There was a recurring gag on Parks And Rec about Pawnee internet users needing Altavista so they could use it to navigate to Google. That joke felt very real.
I can understand parents. My mom was an office admin before computers and she could type 130+ wpm on a typewriter, but she struggles with things like this. Bless her, I'm happy to help her whenever she needs. My dad was a DOS beast in his day but he can't help himself from adding sketchy browser extensions.
Now, when I run into peer "engineers" that use computers like this.... That I cannot forgive
To be fair, I use arrow keys and I've been using vim for years. I happen to use Dvorak, so hjkl is... inconvenient (jk are where cv are on qwerty, h is where j is, and l is where p is). I could remap, but I'm used to other shortcuts.
I almost never use hl, but I use jk periodically. I just happen to use other movements more.
At my job I wrote a lengthy document on how to use vim, like the core concepts of the hot keys (each key has a meaning behind it, text objects and such). I feel like everyone was happy about it but no one used it at all. It's painful as hell to see them fumble on vi and vim.
I have a coworker whose default mode of thinking is to manually type everything. He knows about things like tab completion and copy-paste, but for some reason those two things just aren't baked into his brain as a natural reflex like it is for most people. Like if he has to put a URL or database connection string in a config file somewhere, he'll start manually typing the string one character at a time, and will keep alt-tabbing between the config file he's editing and the email or whatever that has the reference string.
I did a short stint as a video editor at a local news channel. Had one colleague who made it a point to lean back and touch the keyboard as little as humanly possible, and use the mouse for everything. It was excruciating to watch him work. He was fairly experienced btw, so I'm sure he could have done the work much quicker, he just chose not to.
Makes me glad I'm a millennial and had to deal with the times when technology wasn't so "nice" to you. When Windows would let you delete system32 with less hoops, random websites could drive-by malware into your machine, and you could tangibly customize your OS to look completely different.
Late 90s/early 00s computing really gave opportunities to get good at understanding what your computer did, scrutinize when downloading random programs, and made you think about what you were clicking on a little bit if you didn't want to get a virus.
I'll add "it's not their fault". In the race to make technology intuitive and idiot proof we've removed the need to actually learn how technology works past a superficial level.
Very interesting! It’s something I just cannot fathom as a 20-something year old. Granted, I’m a software engineer, but I’m very much like the professors in the article. It’s just so intuitive to me.
Yup the first person i thought of when seeing this meme is my apprentice, he is 19 and has only ever had an iPhone and cheap Chromebook. Even at school and everyone he knows is the same. We work in controls and all the technician side programs are all interfaces straight out of the 90s, I let him use my laptop the one day and he can barely use the menus, cant use any office program, had no idea what an IP address is and if the default com port doesn't work there is no way he was going to end up at the device manager page. Not that most people wouldn't have a bit of a learning curve.
Its the "apps" and web-apps its just one more layer of abstraction to turn your computer from a tool into an appliance.
He'll be fine eventually, he's going to buy himself a real laptop and start playing with it he said and there's the internet to learn anything he could need eventually. (Well not always where we work but hell manage). But I'd have almost the same difficulty teaching a young man who'd never seen a computer before as I would him.
It's like how the generations before us knew how to fix cars better than more millennials. They learned because they had to, because their cars needed more maintenance than modern cars. Meanwhile, millennials had computers that needed more maintenance than modern computers, so that's what we learned.
We found out that one of our co workers created tables of formulas in excel, then input a table in Word to manually type in and transfer over the table data. And of course the same formulas needed to be run through a desk calculator once more in case excel got that wrong the first time. Jaw dropping (when that person was shown about this magical copy/ paste feature, it was their jaw that dropped lol)
One of the few moments I remember so clearly where it truly felt like time had stopped. Rest of the dept just froze, as I'm sure they were running through all of this person's work and designated accounts in their heads just as I was. They ended up leaving shortly after, and guess who had to clean up all that fun stuff. The manually-input nightmare 😭
I let my stand-in scrummy drive the TFS board this morning. In adding a PBI to the sprint he typed the iteration manually (a pretty long path name), rather than clicking the context menu and selecting "current iteration"
This is what training new folks looks like.
Even something as simple as a browser; watching someone click into the address bar and hit enter just to refresh the page, hurts my soul.