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I love how everyone is acting like this is a new thing. People have never been able to use computers.
This article looks like it is seriously a decade or older at this point. The writer goes on about how phones can't be upgraded or repaired and go obsolete in two years but also buys a macbook pro.
Much of the article is some boomer going on about how they had no computers and they know computers better than people who do have computers. But I bet you this guy doesn't know how to make laundry detergent but they rely on it all the time. Bet you need manufactur-dad to the fucking rescue for you eh?
she maintains a facade of politeness around them, while inwardly dismissing them as too geeky to interact with
Reeks of “incel” attitude.
The entire thing reads like an edge-lord self aggrandizing. If they were an english lit nerd instead of a computer nerd I'd bet they'd write fan fiction about themselves being a god.
I’m going to go against the grain a bit here - while there were some nuggets of truth, there was also a lot of insufferable behavior from someone who’s job it was to teach technology to people who don’t know technology. This person recounted so many great teaching moments in such a dismissive way, it just made me sad.
I absolutely get how frustrating it can be to work in customer-facing technical roles, and to get dismissed for it. But if one of my customers was smart enough to embed a YouTube video in a PowerPoint slide, they’re smart enough to understand when I say “it looks like PowerPoint is trying to load it from YouTube every time you hit play, but YouTube is blocked on our network. Let’s think through some other options”. Not only that, it’s critical information the next time they want to present a video, and it’s information they can share with others around them too.
I’m going to go a bit further and say that kids today are not worse than in the past. It’s been 20 years since I taught computers but the doom and gloom here could have easily been posted in 2002 with only minor rewording.
GUIs got good with the launch of the Mac in 1984, and by the launch of XP & Mac OS X in ‘01 good GUIs were cheap. This brought computers into way more homes and exposed them both to kids who liked them for their own sake and to kids who saw them primarily as a tool.
I think people like this handwringing about kids not understanding computers on a deep enough level for their taste are just being obtuse.
I write software now instead of teaching and I write the kind of software that people should be able to just use as a tool.
We’ve had 20 years where the vast majority of computer users understand latin better than they understand their computers. It’s fine. It’ll continue to be fine.
Every one learns something for the first time. Expert to noob all start in the same state of knowing nothing.
🤓🤓
Computers, math, cooking, cleaning, exercise, eating properly.
It's just another in a long list of things that some grown-ass adults act like is somehow beyond them because that's easier than trying.
Definitely not unique to any generation.
It sure is getting worse, though.
lol it's really not, at all. every generation tells themselves this and it's always bullshit.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
There are objective metrics one can use, rather than basing your opinion on your personal observation window.
There are, sure. And you are going to cherry-pick the ones that allow you to feel a smug and very much unearned sense of superiority.
I'm old and educated, so sorry.
No need to apologize to me, I'm not the one making a fool out of myself.
Educated indeed. Lmao.
I am 28 and i have always thought that the as long as you know how to operate a search engine you can find out what you need. The reason computer people know computers better than you do is because computer people can use a search engine better than you
Good thing search engines are optimized for advertising instead of utility!
I use searx and DNS level adblocking. Online ads are almost a completely foreign concept for me as 99.9% of the time they just never even load.
I remember when Google used to be perfectly functional as long as you knew the right search tools. Now it thinks it knows what I'm searching for better than I do, and that almost always means pointing me towards something someone paid for lol
Is advanced searching any better? I wouldn't know now because searx but when I used it before it helped to keep the results focused.
It's better, but sometimes google will decide you didn't really mean to type the string inside the quotation marks. Advanced search tools used to be rock solid!
tl;drsYou get to pick one.
This is some "I am very smart and sexy" cringe.
Im a 6th semester software engineer student, back in first semester I had classmates that didn't even know how to zip a folder
He was there to learn, right? Is a first semester student expected to know specific programs without explanation?
Zipping a folder is on of the most basic features of any os. It's weird that he was so unfamiliar with computers and decided to get into compsci
Zipping a folder has 0 to do with compsci in the first place. Unless it's a course on compression.
At my job I have to explain to fully grown adults where the Start menu is on a regular basis.
To be fair it doesn't help that Microsoft keeps moving the damn thing.
TL;DR? Why not just go watch another five second video of a kitten with its head in a toilet roll, or a 140 character description of a meal your friend just stuffed in their mouth. "nom nom". This blog post is not for you.
Well played Blogger. Well played.
To me, it just came across as petulant. Ironically, the "conclusion" was basically a TLDR for anyone interested.
Way before "tldr" became something on the internet, research papers had an abstract and news articles had a lead that tells you what the article is about.
I think this article is very good but replacing the abstract/lead by a snug paragraph is not a good idea.
...and the blog owner can't use Let's Encrypt.
And he thinks TL;DRs are for kids with ADHD. Totally egotistic. I'm sure his whole point can be heavily TL;DR'd.
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I was showing an intern how to install a software the intern needed. The computer setup was a laptop with two external monitors. After we installed the software from one of the external monitors, the intern asked “so will this install the software in the other screen?” I was flabbergasted.
I mean... Technically it would.
They even know how to use Word and PowerPoint and Excel
Oh how poorly has this sentence aged in the last 10 years. There's another nice article about this phenomenom of kids not understanding folder structure here.
Back in uni I was the smart guy whom everyone would ask for help, both with tech and non-tech issues:
"Hey nudny ekscentryk, my phone won't connect to the campus WiFi". Oh yeah that happens I said, you probably didn't fill in the login credentials correctly. This was actually rather tricky, because it used [email protected] for logging in and required changing the default password at least once since registering, for database reasons I guess. They tried it, didn't work. Are you sure you know your password? No, they don't. Let's check in their password manager. They have an iPhone, which I haven't used since I indefinitely switched to Android a couple years back. Took me 20 seconds to find the password manager in Settings though. The password is not there. "Oh you mean my university password? It's in my notes". We go to Notes app. There's nothing here, do you use Evernote or something else entirely for that?. They use a fucking Google Docs document for notes. It's not very handy is it? Like you have to zoom in to edit, it's all clumsy because it's a document and the text's formatted weirdly. Not a problem to them, because "well at least it syncs so I can access it from my iPad." Okay, whatever. It's not like your built-in iOS password manager doesn't sync. We managed to connect to the WiFi network. "could you also do that for the WiFi in the other building?". But it's the same network, it will connect automatically to either. They know better: "nah it can't be, the range is too far". I explain it's not the same hotspot but the credentials are shared and in fact since it's eduroam, a global network, it will work in pretty much any university campus in the world automatically. "wow that is crazy, will that also work for my iPad". Well if you log in with the same credentials. "could you do it for me? i'll fetch my iPad". No, I've shown you how to do it, you can do it yourself now. They can't use a computer.
A different time I was proofreading a classmate's thesis, see quadruple x's next to each heading. hey, what's up with these? I ask her, she replies: "oh I put them here so I can easily find each heading when formatting text. If I make any changes I can just search for " and it will automatically let me go through all headings easily without scrolling manually :)". I open the Navigator (I use LO Writer) and it's empty. She wrote an 80-page document without ever using Styles. All headings, title page etc. were formatted manually. I enable the Formatting Marks. Holy shit. She uses spaces and tabs to move text around. Loads of line breaks to move text to the next page. I could tell the document looks off but I never though this was due to so poor editing skills. Or rather lack thereof. You know you're doing everything the hard way here?. "What do you mean?". There are tools for all that you've done here. Like you can use Styles to mark headings and then edit them in bulk. You can add automatic numbering, which will later let you create an index within a second. To move next to the next page you can use page breaks. "Okay cool but this is how I do it". Alright, then you are just giving yourself extra work, what's the point of not doing this correctly once and then never bothering with formatting ever again?. "Could you do it for me?". I can show you all these tools but I won't be doing that for you, as I'm already proofreading your paper factually. "Okay whatever". Guess what, she never bothered and when handing it the finished paper (probably around 120 pages), her instructor made her do it anyway. She asked me to help her with that. I said no, because I offered help before and she didn't bother. After submitting the paper, the reviewer returned it and made her re-do all citations in an, at least, consecutive style. "Oh fuck that guy why would he give me so much work!? You know how many hours it took me to insert all these in here.". It was around 280 citations total, out of 30 different pieces of writing. She obviously did all of them manually by typing out footnotes. You know there are bibliography managers which do it automatically in a consecutive style for you?. "Will it automatically fix what he asks?". Well, no, because (again) you originally did it incorrectly. This one issue was even stranger for me than her not using styles for formatting: one year later we both attended a "methodology of scientific publishing" class, where they introduced us to Google Scholar, Zotero, Impact Factor and other stuff she could use now. We even had a take-home project to create a bibliography in Zotero and she did it (with online help). But she didn't bother to retain it in her skillset, so when needing to actually apply that skill, she wasn't even aware this was exactly what she learned a year earlier. Crazy; she can't use a computer.
https://www.pcgamer.com/students-dont-know-what-files-and-folders-are-professors-say/
Students don't know what files and folders are, professors say A whole generation has grown up with powerful search functions, and don't think about computers the same way.
Apparently this has become a widespread problem in colleges starting in the last decade.
I was right in the edge of Gen Z and Millennial and grew up being the family’s tech kid. It still astounds me now that my younger sisters don’t know how to even look for solutions. They just get me. Having moved out I get texts and calls sometimes. I’ve had to explain that using a computer is a skill that is learnable. I didn’t learn by going to someone else. I had to learn how to learn. That’s the skill we should be teaching kids. Not how to solve the problems, but how to FIND the solution to problems.
The late 90s Gen Z/Millennial DMZ is a painful place to exist. Constant and mandatory tech support.
The ones that is blamed for the ills of society by both the baby boomers and younger gen zs
Yep. I was born 1998. To Millennials, I'm a tiny baby Gen Z, to Gen Zs, I may as well be a boomer. It's odd.
Growing up poor confuses things even more, because I have more in common with people born late 80s/early 90s than with people born only a few years after me. My first game console was a SNES and we had a VCR until we got a PS2, and kept using it well after.
Growing up poor confuses things even more
Yeah this is why generations aren't actually a good metric. I might as well be from another planet lol