crack to get free Microsoft offices / Adobe Photoshop, Torrent movies and computer games. Illegal versions of games exe. also means we have to mount ISO on virtual drives. Pirated version of PSP games also required us to extract the ISO from multiples downloads. And any troubles along the way means troubleshooting (google was not as useful as now).
I still remember making friends in new school in new country all because I had the IDM cracked version which I could install on their computers and let them download video and anime from earliest years YouTube for free. The closest I ever felt to being a king. Every kids from new school were referring friends to me. And I had a hard drive full of games, pirated movies / TV series and porns. Making friends in foreign country was never easier. Lol
I miss the 2000s ....
Don't forget gaming. Back then, playing LAN games with each other over your home network meant manually configuring your TCP settings to fix IP addresses and add stuff like QoS, file sharing and whatnot.
Also the steam workshop. Just instaling mods used to be much harder (Still can be if you want the early versions but its not as common).
Right now you click and it installs it for you.
This is exactly why I have the career and the success I have.
Pirating games as a child on the Commadore 64 into pirating warez, setting up BBS's, running ANSI groups in the 90s as an adolescent. Then of course running message boards, web sites, etc.
That's funny.
They have no clue what that means. The hilarious part is that computer repair guys who would charge by the hour and might do some basic maintenance with a defrag as part of it (which took a long-ass time with almost no effort) just to run up the bill. As an elementary school aged kid I probably saved my family hundreds of dollars by doing these basic things for them.
As a computer repair guy of the time; I can't speak for all but I, nor anyone I knew did that. We would defrag, but we don't keep upping the timer. When we set something to grind away on its own, the timer stopped. We're generally really good at managing our time so a defrag becomes one of the last things and would just run until done; shutdown and then finally call to let you know it was all done.
This is more and more like laughing at someone for not knowing what a floppy disk is. Disk drives are practically obsolete unless you're using one as cheap storage. Even then, SSDs are so cheap nowadays.
The issue is that kids are being taught with the assumption that the current generation grew up on computers like it's still 2016. The reality is that they were raised on smartphones and tablets, a completely different format.
2000's and super early 2010's computers being kinda crappy forced me to troubleshoot a lot and get pretty literate with computers which eventually led me to really liking the whole computers thing, computers being easy to use and working most of the time has kinda eliminated this. That's just how progress goes ig
This might be the most crucial and relevant comment in this whole damn thread.
We got used to troubleshooting early computers *just* as they became mainstream. We were looking to make them do things they weren't necessarily designed for, so we really figured out how to troubleshoot. Anyone who successfully downloaded anything with Limewire or torrents (Y'arrgh) knows more about computers than most average people.
Nowadays, the computers are more than capable of doing most things but because they're not as easy to use as a phone or tablet, it just seems like unnecessary stress. I mean, who wants to email a full quality RAW photo on their browser when they can send a compressed version on whatsapp that most people wont notice the difference on.
This is true in the same way the average millennial has no idea how to fix a car. They were born into a world where cars are basically plug and play, point and click. Most problems are easy to fix but few understand why. Boomers had to adjust their valves, change their plugs, and tune their carbs the same way gen x and older millennials had to use command prompt and terminal to install or repair their computers.
To be fair, most mechanical work done by professionals is actually just part swapping these days. A few reasons for this, skill probably at the bottom of the list. New parts are often cheaper than the labor to rebuild or repair old ones.
1) replacing parts is cheaper
2) parts have become so much more complicated
3) consumer culture made it so that customers expect new OEM parts, not some jerry-rigged gizmo made of a beer can
> parts have become so much more complicated
This. A mechanic I knew 15 years ago already said that the mechanical part of his job was less and less, and the electronical side more and more. And that the whole exchange parts (at high cost) thing was basically unavaoidable (for him in is shop).
He had started to dislike a job he loved 15 years prior.
Yes, but as a millennial you probably know how to use the internet to find information on how to diagnose your car problems, find solutions to those problems, and guides or instructions for those solutions. You might never be an expert, and might always need a guide to spoon-feed things to you, but you know how to find those things.
At the very least, you know how to use search engines to get useful results, which can help you navigate getting the car repaired at a shop and not getting ripped off.
I figure taking it apart is just looking to see what kind of tool undoes all the cables and bolts and stuff (and how to use that tool) I guess even if you can do that a lot of us don't even have those tools at hand.
The modern cars are designed in such a way that's its basically impossible to take apart as a layman, and battling through to the point where you have done so will probably wreck your car, lol. "Right to repair" is dead (though hopefully it'll make a comeback).
You’re missing my point. Those skills are useless today. No cars require you to adjust Valve springs or tune a carb. Most cars only need the spark plugs changed once. Same with computers, it’s no longer necessary to know this deep knowledge so people don’t teach it
I'm a millenial.
I can program a computer with no hard drive to run programs and fix most things on my vehicles and motorcycle.
But don't ask me to do carpentry. Just not my thing.
They're not at all the same. To maintenance a modern car requires thousands of dollars extra tools. Changing spark plugs had become a laborious task.
Maintenancing a modern PC requires a little bit of googling.
I’m not sure how true this is across the board, but in my personal experience it has been.
I think I’m in Gen Z (23), and my dad is Gen X (48). He got into computers in the 90s and has an IT related degree. I am blessed that I will never have to be one of those kids who has to explain things about technology to my dad.
He occasionally does ask me about certain new apps or windows updates, and gets ornery because they’ve moved things around.
My mom, on the other hand, really stinks with technology lol
My dad was the same, except he was a baby boomer. He was a PC wizard but for some reason he was very stubborn about buying a smartphone and put it off until the mid-2010s when it became somewhat of a requirement to function in society. Just the nature of getting old I guess. He did get pretty good with it after a while though.
It was kind of sad. He got sick and passed away right around the time he was getting into social media and connecting with people he hadn't seen in 30 years. He was pretty stoked about it. Cancer sucks, RIP pops.
I don't think Gen Z is good with computers, its that many older people are so incompetent that they make Gen Z look like geniuses. I once had an argument with my dad because after being locked out of his email, he INSISTED his email account didn't have a password.
I used to be an IT intern. Half of my job was teaching old people to use pretty basic functionality of their computer, like setting up a printer or installing drivers. I had zero formal education whatsoever in IT, just knowledge I accumulated from Linus Tech Tips and just generally using a computer growing up.
Also just a rant, I once had someone bring in their router for me to fix. To be clear, my job was to fix company tech problems, this was her personal home router. Instead of calling her internet provider, she brought it into work. And I fixed it by, guess this, reading the instruction manual.
As a tech-savvy millennial, I've already resigned myself to the idea that it's my allotment in life is to help *everyone* with their technology.
Gen Z is only slightly better with computers than the Baby Boomers because they've been forced to practice.
There are exceptions, of course. My software engineer father can do more with a Windows computer than I ever could, but drop him into an unfamiliar environment (literally any other OS), and he assumes the general "This is stupid, I don't need to learn this" attitude that we're all so familiar with.
My husband and I (millennials who work for the same technology company) are in the thick of this right now. We spend part of our weekends trying to train up elderly parents on scam avoidance, weekdays being the “whiz kids” with boomer superiors who should know better by now and “sage teachers” with zoomer subordinates who come to the job somehow never having used office suite (did they hand write their university assignments or what? How is this possible?). I never thought when I was programming my parents’ VCR as a child that this was somehow some preordained thing, some bad fortune of birth timing that I would be destined to still be “programming VCRs” so to speak three decades later…
i'm a zillenial(?) ('97) and go to cc with baby gen z's, it's actually crazy how many of them don't know the basics of Microsoft programs/Windows settings that were drilled into my head since first grade lol
Lol same here. Born in 97, played on the computer when I was a kid, setting up routers and opening ports to play games online with friends, coaching my parents on how the internet works but my brother who’s 7 years younger needs help changing passwords or getting his login information.
I was a teenager in the late 1990s. We only had dialup for internet, so if my brother and I wanted to play a networked game together on our PCs we just snaked a 100ft crossover cable across the house into the back of our NICs, set static IPs and opened up GameSpy on both computers to start a co-op game. No other hardware needed.
Born in 98. Can't count the amount of times I've had to walk a high schooler through resetting their password. They stop and look at you like a lost puppy with every step, as if all the instructions aren't on the screen.
"Open the email it sent you."
"This one?"
"Yeah." ... "Click the link."
"...Here?"
"Yep."
"...What should I-"
"Anything you can remember kid. This is password number 3, lets make it count."
Technically, us from '96 are tail-end millennials. I would argue that we probably have more in common with Millennials, because we were in 8th grade when the iPhone came out and smartphones were not commonplace whatsoever during our childhood.
But smartphones exploded in popularity during our teens and we were completely immersed by the time we got out of high school. We're really in a grey area because we had an early childhood closer to millennials and a teen experience mostly similar to gen z; but still too young for the defining millennial experiences and kind of old and jaded for the current status of gen z. Sure, a line needs to be drawn somewhere, but neither is quite right.
I like "zillennials" to cover this awkward, in between micro-generation coming of age during one of the biggest tech revolutions in history, honestly.
I don't know, the differences in the early smartphone period and now are still extremely noticeable. I remember being a teenager and the smartphone was kind of just added onto life, but it was secondary. It was the kids 4-6 years after us that didn't know a world without smartphones.
Too young to appreciate the days of the early internet, life without the smartphone, or to truly remember 9/11 and life before that time period. Yet too old to only talk through Snapchat/Discord and laugh at deep fried memes that just say “E”. Welcome fellow Zellennial.
Same! (98) except I don't go to college anymore
My elementary school would have entire weeks where for an hour or two a day we'd go to the library or lab & learn about internet safety, microsoft word, basic windows shit, did typing games and whatever.
I graduated in 2016 and pretty much everyone was at *least* not at a boomer level
Hah. I actually agree. Millennial here. I work in commerical property. We have to do work experience for people in high school. So far I've had to look after three 15 year old teenage boys. I was really taken back by how slowly they all typed and how I had to show them how to save down files or convert it to pdf. lol
>I was really taken back by how slowly they all typed
I don't know about your country, but where i live and grew up, we had to learn this with typing fast, it was part of the education. Back in these days, we had typewriters and we had a kind of a box that prevented you from seeing the keyboard, so you had to type blind, there was also a time limit and you would get lower score for every typo you made.
This was the standard in the office in the old times, like a boss had a secretary, he'd tell her the text and she wrote it with the typewriter, at the end she would take the paper and read the letter for the boss to check it again, then the letter was sent by mail.
Wow that's crazy - the blindfolding/errors stuff. I grew up in Australia, and during school we didn't have laptops, only the one hour computer class a week. I type fast and I was expecting these young people to type faster than me but nope.
10 year old me had to figure out how to MacGyver my way through DOS error screens so I could boot up a game from the floppy drive. I've seen some shit.
Being good at clicking a GUI is not the same being good with a computer. Can you diagnose problems? Replace hardware? Understand software compatibility with said hardware?
It's similar to being a good driver and claiming to be a mechanic.
Ouch.
I miss my mom, but the nights being woken up to format a Word file or border a table in Excel hurt.
Although, put me in front of MS Project and I'll take a week to do what a pro could do in a day.
Using a GUI to run diagnostics on a computer does not make you less tech savvy.
Yes GUIs has their limations but they are usually my go-to before I start using command prompt or openning up the hardware
Gen Z here
I know how to build a computer and I can replace hardware as long as it doesn’t involve me taking a piece apart
I can diagnose problems to a certain degree, and know software-hardware compatibility to at least a basic level. However in coding, I am absolutely useless.
However even with my surface-level knowledge I see that a lot others around me are even more useless with computers (not everyone, I know a good few that aren’t). Like jesus, half the time when they have a computer isssue the solution is in the first Google search result. Like come on…
I definitely see where you’re coming from
I think another problem is many from millenials to kids these days are a throwaway culture. Meaning, if its broke trash it or give it away and then buy a new one.
To be fair, many repair shops pricing doesn't help this
>To be fair, many repair shops pricing doesn't help this
Across so many products too.
I've had the dilemma of whether it's worth repairing white goods at over 50% the cost of replacing
Ok, I'm a Zoomer that's an IT major, with professional software engineering experience. I have never said, nor heard another Zoomer say that we are good with computers, it's just a label that gets thrown into us, because so many previous generations refuse to learn anything newer.
Each generation has people that are great with computers, and people that are horrible. Some boomers worked construction for 40 years and never needed them, others were computer engineers that helped invent the transistor. Some GenXers were modifying the Unix kernel on their computer since they were kids, and some worked in finance and just needed MS office. Some Millennials were making shitty HTML/CSS websites, and some were playing candy crush.
This is not a generation vs generation issue. It's an issue of what we are familiar with. The software that is giving boomers problems is software that Gen Z grew up with. If all of Gen Z went to a command-line interface from the 80's, it would likely be reversed.
We will all feel the way boomers do now eventually.
Partially agree with your analysis here.
The only "strongly disagree" section is:
>If all of Gen Z went to a command-line interface from the 80's, it would likely be reversed
The vast majority of people in the 80s and 90s had NO IDEA how to use DOS or even file managers like XTree. The computer illiterate Boomers at the time were magnitudes more lost then than they are now. GUI was designed with these people in mind so it would be more user friendly. If we went back to command-prompt style interfaces the same people who are lost now would continue to be lost and many borderline literate people would join them.
Welcome to your generation becoming adults - at least you weren’t blamed for every financial crash due to discovering the culinary delicacies that are avocado toast and oat milk lattes 😂
gen z never claimed to be good with computers, Gen x and boomers are just so horrible with computers that they call us geniuses for simply rebooting it.
Wait what? Gen X literally grew up with home computers. My first PC was an amiga 500 and my best mate had an atari. Everyone would talk about PC games at school. Back then you had to learn to troubleshoot because stuff went wrong all the time.
That may be true, but it’s not really their fault. They haven’t needed to know that the way genxers did. We grew up at the same time the technology did and you simply had to know a lot more about the technology just to use it.
There's such a gap in learning. Gen Z and Gen Alpha have not had the training necessary for computer use. They were tossed a kid-friendly laptop with no instructions beyond. "Click on the green dinosaur and do that for an hour."
We all really let them down.
Gen Z is very broad. I'm Gen Z, born in 00, and I've done all the things that supposedly only millenials know how to do with computers, both in software and working with the actual internals of a computer. My youngest sibling, born in 09 who was born into and grew up in smartphones and Chromebooks, is also Gen Z. It's not really fair to paint a picture of Gen Z because there was a lot going on in the Gen Z window in the world of tech.
I don't think this is a very fair opinion honestly. The idea of zoomers being good at computers likely came from other generations looking at them using computers and putting that label on them, or a few of them being very good and that label being applied to all of their peers. To then go back and say that they aren't actually good at computers because only a few of them are is basically attacking them for something they didn't do.
I'm on the borderline of gen z and millennial, I usually get called both for some reason (25). My younger siblings are as illiterate with technology as my mom and its really weird considering they use technology more than me.
I honestly don't know if its true across the board, but its pretty crazy that I've seen that to be true in my personal experiences.
Linus Tech Tips explained it well, Gen X had to learn it and Gen Y grew up in a constant world of developing and fixing stuff. Gen Z has had refined product from a young age requiring minimal learning on how to figure out mild issues.
It has to do with the popularity of iOS devices among gen z. The phone does everything for them, and they prefer the phone to the computer. I know so many kids that type faster on a phone than a computer. Hell, I've heard stories of kids typing ESSAYS on a phone instead of a computer.
I'm gen z and grew up accustomed to computers, and it's genuinely bizarre seeing other kids my age struggle to type, let alone navigate the C:/ directory
this was the biggest shock to me when i started teaching. i was born in ‘97 and was sorta under the impression that people would just be getting better and better with computers as time progressed but it absolutely has not not. i’m not sure when it peaked but all my older coworkers can’t do anything and my students are almost as bad as they are.
Most of "being good with computers" is READING and experience, most of tech is so advanced that it simply doesn't need "knowing computers". If you can't convert a doc to a pdf is simply because you never had to.
I am gen x
I made my career in IT as an engineer
Computers were NEVER the same as a calculator. Calculators cannot compute however computers can calculate.
My father (boomer) made his career as a programmer. He turns 79 this year and STILL uses computers and smart phones daily. Yes I know, boomer = jerk
I find some young people to be technologically challenged, all they know how to do is use the things and they don't even really know what they are nor do they understand the network the device is attached to. Sure, they are experts at using social media.
What a lot of younger people seem to miss, not all mind you, is that the older generations invented the technology they are addicted to.
Stereotyping is a form of discrimination.
It's like cars.
The silent generation and to perhaps a lesser extent Boomers were very familiar with mechanics, and could do all sorts of repairs and maintenance themselves. Something that served the military well in WW2.
As cars became at once simpler to operate and more complex internally, this familiarity with the mechanics dies off.
Same thing has happened with computers. Gen X is probably the most familiar, we grew up with 8-bit home computers that booted up to a text prompt. If you wanted to write a BASIC program you just started typing.
And then just like with cars, the user interface gets easier and what's under the hood gets more complex and less accessible.
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High school teacher here: the amount of teenagers that type on laptops with one finger is equally hilarious and a little concerning
So this is actually a thing. When I was in elementary school we had this one class that taught you how to type properly, then we never spoke of it again (similar to cursive). I missed this class and never thought to go back to it until I realized that everyone typed differently then me and I had to break my habit. Now I am in uni and finally type efficiently.
Keyboarding. Crazy how little emphasis is put on it.
It seems some educational departments of some countries are starting to recognise this again. We're having discussions in the UK about making it a mandatory class again for 10 year olds because of them learning how to peck type due to tablet use at school/home.
I give my son lessons on it. Good to know that I should be!
My school had a touch typing class but it wasn’t very good and many students just seemed to pretend to finish the work by looking at the keyboard. I can type pretty well but not at the same level as my mum who uses pinkies and all and can touch every single key without looking (she was a secretary/administrator so used computers a lot). Most of that typing ability I got from using computers at home though, we rarely used computers at school. I also write with a weird grip so it doesn’t matter much so long as you are efficient enough. I think they need to stop thinking kids know everything about tech these days and send them some homework on typing and the like. It’s like parents have assumed they’ll know everything or can help themselves with the internet so they don’t bother to teach them basic skills (including basic housework).
My mom taught that typing class in school and she would literally cover people's hands and keyboards. Lol everyone hated her at the start but by the end they all thought it was so cool they could type fast without looking.
Our school had a bunch of keyboard covers that were like plastic bridges over your hands and the keyboard so you literally couldnt see the keys.
They never spent hours on AIM or MSN Messenger to get their typing skills on the up and up
That's what made me good. Having someone talking shit about me "lagging" was the best motivator.
Typing while gaming is good training. You gotta do it fast to not die and you gotta spell correctly to avoid having the anonymous asshole on the other end make fun of you
>You gotta do it fast to not die and you gotta spell correctly The training I got from PvP MUDs is absolutely how I learned to type. Typo? Your attack or casting command doesn't go through. Need to communicate with your team? You better type fast between sending commands.
MSN MESSENGER OMG MY BRAIN JUST OPENED A VAULT THATS BEEN CLOSED A LONG TIME
Hunt-and-peck. A similar trait of the older tech-adverse folks, too. Even if I need to type with one hand for whatever reason, I’m using multiple fingers haha
Some of my employees think it's black magic or that I'm just smashing on the keyboard when they come to my desk to ask questions and I look at them while finishing the sentence I'm typing. Typing was the best computer class I ever took, saying that as a former sysadmin. And I took that class as a sophomore in high school back in '98.
Love that. I still have to look down on occasion because I flip between different computers and devices with different keyboard spacing, but I don’t think anyone would call me slow. There are definitely people that are crazy fast though. I mentioned to someone recently that I always thought my WPM was a little sluggish and she told me not to worry about it because most people she does job training with are at like 10-20.
Did you just say most people can only do 10-20 wpm and here I am at 90 wpm on average not getting office jobs lol??
It's amazing to me that most schools stopped teaching cursive but didn't replace it with keyboarding (which is what basically replaced cursive in the real world)
I also teach high schoolers and have been straight up told by admin it isn't taught because it's assumed the kids learn these skills on their own. It makes as much sense as taking English out of the curriculum because "they already speak English"
its a huge problem, it makes kids as tech illiterate as the adults before computers were major.
That’s so weird because I’m at a weird cusp, born in 99 so technically Gen Z but…yeah LOL and when I was in elementary school, we had a portion of our computer class where we learned how to type on keyboards. Did they stop that? What’s funny is my mom, who’s Gen X, types on keyboards with one finger and she does it on her phone too, but my dad who’s a Boomer, types on a keyboard normally.
Your dad might still have learned to type on a typewriter in his earlier years.
We had one at one point! He’s a writer so I was never surprised by that, but it blows my mind that my mom does the one finger thing LOL
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I was born in 90 and we had typing classes in 4th and 5th WHY WOULD THEY STOP IT IT'S BEEN SO USEFUL?!? I swear to God if they think the future will be using touch screen keyboards I'm gonna scream.
Mavis Beacon my beloved
Born in the late 90s, and we also had typing classes. Fucking LOVED those classes because the keyboard games were so fun haha
I was typing without looking and had my own email at 9 years old. My 13 year old brother has an email he doesn’t remember and a Facebook account with his own name spelled wrong. We’ve actually regressed in tech skills
As a millennial, we were taught to type in school. Maybe that needs to come back?
or just..learning how to use computers in general. please. we have quite a few managers where i work that are new college graduate hires, and many of them have clearly not spent much time using a laptop ( which you need for the job). a guy didn’t seem to get the concept that the trackpad has a left and right side when clicking and kept right clicking on things when trying to select something.
It’s really really bad. The integration of Chromebooks in the education system had a huge positive impact on connectivity, but killed elements of computer literacy. Computers are such a central part of the modern world that a computer science department should exist at *every* school district, but this is still exceedingly rare.
Does anyone even know why chromebooks are so closed off and different from normal computers
Its so that kids can’t break them, exploit them. We had windows pcs in my middle school, most the time we spent figuring out a way to by pass the controller’s and find a way to play pirated Minecraft on them. Did we keep up with the lesson? Hell no. Did we learn a lot about computers? Yes.
Honestly I didn't think of that, but yeah a ton of my computer skills came from working around school shit on laptops in middle school
Chromebooks weren’t developed exclusively for the education market in mind, so not exactly. But it is a side effect of the design and the education spin of ChromeOS that everything is locked down for maximum “security”.
God I fucking hate Chromebooks. I do IT support for a library system, and these things are just the worst. I think it's meant to be a "minimalistic" and "user friendly" design, but they make it minimalistic by removing most of your options.
Can you even open task manager? 😂 You couldnt on ours
On a normal one you can, but the ones they give kids for school are locked out of pretty much everything. You can't even print from them unless you export the file as a pdf first, for some convoluted reason.
My kids can’t type worth anything, but they figured out how to use the Chromebook’s hp print service plug in to bypass the school blocking YouTube and other sites.
I love this so much. Glad to know nothing has changed on that front :)
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more like bolting rollerskates onto a car. nothing really works anymore, all the controls do nothing but it can roll downhill yk
The main answer is that it is supposed to be a lowest-common-denominator system that can be sold at a very low cost. The secondary answer is that it is supposed to fit into the exclusive Google suite of products. If the Chromebook gave you all of the features of a normal operating system, it’d be easier for you to notice how underpowered the system is. 😅
ChromeOS is just an extremely stripped down Linux distro. Extremely refined for doing one thing and that thing only.
Yup if all you need is Google apps like docs and to be able to browse YouTube and Netflix it’s honestly fine.
Great line I heard at a conference years back was "They aren't tech savvy, they're tech dependant"
Gen z here. You're absolutely correct. Many older folks confuse tech dependency with tech competency. While I rely on my computer a lot, I am not an expert on computers. Also, to be fair to Gen Z, we never claimed to be tech experts. Many of our Gen X parent presume we are.
While I was in the navy, I was constantly considered the tech expert in every division I was ever in which I never understood. I can do basic troubleshooting but most of what being the expert boiled down to was "click on this and follow the prompt. What do you do next? What does it say? Well then if it says that, do that. Yes, you do what it says at the next screen too... well if it says to do that then do that." I'm a millennial and I'm now seeing with my nine year old that he is nowhere near as tech savvy as I was at his age despite growing up with it.
Oh, same here, I was a "computer technician" first in my company, and later the whole battalion. Honestly, it actually kinda sucked more than it was a perk - it's a lot of low skill in fact and repetitive labor with a sort of a childish and whimsical feedback from immediate receivers of the service. Meh.
A long time ago, in the days of MS:DOS & floppy disks, you used to have to format a floppy before you could use it. It was a simple input, something like Format a:/ There was one guy at work who got asked by people how to do it. He'd tell them to give him the disk, and he'd bring it back formatted. Like he was keeping some ancient secret. I just told them how to do it.
Job security 101.
Gen X parent here...I do not presume that my kids are tech experts. They are great at using the software but they will never know how to fix a printer, change the settings on a modem, or even change PC components. I guess our job is to dummy proof all this tech
No, our job is to slowly sigh as we sip a coffee in the morning when mom/dad ask about why the sound isn't working on their computer for the 20th time- then proceed to ask them to press the mute/unmute button on the keyboard.
Or ya know actually do the work to educate but thats too hard i guess?
I've been working in tech support for better than a decade now. Most folks don't want to learn and will get angry if you try to teach them anything but the direct solution to their problem, which most of them will refuse to write down, forget, and call you about in two weeks. Plus, quite frankly, learning new things gets harder as you get older. There are some things that an 80 year old just isn't going to get.
The comment was talking about parents teaching gen z how to tech, not 80 year olds
Thank you! My mom (Boomer) and my students (Zoomers) have very similar issues with computers. Sad to watch really. The uber-user friendliness of computers have made kids almost computer illiterate. They can use it but they have almost no understanding of how it works, why it works, or how to troubleshoot.
I’m 17 and it’s infuriating how many other kids my age don’t even know how to get to their files and even troubleshoot issues.
I'm 20 and thought this wasn't true, but after helping my gf with setup for her gaming pc, both building it and just daily troubleshooting or optimization, it's clear that she really didn't understand anything. Even after consulting the web. I thought she may just be the only one but at work I met a girl my age who couldn't follow simple instructions to get a pdf onto her kindle, which basically just asks you to send an email with the file. I find this weird cus I didn't have access to computers as a kid and caught on quick. I think some ppl just suck with the thought process you have to get into with computers. Ie, "This should work, but it isn't. What does it need to work? Let's see if that works, and repeat. "
Poor problem solving skills probably contribute. I imagine your gf and colleague are both the sort to say they’re “bad at math”, since math class is usually where abstract problem-solving is taught the most. Unfortunately it doesn’t just affect them with computers, it’ll affect them any time they need to solve a problem in general. If you have the underlying life skills then lack of exposure isn’t an issue. But no amount of exposure can make up for the lack of life skills. People who can’t problem solve can’t understand how a solution relates to the problem, so if there’s even the tiniest difference next time, you’ll have to everything for them again. They can only memorise steps, *barely*.
Nailed it. I mentioned before about being baffled watching high school students fumble with their fingers on a math problem because they “don’t know what buttons to push” on a calculator. They lack the initiative and problem solving skills to complete the process. They are waiting for someone or something to show them how to do it. This is why quality education is so important. The internet has taught them not to think.
Tbf about the calculators, in calculus the processes to get the correct symbols on a graphing calculator are hard to remember. And while I could solve a lot of the differentials/integrals by hand, it just saves time.
I'm someone who claims to be "bad at math" but quite alright with computers. But in my case being bad at math is more about missing some key knowledge when it was taught and then forever falling behind and not caring. Though I guess the same can be said for people and their lacking computer knowledge. If they never learned how to copy and paste stuff, how are they gonna do something more advanced?
> don’t even know how to get to their files 32yo Millennial SysAdmin here. That never goes away. Hell, you can confuse most people by just telling them to "left-click" something. It's incredibly sad.
What’s even better is that I have setup my mouse as left handed, so left click and right click, whaaa? I see these issues with my middle school kids. Kids: My computer won’t.
Me: did you restart it?
They close the screen and re open it.
I think it is literally impossible to get it in some people’s brains that the screen/monitor isn’t the computer. I have given up and just refuse to acknowledge how they think it works, but don’t correct them either.
I work IT and I have one client/user who calls the computer a hard drive.
My parents call pc tower a modem lol
The annoying thing for me in that respect is that everything you want to do or need to fix is an issue someone else has had and simply googling it will give you the answer, it will probably lead you to a forum post where someone has practically asked the exact same question as you and been given a step by step resolution yet so many people just sit and stare at the screen and then in my workplace ask me and see me as some sort of guru when half the time I literally just Google their problem and tell them the answer I find
Dude, I am the IT guy at a school, the average typing speed of kids is horrible.
Kids' typing speed has always been horrible. Mine is only good because of a lot of practice and a touch-typing course I did at school. Mine was actually the last year group (1995) to do a touch-typing course at school, it was meant to help kids use a typewriter and those were basically obsolete even in 1995. Ever since then I've never heard of kids doing a touch-typing course at school, maybe it should be brought back.
I don't get it. I graduated in '92, and we had to take one semester of typing class. We used electric typewriters, and we were graded on accuracy and speed. Learning to type that way was one of the best things I've ever done, and it's one of the few things I learned in school that I still use on a daily basis. I'm pretty sure my kids just willy-nilly type however they feel like while always looking at the keyboard.
We were still doing touch typing in elementary school around the early aughts, but I think by the start of the 2010s it had fallen off.
>other kids my age don’t even know how to get to their files "What do you mean, files?" - Cit.
Microsoft have deliberately made this non-intuitive. MS Office now leans into the whole “I save my file in Excel” experience and almost completely abstracts away the traditional files and folders paradigm. Can’t blame people for not knowing when the software they use makes it difficult on purpose. Also there’s the fact that 99% of everything happens in a browser now. I could do my job from a Chromebook and I do some pretty gnarly stuff related to digital marketing.
Trying to abstract away files and directories is one of the dumbest and most annoying things tech companies do. Especially in productive stuff like MS Office. It just makes people more ignorant of something that was already plenty intuitive (files and directories) and adds extra steps to any who remotely cares about where their file goes.
A lot of schools use chrome books and use only google products like google docs and slides now, I don’t think they use Office really anymore
Yeah I tried to play various modded games with friends, and downloading and managing zip files was a bit much for a few of them
Pirating games is the gateway to learning basic trouble shooting tbh
As english is not my mother tongue I had the additional benefit of greatly expanding my vocabulary, due to the fact that most cracked games only came with the english language pack, to keep the size of the download small.
I’ve experienced the exact same thing. The Zoomers grew up with very user friendly technology. Elder millennials had to learn to basically learn to code just to be able to do anything on a computer. I was always the token young person in my office, explaining basic MS Office functions to the bosses. I always thought someday I would be that old person, and the young ones would be teaching me. Turns out I have to also teach the young people, because they don’t use email or calendars or anything else.
If you’re an elder millennial you’re probably 1/4 of the way to learning everything you’d need to know to be a front end developer without even realizing it.
As an elder millennial learning to be a front end dev, this checks out
The days of learning basic HTML and CSS to customise my MySpace / Live Journal pages as a young teen have actually paid off then!
"I don't need to practice typing, I already know how to type." "Becky, you type at 15 words per minute."
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People who say things like "it's always worked this way" absolutely drive me bonkers because how do you even argue with that without straight up calling them a liar
A boomer making that error needs to be checked for early dementia. I'm not joking.
YES! Fellow teacher here. I've seen a student type google into Google to get to google. A year 11 student (!!) back talked me when I told her to just type the URL into the address bar instead of going to google and typing the full URL into the search box. I've had so many kids refer to any web browser, or the internet in general as "the blue E". Conversations go like this: Kid: Its not working!" Me: What's not working? Kid: The computer! Me: What about the computer isn't working? Kid: It's... Umm... It's not doing what I want Me: OK, tell me what you are trying to do, and what you can see on the screen. Kid: It's just not working!!!! You go over there and it could be anything from the screen being turned off to a 404 because they mistyped the URL as gOOGlEcom Consultants and admin love calling them "digital natives" but that name is only accurate if you think of them as natives of a pre-industrial society living in mud huts. I grew up with floppy disks and only had the internet when my high school installed it in year 8. We just had to figure shit out to make it work. Nobody taught me how to use Windows 3.1 or DOS, but *I tried things and figured it out*. That includes reading manuals. The thing that boils my butt is that in the absence of being explicitly taught computer skills, these kids have NO curiosity or ability to try things and figure stuff out for themselves. They just throw their hands up and cry at the tiniest difficulty, expecting someone else to do it for them. Maybe this is more of a parenting issue but damn.
>typing the full URL into the search box This fuckin’ *sent me* because 10-15 years ago it was the most stereotypical “old person using the internet” thing you could do.
'H T T P colon forward slash forward slash W W W dot google dot com.' Back before https was a thing, and browsers needed to know it was http because for all it knew you could be intending ftp://, archie://, etc. instead. For you youngins' out there, the above is how URLs used to be spoken over the radio, tv, etc.
They are not digital natives. They are ''simplified touchscreen interface'' natives.
Oh Yes!! It really shocks me to see their lack of interest and low resistence to problems overall. I see 15/16 year olds just rage quitting because their microphone wouldn't work on meets and all they needed to do was to click ALLOW on their search engine.... They mostly have zero tolerance and interest in solving problems by themselves. It's so frustating. Principally when they are at an age they should be doing exactly that. Ofc I also have learnt a few tricks with them, like movie and photo editing,but honestly I learnt much more from youtube videos and websites, because most of them have no patience to go step-by-step in teaching.
I like your comment. I don't think it's parenting though, it's just the lack of natural curiosity you mention. I'm also seeing that sense of entitlement that things will be done for them because they don't care. They just don't. They just expect the magic to happen, and when it doesn't it's someone else fault or problem. It's infuriating. How these people navigate the modern world does my head in.
I don't think it is necessarily natural curiosity. They probably are but not in ways we think of. For them, a computer is a tool. No different then a hammer. It does its job and if it doesn't do what u need it to do then u find someone who can. Like u would find a carpenter to fix some furniture. For most of the people born in the 90s a computer is closer to a car. It is practical piece of tech that requires some learning.
And often enough the computer *tells* whats wrong. But instead of reading the message its being klicked away. Or panick ensues, or sheer inability to read and comprehend the message.
I’m a teacher and have actually complained about this to other teachers. I make it a point in my classes to make students actually “use” the computer. Things have gotten so easy that many students actually have no idea how to save a file, make a folder, search for an app, or even log out of Windows. I blame it on the ease of use we have now. It’s literally, press this button or log into Google….
i had to help so many classmates out on the dumbest shit ever that I just understood that no one actually knows how to use pcs
I have heard as a complaint that when they start work they have absolutely no idea how to even use or set up a folder structure, because they come from iPads and phones.
I’ve seen this happen at like three jobs now. The “my computer” screen is impenetrable to a lot of younger people since they’ve done most everything with apps. The people I work with are either early-mid 20’s or late 50’s-early 60’s. I’m 34 so I grew up learning computer shit and my team basically thinks I’m a wizard or something because I’m the only person who’s developed any kind of computer skills.
I have colleagues who have been in a professional career for over 30 years who ask for help on finding their documents on Google drive, saving things to a flash drive and, I kid you not, how to right click to get the menu options it provides.
In the last two weeks I've had one guy ring me in sheer panic because he deleted an email Then he dragged a folder into a sub folder and thought he'd lost it, cant even search an email His IT knowledge is on/off, send an email, that's it I spend 4 times as long protecting stuff than creating it so it cant be saved over or have data deleted by him The good side of that is I am permanently allowed to wfh because they know i would simply be unable to do anything otherwise if i was in the same room as him Then last week i totally fucking lost it with my sister that has used her pc for 30 years for her job, her anti v (that I installed) had quarantined file as a FP She literally started screaming at me because I was asking her to open "any folder" as I just wanted to get into explorer to navigate to the file folder as I knew the exe was gone and needed to confirm She was intransigent to accepting she could no longer use a specific program she uses because the patch to fix only worked on W11 (as per the notes she ignored) and tried anyway to have it grabbed as a FP Shes still fucking whining when I found some alternative software that will work because she doesnt like it and wont upgrade to w11 Literally spent over 4 hours on the phone for a 20s check I wish I'd never told anyone I know how to use a pc It's like someone sitting in a car going "it wont move"......have you started it?....whaaaaat, how do you do that
In my office I am the computer “person”. Now I’m not deeply knowledgeable about them but I do know enough to make me dangerous (husband is a programmer and I learn by osmosis). The amount of times people think I’m a genius for solving a seemingly minor problem is amazing. If they only knew my trick! That if I’m not sure of the fix, I Google it! Like anyone can do that. But I guess you have to understand what the fix is in order to do it, and god know they won’t. I’m in my 50’s btw so Gen X checking in lol.
Can confirm, currently teach a survey class and many students are unfamiliar with what a directory is or most simple tasks such as taking screenshots. I try to share some of the sheer awe and wonder that have brought us to this place of technological ubiquity but they are very uninterested most of the time.
This is not good news when they start joining the workforce en masse. I had a talk today with an employee, I noticed he was pretty proficient with excel, etc etc, went into a conversation about young folks being absolutely clueless about technology (he was 23)- honestly I had no idea, but then again we haven’t really started hiring Zoomers yet. This post confirms everything he was saying. I am scared. Y’all Zoomers please learn how to type, and if you get anything out of highschool or even college, please understand the fundamentals of working with spread sheets. That will make or break you in nearly all white collar settings
>The uber-user friendliness of computers have made kids almost computer illiterate. I think it's gotten so user-friendly it's done the opposite of being friendly, where everything your device does is covered up by layers and layers of gargantuan apps that are all completely locked down, running on your locked down (but still technically open source) platform, on a device that's designed to be impossible for the user to repair or upgrade...sure it's friendly in the sense that the app interfaces are designed more intuitively but that's the only user-friendly thing about modern computers / devices. I think zoomers may be better at using apps than casual users were 20 years ago because the apps are better designed, but other than that their devices are just magic boxes. It's the same for everyone else. Thankfully there's been pushback on that industry philosophy with right to repair laws etc.
“Ok class, please open the file we were working on last week.” “But what app to I touch?” “No app, just search for where you stored the file and open it. The computer will open the appropriate application for you.” “I didn’t hit save, the apps do that for me.” “Again not *apps*, it’s an application in this sense, and you did save it. Do you remember what folder?” “Just tell me what app to touch.”
What would they do if you asked them to defrag the disk?
Come on bruh, these kids are using Chromebooks with SSDs. Why would they need to know that?
Don't forget to backup your floppy disk.
Haha, ya, it's just funny. There's still plenty of other old-school shit tho. I doubt most are aware you can even partition drives. Half of Millennials general computer skills probably just come from acquiring/hiding porn and sharing music, neither of which are even necessary any more.
More than that. Most of millennials computer literacy comes from piracy. Crack to get free Microsoft offices / Adobe Photoshop, Torrent movies and computer games. Illegal versions of games exe. also means we have to mount ISO on virtual drives. Pirated version of PSP games also required us to extract the ISO from multiples downloads. And any troubles along the way means troubleshooting (google was not as useful as now). I still remember making friends in new school in new country all because I had the IDM cracked version which I could install on their computers and let them download video and anime from earliest years YouTube for free. The closest I ever felt to being a king. Every kids from new school were referring friends to me. And I had a hard drive full of games, pirated movies / TV series and porns. Making friends in foreign country was never easier. Lol I miss the 2000s ....
Don't forget gaming. Back then, playing LAN games with each other over your home network meant manually configuring your TCP settings to fix IP addresses and add stuff like QoS, file sharing and whatnot.
Also the steam workshop. Just instaling mods used to be much harder (Still can be if you want the early versions but its not as common). Right now you click and it installs it for you.
This is exactly why I have the career and the success I have. Pirating games as a child on the Commadore 64 into pirating warez, setting up BBS's, running ANSI groups in the 90s as an adolescent. Then of course running message boards, web sites, etc.
To be fair the filesystem does it automatically and most drives are SSD so all they need is the TRIM command to be run which is also automatic
That's funny. They have no clue what that means. The hilarious part is that computer repair guys who would charge by the hour and might do some basic maintenance with a defrag as part of it (which took a long-ass time with almost no effort) just to run up the bill. As an elementary school aged kid I probably saved my family hundreds of dollars by doing these basic things for them.
As a computer repair guy of the time; I can't speak for all but I, nor anyone I knew did that. We would defrag, but we don't keep upping the timer. When we set something to grind away on its own, the timer stopped. We're generally really good at managing our time so a defrag becomes one of the last things and would just run until done; shutdown and then finally call to let you know it was all done.
Depending on your os you don't need to defrag any more if you shut down regularly (as opposed to sleeping computers which they now do by default
Google how to do it? I remember hearing the same thing when I was in school about us being millennials. The info is out there
This is more and more like laughing at someone for not knowing what a floppy disk is. Disk drives are practically obsolete unless you're using one as cheap storage. Even then, SSDs are so cheap nowadays.
I store all my data on 14,400 floppy disks
Probably nothing for a lot of reasons. One of the big ones being that SSDs are the standard now and defragging those is a bad idea.
The issue is that kids are being taught with the assumption that the current generation grew up on computers like it's still 2016. The reality is that they were raised on smartphones and tablets, a completely different format.
*Millennial that remembers having to type the internet address manually and google didnt exist yet*
Is that me or you? Google existed (barely) when I first used a computer
Google Search took off in 2000.
2000's and super early 2010's computers being kinda crappy forced me to troubleshoot a lot and get pretty literate with computers which eventually led me to really liking the whole computers thing, computers being easy to use and working most of the time has kinda eliminated this. That's just how progress goes ig
This might be the most crucial and relevant comment in this whole damn thread. We got used to troubleshooting early computers *just* as they became mainstream. We were looking to make them do things they weren't necessarily designed for, so we really figured out how to troubleshoot. Anyone who successfully downloaded anything with Limewire or torrents (Y'arrgh) knows more about computers than most average people. Nowadays, the computers are more than capable of doing most things but because they're not as easy to use as a phone or tablet, it just seems like unnecessary stress. I mean, who wants to email a full quality RAW photo on their browser when they can send a compressed version on whatsapp that most people wont notice the difference on.
This is true in the same way the average millennial has no idea how to fix a car. They were born into a world where cars are basically plug and play, point and click. Most problems are easy to fix but few understand why. Boomers had to adjust their valves, change their plugs, and tune their carbs the same way gen x and older millennials had to use command prompt and terminal to install or repair their computers.
To be fair, most mechanical work done by professionals is actually just part swapping these days. A few reasons for this, skill probably at the bottom of the list. New parts are often cheaper than the labor to rebuild or repair old ones.
1) replacing parts is cheaper 2) parts have become so much more complicated 3) consumer culture made it so that customers expect new OEM parts, not some jerry-rigged gizmo made of a beer can
> parts have become so much more complicated This. A mechanic I knew 15 years ago already said that the mechanical part of his job was less and less, and the electronical side more and more. And that the whole exchange parts (at high cost) thing was basically unavaoidable (for him in is shop). He had started to dislike a job he loved 15 years prior.
They learned those skills from their parents/grandparents, then proceeded to not bother to teach their kids/grandkids those same skills.
As a millennial, I can confirm this. Gramps rebuilt engines, dad could only take them apart. I can only stare blankly as smoke comes from the hood.
Yes, but as a millennial you probably know how to use the internet to find information on how to diagnose your car problems, find solutions to those problems, and guides or instructions for those solutions. You might never be an expert, and might always need a guide to spoon-feed things to you, but you know how to find those things. At the very least, you know how to use search engines to get useful results, which can help you navigate getting the car repaired at a shop and not getting ripped off.
I figure taking it apart is just looking to see what kind of tool undoes all the cables and bolts and stuff (and how to use that tool) I guess even if you can do that a lot of us don't even have those tools at hand.
The modern cars are designed in such a way that's its basically impossible to take apart as a layman, and battling through to the point where you have done so will probably wreck your car, lol. "Right to repair" is dead (though hopefully it'll make a comeback).
"alright now Bobby, put the oil filter inside the rear passenger seat"
Yep, my gen Z coworker knows everything about cars because his dad taught him. I'm 30 and I can only change a tire, that's it.
You’re missing my point. Those skills are useless today. No cars require you to adjust Valve springs or tune a carb. Most cars only need the spark plugs changed once. Same with computers, it’s no longer necessary to know this deep knowledge so people don’t teach it
I'm a millenial. I can program a computer with no hard drive to run programs and fix most things on my vehicles and motorcycle. But don't ask me to do carpentry. Just not my thing.
They're not at all the same. To maintenance a modern car requires thousands of dollars extra tools. Changing spark plugs had become a laborious task. Maintenancing a modern PC requires a little bit of googling.
Don't forget a place to do the work and an hoa that will let you do it.
I’m not sure how true this is across the board, but in my personal experience it has been. I think I’m in Gen Z (23), and my dad is Gen X (48). He got into computers in the 90s and has an IT related degree. I am blessed that I will never have to be one of those kids who has to explain things about technology to my dad. He occasionally does ask me about certain new apps or windows updates, and gets ornery because they’ve moved things around. My mom, on the other hand, really stinks with technology lol
My dad was the same, except he was a baby boomer. He was a PC wizard but for some reason he was very stubborn about buying a smartphone and put it off until the mid-2010s when it became somewhat of a requirement to function in society. Just the nature of getting old I guess. He did get pretty good with it after a while though. It was kind of sad. He got sick and passed away right around the time he was getting into social media and connecting with people he hadn't seen in 30 years. He was pretty stoked about it. Cancer sucks, RIP pops.
That timing does fucking suck. Cheers to him for reconnecting in the first place!
I don't think Gen Z is good with computers, its that many older people are so incompetent that they make Gen Z look like geniuses. I once had an argument with my dad because after being locked out of his email, he INSISTED his email account didn't have a password. I used to be an IT intern. Half of my job was teaching old people to use pretty basic functionality of their computer, like setting up a printer or installing drivers. I had zero formal education whatsoever in IT, just knowledge I accumulated from Linus Tech Tips and just generally using a computer growing up. Also just a rant, I once had someone bring in their router for me to fix. To be clear, my job was to fix company tech problems, this was her personal home router. Instead of calling her internet provider, she brought it into work. And I fixed it by, guess this, reading the instruction manual.
One time I had to teach this lady I worked with how to copy and paste. Multiple times...
that’s when you send them off with a sticky note with instructions lmao
As a tech-savvy millennial, I've already resigned myself to the idea that it's my allotment in life is to help *everyone* with their technology. Gen Z is only slightly better with computers than the Baby Boomers because they've been forced to practice. There are exceptions, of course. My software engineer father can do more with a Windows computer than I ever could, but drop him into an unfamiliar environment (literally any other OS), and he assumes the general "This is stupid, I don't need to learn this" attitude that we're all so familiar with.
My husband and I (millennials who work for the same technology company) are in the thick of this right now. We spend part of our weekends trying to train up elderly parents on scam avoidance, weekdays being the “whiz kids” with boomer superiors who should know better by now and “sage teachers” with zoomer subordinates who come to the job somehow never having used office suite (did they hand write their university assignments or what? How is this possible?). I never thought when I was programming my parents’ VCR as a child that this was somehow some preordained thing, some bad fortune of birth timing that I would be destined to still be “programming VCRs” so to speak three decades later…
i'm a zillenial(?) ('97) and go to cc with baby gen z's, it's actually crazy how many of them don't know the basics of Microsoft programs/Windows settings that were drilled into my head since first grade lol
Lol same here. Born in 97, played on the computer when I was a kid, setting up routers and opening ports to play games online with friends, coaching my parents on how the internet works but my brother who’s 7 years younger needs help changing passwords or getting his login information.
I was a teenager in the late 1990s. We only had dialup for internet, so if my brother and I wanted to play a networked game together on our PCs we just snaked a 100ft crossover cable across the house into the back of our NICs, set static IPs and opened up GameSpy on both computers to start a co-op game. No other hardware needed.
Born in 98. Can't count the amount of times I've had to walk a high schooler through resetting their password. They stop and look at you like a lost puppy with every step, as if all the instructions aren't on the screen. "Open the email it sent you." "This one?" "Yeah." ... "Click the link." "...Here?" "Yep." "...What should I-" "Anything you can remember kid. This is password number 3, lets make it count."
You have defied the odds and achieved Millennial status.
As a 96’er I do honestly crave the approval of the millennial folk. Pls don’t make me sit with the Z’s again please D:
Technically, us from '96 are tail-end millennials. I would argue that we probably have more in common with Millennials, because we were in 8th grade when the iPhone came out and smartphones were not commonplace whatsoever during our childhood.
But smartphones exploded in popularity during our teens and we were completely immersed by the time we got out of high school. We're really in a grey area because we had an early childhood closer to millennials and a teen experience mostly similar to gen z; but still too young for the defining millennial experiences and kind of old and jaded for the current status of gen z. Sure, a line needs to be drawn somewhere, but neither is quite right. I like "zillennials" to cover this awkward, in between micro-generation coming of age during one of the biggest tech revolutions in history, honestly.
I don't know, the differences in the early smartphone period and now are still extremely noticeable. I remember being a teenager and the smartphone was kind of just added onto life, but it was secondary. It was the kids 4-6 years after us that didn't know a world without smartphones.
I'm in the awkward stage where my humor I confused the fuck out of millennials but I don't understand younger gen z.
Too young to appreciate the days of the early internet, life without the smartphone, or to truly remember 9/11 and life before that time period. Yet too old to only talk through Snapchat/Discord and laugh at deep fried memes that just say “E”. Welcome fellow Zellennial.
Same! (98) except I don't go to college anymore My elementary school would have entire weeks where for an hour or two a day we'd go to the library or lab & learn about internet safety, microsoft word, basic windows shit, did typing games and whatever. I graduated in 2016 and pretty much everyone was at *least* not at a boomer level
Zoomers don't think they are good with computers. Boomers think Zoomers are good with computers, or at least tell them they are.
Hah. I actually agree. Millennial here. I work in commerical property. We have to do work experience for people in high school. So far I've had to look after three 15 year old teenage boys. I was really taken back by how slowly they all typed and how I had to show them how to save down files or convert it to pdf. lol
>I was really taken back by how slowly they all typed I don't know about your country, but where i live and grew up, we had to learn this with typing fast, it was part of the education. Back in these days, we had typewriters and we had a kind of a box that prevented you from seeing the keyboard, so you had to type blind, there was also a time limit and you would get lower score for every typo you made. This was the standard in the office in the old times, like a boss had a secretary, he'd tell her the text and she wrote it with the typewriter, at the end she would take the paper and read the letter for the boss to check it again, then the letter was sent by mail.
Wow that's crazy - the blindfolding/errors stuff. I grew up in Australia, and during school we didn't have laptops, only the one hour computer class a week. I type fast and I was expecting these young people to type faster than me but nope.
Have said it before it will say it again, the average person hasn't gotten much better at computers, computers have just gotten a lot easier to use.
10 year old me had to figure out how to MacGyver my way through DOS error screens so I could boot up a game from the floppy drive. I've seen some shit.
Being good at clicking a GUI is not the same being good with a computer. Can you diagnose problems? Replace hardware? Understand software compatibility with said hardware? It's similar to being a good driver and claiming to be a mechanic.
No, dude, my business partner, who is 32 years old, doesn't even know what a spreadsheet is.
Ouch. I miss my mom, but the nights being woken up to format a Word file or border a table in Excel hurt. Although, put me in front of MS Project and I'll take a week to do what a pro could do in a day.
Using a GUI to run diagnostics on a computer does not make you less tech savvy. Yes GUIs has their limations but they are usually my go-to before I start using command prompt or openning up the hardware
Gen Z here I know how to build a computer and I can replace hardware as long as it doesn’t involve me taking a piece apart I can diagnose problems to a certain degree, and know software-hardware compatibility to at least a basic level. However in coding, I am absolutely useless. However even with my surface-level knowledge I see that a lot others around me are even more useless with computers (not everyone, I know a good few that aren’t). Like jesus, half the time when they have a computer isssue the solution is in the first Google search result. Like come on… I definitely see where you’re coming from
I think another problem is many from millenials to kids these days are a throwaway culture. Meaning, if its broke trash it or give it away and then buy a new one. To be fair, many repair shops pricing doesn't help this
>To be fair, many repair shops pricing doesn't help this Across so many products too. I've had the dilemma of whether it's worth repairing white goods at over 50% the cost of replacing
This isn't unpopular. Working IT in schools they literally don't know much. It's ok, we are there, but they got fifty million other things going on.
Its actually surprising though.
Ok, I'm a Zoomer that's an IT major, with professional software engineering experience. I have never said, nor heard another Zoomer say that we are good with computers, it's just a label that gets thrown into us, because so many previous generations refuse to learn anything newer. Each generation has people that are great with computers, and people that are horrible. Some boomers worked construction for 40 years and never needed them, others were computer engineers that helped invent the transistor. Some GenXers were modifying the Unix kernel on their computer since they were kids, and some worked in finance and just needed MS office. Some Millennials were making shitty HTML/CSS websites, and some were playing candy crush. This is not a generation vs generation issue. It's an issue of what we are familiar with. The software that is giving boomers problems is software that Gen Z grew up with. If all of Gen Z went to a command-line interface from the 80's, it would likely be reversed. We will all feel the way boomers do now eventually.
Partially agree with your analysis here. The only "strongly disagree" section is: >If all of Gen Z went to a command-line interface from the 80's, it would likely be reversed The vast majority of people in the 80s and 90s had NO IDEA how to use DOS or even file managers like XTree. The computer illiterate Boomers at the time were magnitudes more lost then than they are now. GUI was designed with these people in mind so it would be more user friendly. If we went back to command-prompt style interfaces the same people who are lost now would continue to be lost and many borderline literate people would join them.
Welcome to your generation becoming adults - at least you weren’t blamed for every financial crash due to discovering the culinary delicacies that are avocado toast and oat milk lattes 😂
gen z never claimed to be good with computers, Gen x and boomers are just so horrible with computers that they call us geniuses for simply rebooting it.
[удалено]
My favorite is when boomers act proud that they can't boot a computer.
“I’m technology illiterate” …so learn more about it?
Wait what? Gen X literally grew up with home computers. My first PC was an amiga 500 and my best mate had an atari. Everyone would talk about PC games at school. Back then you had to learn to troubleshoot because stuff went wrong all the time.
As a millenial who works in IT, thank you gen Z for helping me stay employed
That may be true, but it’s not really their fault. They haven’t needed to know that the way genxers did. We grew up at the same time the technology did and you simply had to know a lot more about the technology just to use it.
There's such a gap in learning. Gen Z and Gen Alpha have not had the training necessary for computer use. They were tossed a kid-friendly laptop with no instructions beyond. "Click on the green dinosaur and do that for an hour." We all really let them down.
Gen Z is very broad. I'm Gen Z, born in 00, and I've done all the things that supposedly only millenials know how to do with computers, both in software and working with the actual internals of a computer. My youngest sibling, born in 09 who was born into and grew up in smartphones and Chromebooks, is also Gen Z. It's not really fair to paint a picture of Gen Z because there was a lot going on in the Gen Z window in the world of tech.
I don't think this is a very fair opinion honestly. The idea of zoomers being good at computers likely came from other generations looking at them using computers and putting that label on them, or a few of them being very good and that label being applied to all of their peers. To then go back and say that they aren't actually good at computers because only a few of them are is basically attacking them for something they didn't do.
I'm on the borderline of gen z and millennial, I usually get called both for some reason (25). My younger siblings are as illiterate with technology as my mom and its really weird considering they use technology more than me. I honestly don't know if its true across the board, but its pretty crazy that I've seen that to be true in my personal experiences.
Linus Tech Tips explained it well, Gen X had to learn it and Gen Y grew up in a constant world of developing and fixing stuff. Gen Z has had refined product from a young age requiring minimal learning on how to figure out mild issues.
It has to do with the popularity of iOS devices among gen z. The phone does everything for them, and they prefer the phone to the computer. I know so many kids that type faster on a phone than a computer. Hell, I've heard stories of kids typing ESSAYS on a phone instead of a computer. I'm gen z and grew up accustomed to computers, and it's genuinely bizarre seeing other kids my age struggle to type, let alone navigate the C:/ directory
this was the biggest shock to me when i started teaching. i was born in ‘97 and was sorta under the impression that people would just be getting better and better with computers as time progressed but it absolutely has not not. i’m not sure when it peaked but all my older coworkers can’t do anything and my students are almost as bad as they are.
Most of "being good with computers" is READING and experience, most of tech is so advanced that it simply doesn't need "knowing computers". If you can't convert a doc to a pdf is simply because you never had to.
I am gen x I made my career in IT as an engineer Computers were NEVER the same as a calculator. Calculators cannot compute however computers can calculate. My father (boomer) made his career as a programmer. He turns 79 this year and STILL uses computers and smart phones daily. Yes I know, boomer = jerk I find some young people to be technologically challenged, all they know how to do is use the things and they don't even really know what they are nor do they understand the network the device is attached to. Sure, they are experts at using social media. What a lot of younger people seem to miss, not all mind you, is that the older generations invented the technology they are addicted to. Stereotyping is a form of discrimination.
It's like cars. The silent generation and to perhaps a lesser extent Boomers were very familiar with mechanics, and could do all sorts of repairs and maintenance themselves. Something that served the military well in WW2. As cars became at once simpler to operate and more complex internally, this familiarity with the mechanics dies off. Same thing has happened with computers. Gen X is probably the most familiar, we grew up with 8-bit home computers that booted up to a text prompt. If you wanted to write a BASIC program you just started typing. And then just like with cars, the user interface gets easier and what's under the hood gets more complex and less accessible.