My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.
Technology for new generations is really dumbed down, unless you want to learn and get into the weeds deliberately. Millennials know how to work around multiple operating systems and generally also learned how to troubleshoot (of course, there are a lot of millennials who aren’t interested in tech as well). Zoomers will definitely have their own generation specific stuff they will know much better than any other generation.
I like to think every generation has it own knowledge and speciality, and bringing those together is when we as a species grow and advance.
They are just as bad with current tech. Those of us who grew up as the internet was becoming more than just BBS and college databases had to learn the tech to use it.
Now everything “just works” so nobody needs to learn anything. Nothing is made to be repaired so if something breaks you just buy a new one. The younger generations can’t even type properly on a keyboard even though they’ve been using them their entire lives.
With corporate monopolies, more advanced AI, and the failing of the education systems it will only get worse.
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The vast majority will be, yes. We may have grown up with technology being janky but it has been years since that has been the case. People are comfortable with the current tech. Even me as a techie will often reach for the thing that I know how to use rather than going through the process of learning something new. I largely just want shit to work.
I’m a primary school teacher, not related to computers, but every year kids are getting measurably worse with coins and money. I can give quite a few 9 year olds a few coins, and they would have a seriously hard time quantifying the amount. It’s funny the parents come to me saying their kid needs to be extended, but I’m just here saying “bro, your kid can’t even buy himself an ice-cream.”
Absolutely. They will try to plug keyboards and screens into the neuralink chip.
The way some of my older millenial and x-er friends are reacting to AI I sort of wonder if that’ll be the dividing line between generations. Someone in their 40-50s can probably afford to ignore AI in the coming years but a zoomer ignores it at their own peril. I bet there’ll be millenials in a couple decades complaining about how it’s crazy the youths have ‘AI friends’.
Yes. Because I already take tech support calls/chats from them while working at an ISP. There was a very limited sweet spot where SOME kids became computer literate. Then smartphones happened. It’s all been dumbed down again. People call the Internet “WiFi” and have little to no understanding of how anything works.
“I’m working from home on my MacBook Air!”
Absolute madness. Trust me. They’re mostly very dumb already.
Seems like people born from mid 70s to mid 90s are peak technology nerds. Before and after… not so much. And with current trend of dumbing everything down it will stay this way
My daughter has this issue with others in her class - she grew up with me and the computers and games I got for her, and she was ahead of her classmates in IT from the start. Some others had never used a mouse before - at age 11.
Work tech retail, a lot of young people don’t know shit about any tech tbh
It’s because everything is now UI driven and done for them. They didn’t have to debug or solve computer issues. It’s a sad state of affairs that the better technology gets the less the population understands it. I’d say, with respect to this post, millennials may be the only generation that can truly problem solve tech, both past and future.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing
Not sure why this got downvoted. Things “just working” have a lot of upsides too: saving time, better accessibility, etc.
I think so too, but oh well, people disagreed and that’s okay :D
No one is saying things should not just work. The problem is they still break sometimes and people have no idea what to do because it’s rarer now. Also when you get into the business world, you need to use an actual computer to do work. A tablet is not going to cut it. Tablets are mostly for consuming/using, not creating. It’s a lot easier if you know how to use a computer to do that (Windows, Mac, whatever but you need to understand that basics).
It really depends on the kind of work you do. My mindset is, if you’re interested in it, invest time in learning about it. If not, then not. We don’t have to go all “kids these days…” or look down on people who aren’t as interested in techology as we are.
I don’t really. I was just explaining the reasoning there. It is still important to know how to use a computer. That said, I’ve worked in IT and many people of all ages are pretty terrible with tech anyway lol.
They don’t know how to troubleshoot tech. Gen X and early millennials had to get things to work far more often than later generations. Today most things just work.
Even beyond troubleshooting.
Basic things I’d expect people to know:
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What and HDMI cable is
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what an Ethernet cable is
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That Samsung isn’t the only Android manufacturer
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That different tablets are different shapes/sizes and hence use different cases (seems like common sense to me but apparently not)
Etc…
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I work in tech and it’s honestly exhausting trying to keep up. I already feel this way tbh, it’s a non stop procession into the future.
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I think it very much depends on what industry you’re in.
Boomers are not bad with technology, at least not boomers working in tech… It’s the younger guys with ipads that have no clue how anything works. :)
One teenager I met wanted to be a data scientist and had a running jupyter notebook but couldn’t write a simple python loop on his own.
I asked him why, and he said he wasn’t interested in learning that, he just wanted to do AI easily and get quick results. It was all about getting to the end result as quickly as possible and skipping the foundations.
This is the YouTube generation. Very impatient people. And you actually need patience to learn more difficult things…and you have to be OK with feeling stupid too.
You say YouTube generation I say they’re just learning how to be good capitalist. Do something easy and get quick results? You just described how everything is done these days. It’s not them, it’s us. They’re learning it from us.
Maybe. It was a different time when we grew up. We had time to understand tech because there wasn’t much distinctions. I remember having 2 TV channels and there was no handheld devices or mobile phones.
Now tech is everywhere. So they don’t have “time” to focus on learning it well, because they want to make money, not learn things deeply.
It seems like my generation (Gen Z) is a lot worst with technology than millenials. Most of my generation don’t know simple stuff like how filesystems and directories work or how extract a zipped folder. I blame the usage of phones as the primary computer and really dumbed down software that dosen’t allow any sort of self troubleshooting or configuring.
Millennials had to learn how to handle technology from the ground up, recognizing file extensions to avoid viruses from the wild jungle that were Limewire/eMule for exemple. Troubleshooting software and hardware, navigating an untethered web. As technology and intuitive tools arose, the need to develop this knowledge disappeared mostly, that is the bad side of progress.
Even more so when millennials had to help their parents for that, whereas the following generation didn’t have to, except for specific cases.
I’m already one of these millennial who become a boomer.
I’m for the regulation of social media with age restrictions or restricting access to smartphone for the youngest.
When I see the damage of both of them on the young generation and at school, we can’t close our eyes on the issues. We need to act and fix them.
I am an older millennial born in 83 and I’ve been in IT for about 21 years now and grew up building and fixing PCs for everyone. I think the newer generation is going to be the ones that need the most help. Might be anecdotal but in my years in IT at first it was the older folks with all the problems taking on and using tech. Now it’s the younger kids coming in. In my opinion it’s the way we consume tech now. All tech in the 80’s - early 2000’s required a lot of tinkering and figuring out I always figured the older folks were just set in their ways and didn’t want to learn anything new. My first 15 years in IT I always heard people say “I’m not a computer person” as an excuse to not knowing how to change a signature in outlook, an app they’ve been using for a while, or some other basic business app everyone should know how to use.
Now consumer tech just works. Out of the box you don’t need to tinker or do shit to the stuff. Younger gen is coming us used to shit just working and when anything goes wrong they don’t do well with troubleshooting also companies make anything beyond basic troubleshooting nearly impossible without them so most just don’t try to figure shit out. This type of behavior is getting worse now people get tech that can do a few hundred things and they only use it for two of the few hundred and now you are stuck trying to explain how to do basic tech tasks to an end user who is just going to forget it an hour or so later.
I’ve noticed this with IT employees and the rest of the business. Maybe I’m just a salty IT guy but I do cyber security now and the tech skill levels are just bad and it causes me grief on a regular basis.
I feel this is very similar to working on a car. Back in the day they fixed those things up until they crumbled to dust. Pretty much EVERYONE’S dad knew how to do at least a little something on the car. But I didn’t. The car was just a tool, not a hobby, my dad would fix things when they went wrong and sometimes I’d help and learn a bit, but other than that, I had it repaired or tagged it for a new one.
Cars were always there and easily accessible, but I had to learn DOS to play video games! Computers are now our dad’s cars.
I think this is an apt analogy in more ways than one!
Older cars, you really did have to keep messing with them to keep them running and if you had to go to the mechanic every time, it would be too expensive, so it was almost a necessity. Just like with computers 2 decades ago.
These days you hear of people who drive a Honda for 100,000 miles without even changing the oil once and it just keeps running somehow. Why bother learning to fix something like that?
100% this.
I have even noted a huge deterioration since I have been in the IT industry, and that’s just been since the mid 2000’s
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People have no idea how to do basic process of elimination troubleshooting anymore.
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They have no ability to look at logs and extrapolate what could be going on.
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They don’t understand how to use a search engine effectively anymore or how to rapidly filter through large amounts of information to find answers (I have no idea why)
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The ability to understand how the various bits of tech actually work together and how this is happening seems to be getting more and more lost. So then which things fail people have no idea where to start.
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More and more products as you said “just work”… Until they don’t and give you jack shit to go on.
Basically just “oh… It didn’t work, try again later” nothing is more infuriating than something not working and also giving you no information to troubleshoot, it’s why I am basically allergic to anything made by Apple in particular but this is becoming more and more the standard.
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My wife and I regularly joke that one day we’ll harass our kids to help us with our neural interfaces but I don’t think that sort of thing will happen any time soon.
When I was a kid in the 80’s a lot of people could already afford computers. They weren’t so cheap that everyone had them but they were affordable to a fair number of people if they really wanted one. A C64 cost $595 at launch, that’s under $2,000 in today’s dollars.
The biggest barrier to computers were that they weren’t “user friendly”. If you wanted to play a simple video game you needed to know some basic command line instructions. When I wanted to set up my first mouse for my 8086 it involved installing drivers and editing config.sys and autoexec.bat. You couldn’t really do anything with a computer those days unless you were willing to nerd out.
At the same time, nerding out on a computer could easily get you deep into the guts of your computer in a functional way. I learned that the only way I could play video games at night was if I opened up the computer and disconnected the speaker wire so it wouldn’t alert my parents. I also learned that I could “hack” Bards Tale by opening up the main file with debug and editing it so that the store would sell an infinite number of “Crystal Swords”.
Today there are 2 cell phones for every human on earth. Kids walk around with supercomputers in their pockets. But they’ve become so “user friendly” that you barely even need to be literate to operate one. That’s generally a good thing but it removes an incentive to figuring out how the stuff works. Most people only bother with that if they’re having some trouble getting it working in the first place.
At the same time it’s gotten much harder to make changes to your computer. The first Apple was a pile of circuits you needed to solder together. You can’t even remove the battery on a modern one (without jumping through a lot of hoops). If you edit some of your games it’s more likely to trigger some piracy or cheat protection than to let you actually change it.
There are still large communities of computer nerds but your average person today basically treats computers like magic boxes.
I’d expect that kind of gap in other areas. I’d take 3d printing as an example. You can get one now for a few hundred bucks. They’re already used in industry but, at this point, they’re still very fiddly. The people who have them at home are comfortable doing stuff like troubleshooting, flashing ROMs, wading through bad documentation and even printing custom upgrades for their printer.
