theres a generation of kids who don't understand basic directories because of the mobile market and never actually used a pc in a regular usecase.
put in perspective, there are those who are more proficient on a touchscreen keyboard more than an actual keyboard.
I've also found (I'm a teacher) this generation is far less proficient at search. They (generalisation) type a whole question into Google, and read the Google created text box to get their answer, taking it as gospel - regardless of if Google has completely gone off the mark.
Contrast this to a generation that grew up with needing to refine search terms with key words, who can find far more relevant info quicker.
It's hard to get them out of the rut and teach them to be more critical of sources. They're so used to having what they need served straight up for them. LLMs (AI) are feeding into this more - they struggle to believe that AI hallucinations exist until I show them.
Again all this is generalisation - when I say 'they' I don't mean 'all'.
Couple of years back I used to help this kid with computer related stuff, and it really baffled me how he was nearly computer illiterate. He had no idea what make his laptop was, no idea what OS he was on, or any of the specs.
He called it a gaming laptop because he played games on it, but it was a pretty decent school/work thing without a dedicated GPU.
I’d always envisioned the younger generations getting better and better with tech, but it makes sense that won’t be the case as tech moves to be easier to use, more reliable, and less intrusive.
Modern iPads are nothing like the BS DOS/98 I grew up with.
Similar thing happened with cars. My grandpa would take them apart and reassemble them. my dad (somewhat generalizing to generations a bit) were really into cars and engines and would do some basic diy. I know nothing about them and don’t care to learn much.
I think computers are doing a similar thing. Millennials sit in the middle of the adoption and saw it emerge from more of a technology wild Wild West to being central to modern society. We could take the time to delve into details (since they mattered), but now it’s more taken for granted and things are there.
I guess, I’m just thinking it’s some sort of technology adoption thing that naturally plays out in a “victim if it’s own success” way.
Unfortunately this generation google is getting less proficient at search as well. It’s like it treats the search term as a vague idea and any syntax as a non binding suggestion.
This has actually been studied. Turns out, zoomers are so reliant on smart technology like tablets and phones, they never actually learned anything about normal PC file systems or extensions. They literally don't understand what a folder is because they've never been exposed to PC or Mac environments.
I've seen people comment about needing to teach folder and file hierarchies to young people in CS classes because they grew up with cloud services and auto-save. Dunno how widespread that might be.
I've had to teach folders, file types and extensions to lots of ~18 yo. When I ask them where they saved a files they get confused and generally respond with something like "on the computer".
Forget the 30 year old boomer, I present to you: the 18 year old boomer!
I blame hardware and software manufacturers for locking and dumbing down their devices
And there are lots who don't understand what the shift key is for. They use capslock to shift...
I call bullshit on this post. Since Windows 10 you can just double click a zip file and it opens up like any other directory (even if it isn't) and shows you the files.
If this zoomer wanted to open it they'd obviously double click.
So calm down boomers, this is fiction.
If it's an executeable with dependencies in the archive it might not run without being unpacked.
The greentext says "he asks for some files", that doesn't sound like an executable, which usually gets blocked by the mail system anyway (even in a zip, if there's no password on it).
But yeah, that is one way to have it broken, besides Windows refusing to run a random .exe
It's Chromebooks, phones, and tablets that you don't ever have exposure to actual files. Chromebooks especially now that they're so common in schools because they're cheap.
I so wish Linux phones were actually a usable thing so that we could have functional pocket computers.
The attempts made so far weren't very convincing.
Sample size of 1 person
ZOOMERS
Millenials are just passing on the abuse they got from the boomers for enjoying avocado toast 10 years ago.
At least making fun of someone’s tech skills is rather harmless compared to questioning the basic desire to eat something other than ramen every now and then.
We should destroy the economy next that would be hilarious
Yeah IDK, I think the biggest “fuck you” we can give to the boomers is to not be shitty to the younger generations as they were.
Like, look here you cunts, peace WAS an option all this time. You just didn’t want it badly enough.
I have seen multiple "zoomers" struggle with zip files. Probably because they dont know those from their smartphones.
Weird, right? I feel like I grew up in the perfect generation, where I started with MS-DOS and Windows ‘95. We had to KNOW how things worked in order to get games and other software running. Had to know how to install, how to fix driver issues, how to configure things, etc. Even (re)install a complete OS.
But tech these days ‘just works’. A lot of software is one click installs, with no real user interaction needed. And everything else is easily accessed on the web or a phone app. Windows itself is also much more reliable, so even that doesn’t require much knowledge.
It’s made everything available to a much wider audience, but it also means people don’t need to develop actual skills in this area. A good example is my dad. He never figured out how to do things on our Windows ‘95 PC, but he loves his iPad because it’s so easy toddlers can use it.
We asked an intern to write a lettre for a RMA, and he printed the letter, we tell him what he has to modify. He is like "I have to type all this again" "What do you mean lil intern?!?". Intern deleted his file after printing it. O.o
I have yet to meet the braindead skibidy rizz zip file zoomers everyone keeps talking about. I assume I'll find them with the latte avocado toast millennials.
You'd be surprised.
The thing is they tend to be in the same avenues as where you'd encounter tech illiterate people of every other generation too.
While there is a degree to which there's age barriers, it was more a thing going from no computers at all to computers.
Nowadays age means less in terms of tech competency than things like socioeconomic background, professional background, and general interest.
Sports kids in HS who grow up to go into a nepotistic position at a construction business doing sales have roughly the same tech competency if they were born in 1970 or 2000.
Every generation complains how much worse the next generation is.
It's all a lie to make old people feel better about themselves declining with age.
We need to join the generations into one super generation. Why do we let people pit ourselves against each other? Father vs son, mother vs daughter, grandma vs nephew and so on...
Time to combine the bitterness and resentment of the older generations with the can do attitude of today's youth and inflate the numbers with gen x who will just act as fillers.
This isn’t just people whining cause they’re old, Gen Z really is less technically adept than Gen X and Millennials. I don’t know if anybody is sure exactly why, but articles I’ve read tend to attribute it to the tech we use being so easy to use that they don’t need to learn how to do things that would seem trivial to their elders.
Take archiving, like in the example above. These days, you don’t usually need to archive things. Everything is in the cloud, and sharing files is as easy as airdropping them, or sending access to a contact. Most people would look at how easy it is to do that, and not bother learning the manual way, because why would they? They have no idea how to use something like 7-zip or FTP, because all of their digital lives are carried with them everywhere they go, and are synced across all their devices. There’s no technical knowledge required.
The lack of curiosity is what kills me though. The amount of effort it took to figure things out that I didn’t know was far and away more effort than it would take to search with google how to open the associated archive. This has been something I’ve read up on also and I wonder if the intuitive spoon feeding of technology also impedes one’s willingness to tackle the easiest obstacles even if the solution is a literal search away. It feels like offloading their ignorance which rubs me wrong.
The previous generation: "We use to go out and beat up n#####s for fun on a Friday night."
My generation: "Maybe stop calling them that."
Behold the difference between the generation growing with Win98, where everything was manual and accessible and doing it wrong could mean a manual install, and the generation growing up with iPhones, where you're not allowed to change anything whatsoever.
Ease of use. Don't worry about the man behind the curtain. Just stare at your tik tok
Gen Z at uni here. Most of my fellow zoomers know what a zip file is. But some people just don't computer that much so they simply don't know.
However if you're doing a computer job and you don't know that's ridiculous.
That's because all they know how to use are iPads. They don't actually understand how real computers work.
Plus of course there is this attitude that if it doesn't immediately work on its own you should give up and just pray to the nebulous entity that is "IT people".
You wouldn't believe how many people get annoyed that I don't know what their password for something is.
We Millennials were born in a sweet spot where PCs were widespread enough to be virtually in every house since childhood but also not too streamlined and simplified.
We had a pc that sometimes didn't work properly, we had to use the command line from time to time, troubleshoot and look up errors. When something fails we try to find out why and only after a while we give up and claim it's an error or look for help.
Also you know, stupid people are in every generation.
There are tech illiterate people in every generation, but they definitely seemed more prevalent in the boomer generation. In my experience it's Boomers > Gen X > Zoomers > Millenials in terms of most to least technologically incompetent. Always suspected millennials are usually more comfortable with tech because they grew up with it, and it grew up with them.
For older generations, especially boomers, I figure they were more set in their ways and for many (but not all, obviously) it was hard to adapt. For Zoomers, I think it was just assumed that they'd just be inherently good so there were many things they were never actually taught (though many of them learned for themselves because they are nerds, which is pretty great if you ask me). Anyways, that's my theory on generational tech literacy.
I'm a xennial, and i think one of the key characteristics of my generation is that we grew up with tech becoming omnipresent, but it was also non user friendly tech.
We started having PCs young, but we really had to know how to build our systems, it was much less plug and play. We grew up with visual OSs, but configuring that shit was not intuitive at all. Or outright broken (looking at you Win ME). We had to troubleshoot, fix, learn, read and test just to get our tech working.
Younger generations grew up with tech omnipresent yes, but tech that mostly works intuitively - you barely ever have to really figure shit out, fix it or reconfigure it.
Just my 2 cents!
They use magic that just works. They don't need any understanding of the processes because things are so user friendly they never had a rigorous cleansing through fire in order to figure out where things were broken like Gen X had.
If you think it's bad now wait until AI destroys all the entry level skills and it becomes impossible to get experience to master something that AI can't do.
“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment” – Warren G. Bennis.
This really bugs me at work sometimes. I'm a designer and I often have to split up images in several mails because others don't understand the concept of archives. Or even worse: send the photos as "excel image file" (slapping them all in a excel sheet). I even once had a printery tell me my file was corrupt because it was (accidentally on my part) compressed as 7z. Oh how I would love to send files more often as 7zip... But that's black magic apparently.
im a gardener. some apprentice who has never owned a computer, not bcs they couldnt afford it, but bcs due to mobile phones there simply is no need for it, asked me how to shut down a computer. not kidding. it wasnt even some obscure gnu/linux distro, it was bog-standard windows 10.
Interestingly I heard that it's not that they're less technology skilled exactly (I'm not commenting that I'd or isn't the case), but instead grown up on a different platform, notably iPhone/iPad/android instead of a PC.
This has meant a big push by companies to develop mobile first. So much so, some companies don't even have a browser version of their system anymore.
I work with a couple guys that basically aim to do as little as possible in as much time as possible.
I'm a millenial and it seems i've become a boomer, telling these guys to stop building cardboard towers as everyone notices and will tell their supervisor. Then they get angry with me for some weird ass reason while they just spent 3 days doing one hour worth of work.
Our supervisor wants me to get them to work better, but it's 4 of them and one of me.
I understand the mindset that it's the employers task to supply you with work, but there's plenty y'all just refuse to pick it up and get at it.
are you the manager? if not it ain't your problem, and now you have a valid excuse if your stuff doesn't get done. My work tried that shut with me, I just do my work, then leave, if everything isn't done that's a management problem.
Meh. Being young, ignorant and willing to learn in a new job is very different that being old, proudly ignorant and refusing to adapt to how your current job evolved.
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