Don’t blame the people, they often cant get a mobile and tablet and computer… blame the awful corporations who made everything an app and pushed locked down mobile and tablets environments
Then get a laptop and a phone. No one needs a tablet.
Then they get a chromium based laptop because those were the most affordable ones they can get.
Appification was generalized and its not ppls fault for growing up in that environment, especially if their parents were not big into computers and couldn’t tell the difference.
My favorite:
“Where did you save the file?”
“I saved it in Excel”
The key concept they’re missing a lot of the time is that software sits within the file system and not the other way around.
This is largely because apps hide this and data is generally stored in one place on your phone (the downloads folder).
Best way to fix it - have 1–2 lessons entirely devoted to finding shit on their computer. My favourite activity is “ok, save your word file, close word, you now have 10 mins to find that file without opening word”.
I’d at least start them with something simple like Paint or Notepad. Once they have that down, then you can throw the disaster that is the MS Office file save dialog at them.
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!
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.
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.
I meant it a more general sense as anyone involved with the software development life cycle, but I see your point, good catch
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.
just want to add, it’s not the zoomer’s fault.
fuck the corporations who’ve deliberately turned our living computers into soulless commercial brainwashing surveillance machines
they were intentionally raised in ignorance because its apparently profitable
It’s their parents fault for not using GNU/Linux
Also schools that thought just seeing the tech used would give you innate knowledge on how to use a computer.
Messing around with your old WinXP/95 computer and then fixing that mess before your parents come home and scold you does wonders to one’s troubleshooting skills. People of this generation never got to hear that scary XP error sound, and it shows.
Fun fact: Windows XP had cool day 0 loophole that saved my my ass. Once I decided to explore new options and I stumbled upon new and cool feature: setting a password. The only issue with it was that I’ve forgotten it half an hour later. I already knew ‘admin’ word so I used it in hackerman style and I logged in and I was able to reverse old password. This loophole was patched with first service pack but I still giggle when I remind myself of that.
Damn! This is some real hackerman shit.
Windows XP’s error sound wasn’t scary. Windows 95 and 98’s were. That natural alarming chime, combined with the angry faces when our parents find out the non-functioning operating system…
Turns out the one I was thinking of was the critical stop sound and the error sound was less threatening. Learnt something new…
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.
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.
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…
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
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!
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.
Gen Z here, in college.
Some of these people are braindead when it comes to tech.
Like, I get if you’re not used to technology because you’re poor/had a lack of access to it, as many people might not have a home computer. So there were kids who were absolutely hopeless when it came to using windows at my tech school because they were broke, and the school only gives out Chromebooks (cause they’re shitty and cheap).
But outside of not knowing a UI and different file formats, you should absolutely know how to use anything on the web, unless you literally lived in an area with absolutely no internet and electricity.
Some people at my college STILL don’t know how to share Google documents correctly, and it’s the most insane and frustrating thing to me. Literally any device with an Internet connection can use it. Windows, apple, Chromebook, Linux, you name it. HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW HOW TO WORK GOOGLE DRIVE?!?!?!
Like many comments have said, devs have dumbed down a lot of shit in the name of protecting users, and people expect stuff to just work without any issues/effort, which I get, but damn, you’ve never simply done a 5 mins search on Google or YouTube for a quick fix?
My hand-me-down phone journey started with a Samsung G Note 4 as a kid, then a old iPhone (don’t remember which), moved to a Moto G Play 7 (I adore that thing today), moved to iPhone X, and now I’m at a Pixel 8a cause I put GrapheneOS on it. My mom got me it as a grad gift cause I hated my iPhone so much for all the shit I couldn’t do while I was on it. I’ve always just liked Android and Windows more for the freedom to fuck up (which I never did), instead of Apple’s shitty walled garden. And now I’m on Fedora, because I know I don’t have to subject myself to a shit user experience on Windows just for simplicity.
But other people my gen who aren’t willing to be adventurous for a bit and even try will never do that. Hell, you get shamed in school for not loving the Apple overlords and wanting Apple deciding everything in your life (green bubble shaming is real, I hated middle and early high school…). We want quick and easy, and we got it, but at what cost?
Mate just my 2 cents ignore overlords and enjoy using other stuff and getting a more global knowledge. Didn’t know the situation was getting this bad, let me guess: they know every single thing that has been posted on tiktok, but nothing else?
Some people at my college STILL don’t know how to share Google documents correctl
They emulate a “files” menu (like any native office software has), where you can download/export it to a standardized format. Right?
Well, for the download/export stuff, yeah, you just go to the “File” tab and click the download drop down tab, and you can save it to the computer or Google Drive. Which some people still didn’t know about somehow but… (Some people never touch the tabs I guess)
But when I mean file sharing, I’m talking like sharing stuff to another person’s drive, or simply just letting them have access to it by clicking a link. To be fair, sometimes the sharing is wonky or really dumb, but it’s basically, give access to specific emails/accounts, give access to anyone within your organization with the link, or give access to anyone who has the link. You can specify if this access link should be viewer, commenter, or editor.
The amount of people who have shared a document with incorrect access rights where teachers can’t see their work and have to ask them to resubmit, or trying to do group projects with people who claim that it’s not working, is fucking insane. I get some of them are just being lazy and probably lying about it not working to get more time to procrastinate, but dead serious, some people just have no idea how to share files correctly. My public speaking class was full of these blunders, especially when sharing a presentation done with Canva, and we’d always have to waste like 3 minutes waiting for them to fix it…
We are all working class.
The working class should hold the bulk of the wealth.
“Should” is doing all the work in that sentence
More work than the 1% will ever do.
Zoomer in computer science here: I’ve noticed that there are two types of people in my age range, you have the people who are really passionate about technology for the sake of being technology and want to know how things work under the hood (like me) and people who see technology only as a means to accomlish a goal like writing a document, maintaining a social media presence, playing a game, etc, and can’t care less about how it actually works.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with the latter, but there can be conflict between the two groups because their priorities are completely different.
This is not unique to technology and you see this in other fields too. For example, you have the car enthusiasts who do their own oil changes and are constantly tuning up their cars, installing aftermarket mods, etc, and then you have everyone else who see cars as just a way of getting to where they need to go, have never even opened the engine compartment, and bring it into the shop when the scary lights on the dashboard appear.
To use your car metaphor, there was a time when you basically needed to know how a car worked in order to own/operate one. I’m talking like the 1910s-1920s. They were unreliable, simply made, manual transmission, hand crank start, and needed a lot of maintenance.
Millennials grew up at a time when you needed to have some understanding of how a computer worked in order to do basically anything.
I suppose the issue is that the car metaphor breaks down because a vehicle really only does one thing. Push pedal and go. Maybe worry about snow conditions if that affects you.
Meanwhile, computers can still be used to do thousands of different tasks and the only thread tying all of those tasks together is that they’re done by the same machine. So knowing fundamentals about the machine gives you access to a lot of capability vs. just memorizing how to do a few tasks.
the problem is that there’s people out there who in the analogy don’t know how to drive a car, defend it by saying ‘I’m just not a car person’, and constantly ask to be driven around when a major part of their job is driving a car. somehow when it comes to computers employers tolerate this
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 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.
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’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?
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.
It can also be used to mean a singular cogged wheel
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.
Not according to the dictionary, or my masterful command of English
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.
I got used to looking for registry tweaks, but I don’t even know what to call it exactly.
The closest I’ve got is: A place for accessing hidden settings in Windows. I’ve made a couple typos in there and nuked an install or two of XP, but I never really changed much personally. Just kinda looked up various ways people would use it to accomplish x, y, or z, out of curiosity.
I don’t have to deal with it anymore at least.
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.
