I’m an older zoomer but still a zoomer. Its a crazy dynamic seeing people my age and younger just not getting IT stuff. There’s a high ratio of older to younger people where I’ve worked in IT too.
The challenges thst existed to use technology no longer exist, so there is no longer a reason to look under the hood for most people. It’s like how a lot of generations after boomers don’t know about how to change a tyre or spark plugs etc, cars got more reliable and industries created services to stop you needing to worry about that stuff.
As a kid I remember WANTING to play games with a friend on PC, he knew we needed a null modem cable and we went to pc shop 2 towns over got one and tried to figure out how to play together using it. Then when the Internet came out and we had to fight against Internet connection sharing so one computer could share Internet with friends pc. Trying to use no-cd patches just so we didn’t need to keep grabbing cds to play games etc.
There were so many things you learnt back then but it was because we had no alternative, I get why tech knowledge has vanished and I don’t blame them, they have had no need to solve the same problems and haven’t grown with technology, it’s been already established and they have had no need to concern themselves with it.
Problem is the working world still heavily needs PC skills and basic analytical ability so there needs to be more focus on those old “computer driving license” style courses so people can certify they know how to find a file and end task when something hangs.
The paradigm has changed. The rift between PC and smart phone. Is it really a surprise? My 18yr step kid can at least type on a keyboard with proficiency. Beyond that and installing games in steam, he’s lost outside of that. Both I and his mom work in IT. We try to shore up the gaps, but it seems the ‘kid’ actively refuses to learn.
People are going to start asking AI to rotate PDFs for them, just like people started asking ChatGPT to do math; it’s a terrible idea but will probably work 80% of the time, and that’ll be good enough for most people.
The difference is that aged people tend to forget their training more. I’m not worried about the youngins.
An unfortunate consequence of developers playing to the lowest common denominator of users for the last twenty years. Everything has been designed to be as easy and intuitive as possible for mobile, and troubleshooting skills have suffered as a result.
Not to mention that phones are crazy powerful and can do virtually everything these days, so fewer and fewer people are buying PCs.
If the general population is indeed “going backwards” in regards to tech literacy, it seems like demand for IT services is going to spike in the coming years. Good thing to keep in mind for young people choosing a career path!
My most recent job hunt has me thinking the same. I used to be a dime a dozen, and young folks were real and serious competition in the job market, but I’ve been in IT since before the .com crash and now my skills are once again becoming unique.
I’ve been raising my kids, warning them about the shit state of IT. Maybe I should have been nerding them harder.
I will say, I would not want to be a software developer right now, but systems support is generally pretty stable (and less likely to be replaced by AI any time soon)
Yeah, I’m a fancy bricklayer these days…
I would point out that while general computer use has gotten easier, doing anything advanced has gotten much harder.
I’m glad my grandma can send memes, but I can’t figure out where an app is saving my files because everything is a walled garden!
Lifelong Android user here. I don’t know where an app saves its files (not to personal folders, but app-private folder) even it’s rooted. I’m glad this protects me from malwares but it also forbids me to put my device in full control.
I almost added this as a point in my original comment, but you’re absolutely right, and its happening in other industries too (auto, for example). Its really tough to troubleshoot things you lack the permissions to fix.
i think its more complex than this.
people wont know what to do/wont bother if a simple google search doesnt inmediatly has what they want in the first link.
Developers don’t decide that. Blame UX folk for making things simple.
As a UX person often my job is to implement somebody else’s vision rather than being able to design something that makes sense.
As long as you treat yourself as a pixel pusher, this is a side effect. When you understand that you are a mirror for ideas, you will empower yourself.
“Listen boss, I know you wanted me to create it in a certain way, but I am not a pixel pusher alright?! I am a mirror of ideas, so I made something completely different from what you pay me for, what do you mean I’m fired?”
If you say it that way, then yes, even the nicest person will call you a cunt and fire you. If you ask questions, as a user, and showing patterns that support your thesis, this becomes a conversation, rather than a “do it that way”.
edit: People are not all knowing. Once you start asking the right questions, you’ll see that - “Ok, and what happens when the user presses this? And what happens if they delete that?” It’s obviously a very abstract example, but if their ideas can’t stand a single user test, then they shouldn’t be surprised if the feature flops.
I agree in principle but when I’m building something I’m normally 3 - 5 people removed from the people who want it. It’s hard to push your ideas back through project managers, project engineers, program managers, presale engineers, contract managers, feed managers and then onto the actual company that asked you to implement the “solution”.
That’s a problem, I agree. I feel privileged then, because I actually get to research, and interview, and split test. It was a long battle, I’ve been trying to build that culture for a good 5+ years. Once the features started flopping, I started by doing 2 prototypes - one, based on the PRD from the product team and another, based on my personal research. I had to work 12, sometimes 15 hours a day, but when, instead of showing problems, I was showing solutions, without the “i-told-you-so”s, and when I made it clear that I care about the product’s health alone, that’s when I became the mirror. I reckon it’s not an industry term, but it’s what I like to call it - product presents their idea, you reflect it, and more often than not they do not like what they see. That’s when the real work starts.
I meant it a more general sense as anyone involved with the software development life cycle, but I see your point, good catch
Training some younger people at work: “click the cog in the corner to pull up the settings”. “What’s a ‘cog’?” Some things people miss out on life when you’ve never seen a Jetsons episode.
I always call it a gear.
Cogs are typically square tooth, gears have involute teeth.
The definition online says that the teeth of the gears are cogs, which I’d never heard of before.
Me neither. We were taught cogs were those janky gears for certain tasks, while a true gear had geometry for smooth engagment
I’ve never seen an icon of a single cog. Multiple cogs on a hub forming a gear, sure, but never just a cog.
Huh? The single cog is the standard for settings menus. Just looking at three random apps on my phone, they all had single cog icons.
cog
noun
ˈkäg
1 : a tooth on the rim of a wheel or gearCan you share an image of what you describe as a single cog?
It can also be used to mean a singular cogged wheel
Not according to the dictionary, or my masterful command of English
It’s splitting hairs, but that would technically be a cogwheel. The actual cogs would be the teeth around the wheel.
If you have a cogwheel with a broken cog, it would be accurate to say “the cogwheel is missing a cog.” That doesn’t mean the entire wheel is missing from the system; The system is only missing a single tooth.
My bad, I was using gear and cog interchangeably. Didn’t realize it could also mean just a tooth.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Look up cog in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
A cog is a tooth of a gear or cogwheel or the gear itself.
If you have an android phone, the settings icon is a cog.
To be precise, that’s a cogwheel. There are six cogs around the cogwheel in your image. The word “cog” refers specifically to the teeth around the wheel, not the wheel itself. The cogwheel may be colloquially called a cog, but it’s technically inaccurate; If you told a watchmaker that their watch was missing a single cog, it would have a very different meaning than if you told them it was missing a single cogwheel.
That’s a gear with six cogs.
That’s not a cog, it’s a sprocket! George Jetson works for Spacely Sprockets.
I was thinking of the competitor: Cogswell’s Cogs!
I just described a cog as a circle with teeth and my son thought it was funny to call the sticky out bits as teeth.
I’m just hoping he doesn’t ask about crenellations next.
Cogs are gear teeth.
Did these kids grow up not using computers at school? When I was in school (1999-2013) we had both Mac and Windows desktops that we used during library visits, computer lab, and art periods. Did schools just replace that hardware with iPads? Writing/editing an essay, manipulating a photo, drafting shop drawings, or learning to code on a tablet sounds like a fucking nightmare.
From what I’ve seen, they each get a Chromebook at school so they eventually learn to type but are generally getting the tablet app experience
Yeah, we got Chromebooks, with predownloaded stuff on them (hell, our School policy probably PREVENTED us from downloading anything…) or you just used Chrome browser for everything. We definitely weren’t allowed to use terminal either. The extensions store was blocked/didn’t allow downloads.
Chromebooks aren’t built for storage and performance, they’re made for the cloud. So anything that you wouldn’t encounter on Chrome/Google Drive means they have zero knowledge of it.
I think the last time I remember using tablets was like 2nd grade to do math games. But that could’ve changed.
You were also punished/heavily discouraged from using personal laptops instead of school issued Chromebooks, cause they wanted to ensure you had no issues completing work and that you weren’t cheating on assignments and tests. So students were literally forced to use them.
Tablets… in use at 2nd grade…
Damn. I know whether to call you a baby or call myself a geezer anymore.
The Internet itself didn’t even become widely available until I was in 4th grade or so. Windows 95 was only a year old when I got my very first access to any computing device beyond a very simple calculator.
Being “online” wasn’t a permanent status, it only applies for as long as you were allowed to tie up a phone line.
I could say more, but you’ve heard a bunch of back in my days already probably.
As far as I have been led to believe they replaced a lot of interfacing with apps and walled gardens. My work, for example, buys a whole office suite from microsoft. I imagine schools buy preloaded machines from Pearson or whatever.
Lot of boomer-like fist shaking in these comments.
Newer generations are going to find different things to excel at, and they’ll inevitably give up on some of the old ways.
Companies used to train workers, now they just complain that workers aren’t pre-trained by some magical process. (And millennials are old enough that we’ve forgotten how dumb we were in our 20s.)
I was teaching flight school by the time I was 23. I started studying the books at 14 and started flight school in earnest at 16. It’s called teaching adolescents to do shit.
I work on a help desk. We hired multiple Zoomers and they literally don’t understand how computers work. They don’t know what the registry is. Or what POST means. Or how to properly back up a user’s data without using automated software.
They’re fucking dumb. Nice. But dumb.
To be fair, I’m a millenial who’s fairly tech savvy and I barely know what POST means. Then again, I don’t work in IT.
To be fair, POST could mean a number of things. Are we talking in a webserver context? BIOS context? The POST Office?
Why would someone on a help desk be expected to know what POST is? A software engineer, sure, but helpdesk? If it’s needed knowledge…that’s what training is for. Businesses’ expectation that people will come into the job already knowing exactly how you do things and never require on-the-job training is absurd.
Yes, helpdesk should know the basic steps that happen when you power on a computer.
Do you think that’s what he meant by POST? Could have meant data delivery through http? Do you think they should know that one too?
That’s not one helpdesk needs to know, unless you’re in a specific niche where it’s relevant to how your normal users interact with your product. (For example, some backend service, where your users are web devs)
Guessing they’re talking about Power-On Self Test rather than the HTTP verb. I’m assuming you were thinking of the latter given you mentioned a software engineer.
I was thinking of the HTTP verb, you’re right.
Half of software engineers don’t know what a POST is either
Software engineer here, can confirm I’ve never received anything by post in my life, it’s always couriers. My assumption is that post stamps are boomer NFTs.
Ah, but postage stamps are completely fungible.
As opposed to images on the internet… XD
If anything it would actually take more effort to replicate a physical stamp now that I think about it.
Tech obsessed weirdos are struggling to realise that some people are like them.
Xennials are fascinating to watch navigate through tech hurdles. They have a custom built toolbox built purely through trial and error.
I think you misspelled experience.
ouch.
As an autodidact xennial, I’ll take that as a compliment.
DOS, Windows, all the format C:'s in my time, it’s all been trial and error as you say, because there weren’t really anything on the line in the 90s and early 00s.
Absolutely a compliment. It took me many months of research to figure out what PC parts to buy in the late '90s. Now you can easily piece something together in a day.
Oh god I feel seen
anyone who has never experienced the joy of destroying hardware with a misplaced address access is, at best, translucent. magic blue smoke or bust.
True, and Alpha are even worst, most of them never touched a real keyboard, only use 2 thumbs on a phone. Don’t tell them about windows (or/mac/linux) or what is a UI or how to use a mouse and navigate in a OS, they don’t get double click or right click, resize a window, minimize a window (OMG THE WINDOW IS GONE!!!) it’s impressive.
I have seen a lot of late Z/early Alpha who cannot make some special characters on a keyboard like " or $ or even worst using AltCar. Using Word to write a letter, using keyboard shortcuts, etc. they are completely clueless with computers.
Look I don’t doubt you’ve met these people but it’s not everywhere. Here in Australia the kids still learn this at school.
My daughter is in primary school and they’ve learned to use a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software etc.
So they can all use a keyboard and mouse and she’s done some school projects as PowerPoint slideshows.
Oh, you mean characters that are actually on the keyboard. I thought you meant stuff like ‘Δ’ or ‘°’
I still remember looking up alt codes on the character map.
I haven’t had to represent degrees in decades, but for some reason I remembered the code being 0961. According to this page it was 0176. What a classic blunder!
A good way to get a feel for how these Alpha kids probably feel is to use something un-Windowsy like RiscOS. I felt similarly helpless
Me and a classmate were absolutely stunned when we saw this girl typing in her password, and using Caps Lock to do uppercase letters instead of shift. We looked at her like, “WTF are you doing?” And she seriously did not know what the shift button was for.
I just don’t know how nobody showed or told her this before, and we’re in college…
