Do you think millennials who grew up with the early Internet and home computers will be as bad with future technology as boomers are with current technology?
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.
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?
Feel this, I was lucky(?) enough to have a mechanic living at my house who basically told me to fix it myself, he guided me through of course but he emphasized how important it is doing these things on your own.
That guy cannot figure out how youtube works and he's only 45.
I'd say it all depends on how much you had to use something, while the hurdles in software may seem small to someone experienced. those who are first trekking through see it as a huge wall
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
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.
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
This bit, at least, may be at least as much a fault of the environment - the increasing awfulness of search results these days. It used to be you could search a specific issue (e.g., "borked.exe high CPU usage" or "how to partition a drive") and your first results would be relatively well-written sites run by actual tech people. More recently, though, it feels like:
I'd consider myself pretty technically savvy, and even I find it frustrating to search for IT info or fixes these days. The newest problem is AI-written answers cooked up for you on the spot, which are frequently completely unhelpful yet pushed to the top of the results.
You’re not alone. The generation raised on the iPhone/iPad struggle to figure out how to use a “real” computer and everything related to it. There’s all sorts of studies about it.
Nah, it’s a thing. Youngest of the Millennial generation and I can concur with your comment after being in IT for a few years - pretty much it’s either Baby Boomers or Gen Z people who have a tough time with technology, with a 50/50 shot of a Gen X person being either super tech savvy or a technological troglodyte. AI has also made things worse since it can now do some light coding, but I’ve seen some people use it to code out entire projects only for it to not work properly at all or break UI on websites.
I’d argue that Gen Z is the worst for the same reasoning in your post: everything works OOTB, and if something goes awry then they don’t know anything or can’t do things the old-fashioned way - which at least Baby Boomers have the option to if they want to be stubborn enough.
It’s funny you say that. Husband and I are 2 years apart in age. It’s amazing what 2 years does. He doesn’t understand tech. At all. He’s definitely gen x. I grew up being told I was gen x but now I might be millennial, I might be gen x or I might be a weird 2 year micro generation between the two. I’m really good with tech. I can just look at things and generally see how they work. I also started using tech/computers a lot earlier than he did, so maybe that’s why.
also companies make anything beyond basic troubleshooting nearly impossible
I hadn't really thought about this before, but it's a pretty good point. Not just the companies who make the tech, but employers and providers seem do just about everything in their power to get you to submit a ticket or (even worse) chat with "support" rather than give you the tools to solve the damn problem yourself.
And the menus/settings you need to make more than superficial changes to your device get buried deeper every year.
It can be so frustrating. I'm not a tech person, but I can generally troubleshoot my way around most issues I come across. Windows updated on my home and work PC and it rendered the search function unusable on both. So I figured out how to fix the situation on my home PC and it was fine. Came in the next day to try to do the same thing on my work PC and was blocked by a request for Admin permissions, which I don't have, our IT does. I had to send a request for IT to remote into my PC and type in a password so I could click two buttons and fix the issue myself. A 3 minute process became a 25 minute process where IT can now charge my company for the time they spent typing in a password.
There are actually studies already showing this, it’s because they grew up on iPads and apps and everything “just working” or dumbed down. I will look for a source but your anecdote lines up.
Now consumer tech just works. Out of the box you don’t need to tinker or do shit to the stuff.
I have the exact opposite experience , I happen to encounter software glitches nearly every day (especially in shitty apps like Spotify or Todoist) when back in the late 00's/early 10's everything worked as expected (except some occasional Windows blue screens or Linux kernel panics I guess), I guess it's just because how companies design their software for normies and if you happen to use some more advanced features, you will encounter software bugs all the time.
Useful features are removed all the time because apparently marketing departments think that people don't use them, and some of us depend on some things with no real alternatives.
Error messages were also actually helpful back then, nowadays it's just "Something happened" or "Unknown error", good luck finding out what's the problem with that info.
Error messages on android be like "OOPSIE WOOPSIE!!! We maaade abiiig fucky wucky 3: ohhh noooo the isssueee is soo bad we so sooowwyyy!! Pwease, restart the app and if it isn't fixed then go fuck yowsewf!!!"
We need to separate early Gen Z (I'd say 1996-2004) from late Gen Z & Gen Alpha. Early Gen Z was born pre-iPad and mostly used desktops and laptops as they grew up, with iPhones and iPads only becoming available later on. I may be biased being born in '02 but when I spoke to my IT teachers even they said that the younger kids were becoming more and more difficult to teach to the basics of using a desktop OS.
Coming from a simulation software company here, not everyone in my company will know how to deal with servers or IT security and I think it's ok. The programmers and engineers are brilliant, creative thinkers, all highly educated, but some just never bothered to learn this one thing. It's almost offensive how our IT department treat the engineers, as if we'll break anything we touch, but I get it from a security stand point.
As a student, I used to work part time in server maintenance for our uni, that's how I personally got that knowledge. But even people working in the "tech industry" don't all have the same sets of skills or tech interests.
Speaking of security, our company has found that students now account for the largest group to fall for phishing scams. It used to be the older folks, but gen z doesn't seem to understand email. They're used to DMs on authenticated and moderated platforms and they don't get that anyone can send an email and pretend to be anyone else.
I used to use the analogy of snail mail and how anyone can write anything on an envelope, but they aren't familiar with that either.
Ditto, I have to say I'm appalled on a daily basis how software developers I work with are so foreign with the tools they use to earn a living.
Extremely infuriating as well.
i could be thinking this because i grew up around tech but im from 2002 i feel like im WAYYY ahead of the curb for tech problems. NOTHING EVER WORKS and the internet only has solutions that are close to what i need which teaches you how to extrapolate instructions til eventually you hardly need google. making minecraft servers always cause a lot of headache whether it be java not working or port not forwarding. mods not loading or an internet problem causing lag but its a wirlesscard thing not the internet ugh. or just lag in general blah blah
bottom line is im tech support for my friends and my friends are illiterate
You should see my zoomer partner and friend try to work a computer. They all grew up on iPads 😅
I swear I saw a study that basically came to the conclusion that there is a distinct curve in technological literacy where younger generations are used to tech “just working” and not knowing how to navigate anything outside of app-based interface. Take all of this with a handful of salt bc I don’t have source on hand.
This is a very interesting point and I can see it throughout zoomer culture when it comes to the down and dirty technical stuff, but I think there's a distinction to be made between being technically apt and being able to grok whatever the hot shit consumer-grade tech paradigm is right now.
In the former context, a lot of zoomers have already "failed" but that context is the territory of people who reach out to learn it - in other words, the nitty gritty tech stuff will always be for the technical types. In the latter context, I imagine millennials will probably mostly be fine and zoomers will, too. I say "mostly" because we're already seeing millennials start to kind of skip the latest trends (TikTok comes to mind immediately). Zoomers are already coming to grips with not being able to understand Alphas sense of humor via memes. Whatever the next social media platform is, I imagine it'll be primarily a home for Alphas, leaving zoomers and millennials where they are.
Will there be spillover across the board, with members of different generations populating the other platforms? Sure, there are always exceptions.
As far as physical tech goes, like how millennials got the smartphone and zoomers grew up with it? It's highly dependent on how ingrained it becomes in society. Hard to exist without a smartphone these days, so everybody has to know how to use one. Boomers have more trouble because they got it later, but there are plenty of them who are just fine with current phone tech precisely because they need to be for professional AND personal use.
As a instructor of IT I can absolutely confirm. A lot of Gen Z have not grown up with computers as a tool. I have a class of around 20 students, and maybe 4-5 have any knowledge of the various compression archives. I have to give primers on the proper way to save various file types otherwise they'll just create default.config.txt (6) and wonder why an install isn't working.
I thought you said zoomer parents and was about to get really mad and sad at the time.
Yeah, this is a thing. I know a lot of younger folks who don't really have a clue about how to do something if they don't have iOS version whatever or some other bespoke interface. (And no, I'm not a boomer)
CLI ultimately runs the world, and the younger folks who understand CLI are probably at a ratio roughly even to the other generations.
What’s a computer?
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.
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:
Etc...
For sure. Gen X here. I was in IT during the wild west days (90s) and it was glorious!
You'd never hear from (and might even never see) those that knew anything.
Yea I definitely don't expect to hear as much from those who are more educated, the sample group is not neutral.
but with such a large sample size I still find it worrying.
No, I think we'll be fine. It's Gen Z and Gen Alpha that are acting like boomers in regards to technology. My eldest niece and eldest nephew are tech-illiterate even though they grew up with PCs, tablets, and smartphones in their daily lives.
My eldest nephew can't figure out how to use Libby, or how to install unlock origin on his mobile Firefox browser, and my eldest niece has no idea how to troubleshoot or look up solutions to any tech problems at all.
It's frustrating and I had ban them from asking me anything tech related because I got tired of being the free, family tech support. Now I tell them "well, what did the sources say after you researched the solution?" And that always shuts them both up because I know they didn't even try looking up the solution on their own.
They also have the bad habit of believing everything they read online. I tried telling them both that they should look at more than one source when researching important information (nephew was doing a paper on the American Civil War) and they stared at me like I was nuts.
They are the living, breathing examples of Intelligence VS Wisdom.
I think us Millennials will, for the most part, have an easy time keeping up with new tech, even as we get older.
Man that is my biggest pet peeve is someone coming to me asking for help saying IT DOESN'T WORK without either trying to figure it out or even doing the tiniest bit or research. It usually takes one single Google search. My mother in law thinks she has the nuclear codes and she's gonna blow everything up if she touches her laptop wrong
I don't really like bashing or putting the new generations in negative light... But in this case it is true. Late gen x, Millennials, and early gen z grew up with computers and tech that was more troublesome and where forced to learn how to naturally troubleshoot. On top of that we got eased into the more advanced and user friendly stuff.
Later generations where born with the easier user friendly stuff and don't have to troubleshoot nearly as much.
Of course this is also a generalization and does not reflect on an individual bases
Every piece of tech today is made so that it works out of the box with usually a tutorial on an app showing you what to do. So, yeah, young people have a hard time with tech because 95% of the time, it works out of the box.
It's easy to blame them, but they never really had to debug anything. The tech has been dumbed down all the way so that anyone that is remotely functional can use it.
Yea, I don't like bashing my niblings generation either, but it's not just the two of them I've had to provide tech support to; my cousins kids as well. They all act like troubleshooting is an alien concept and panic when the WiFi stops working on their tablets.
Fortunately my nephew's high school has a computer class he's required to take. I hope he learns something useful.
I'm thinking new interfaces/concepts of interaction might be where we lose touch.
Just like the previous baby boom generation had people with a lot of technical knowledge about for example how punch cards were used to configure computers and how to type with an old typewriter, we might know much about more advanced technical software and touch interfaces, but many might skip the Snapchat/TikTok scene and feel out of place.
Not to mention future upcoming things like a Brain-Computer Interface connected to an AI; perhaps to socialize, to create tools / content. Some of us, and maybe you as well, will join this scene too, but I already see people giving up and staying away from new stuff.
We will have a role in the technical side because of our knowledge, but that core knowledge is not that important any longer in many fields just like most developers don't have to worry about machine code any more.
Programming with punch cards was a niche skill very few had.
People who grew up in the 80s and 90s didn't just grow up with tech, we grew up with rapidly evolving tech that ranged from clunky and buggy to completely intuitive. We definitely have a better chance of keeping up as we age.
Social media like Snapchat/TikTok is less about knowing how to use tech and more "who gives a damn?" I care about that about as much as learning about Pokemon. Just toys for kids that I will never need or want to know about. THAT sort of generational divide is inevitable.
It's probably right that exposure to earlier tech taught us different troubleshooting norms. But...To be fair, how old are your niece and nephew? Could be a maturity thing they'll grow out of.
They're both older teens. The younger ones are nearly teens, so I didn't include them in my mini rant.
There's actually a regression where millennial who grew up with pc are still the best at it gen z is as bad as boomers. If it's not an app or website they are lost at even the smallest issue.
I notice this way more today with my job. The people we used to hire for computer support would know most of the things they were supposed to. Today most of the people we hire it seems like they can only follow a script or SOP and that's it, basic troubleshooting or logic just goes out the window. It's super sad... and even worse having to manage them.
Edit: I also don't think it helps that they only get to deal with systems that have been made so user friendly anymore that most options to do anything are just built in or a command away so they really never deal with any of the stuff underneath to figure out how systems run.
I constantly think of the ObiWan meme. They were supposed to be the chosen ones. They were supposed to be better with tech, not worse.
Just like there are exceptions to all boomers being bad at tech, there is definitely are exceptions to the gen z thing as well and I hope I am one of those exceptions.
I think most millennials and and gen-x folks will be totally fine.
I don't want to sound like one of those "kids these days" people, but kids these days have it rough.
I work in tech and old folks, mainly boomers, are usually ok to work with when it comes to tech, because they know they don't understand it. They grew up without it, avoided it when possible, embraced it when necessary, but they know that requires effort, and they're just generally not interested. I get that. They just need some reps and to feel comfortable, and they get it.
Most gen-z folks have grown up in a world where you just click things and they work. As a general rule, gen-x grew up in an era where you had to tinker with the hardware and software yourself if you wanted to do something. As a millennial, I had it easier. Most of the hardware was sorted, but some of the software was not, so you still had to do some configuration yourself if you wanted something to work.
Gen-z hasn't had that. If app A doesn't work, download app B. They're so used to things just working, they have no idea how to troubleshoot anything. In that way, they're usually worse than boomers. Generally a boomer will make an effort to try to fix something, understanding it's outside their wheelhouse. The zoomer won't and just stops in their tracks.
For example, a boomer will mangle the displayport connection on their computer trying to plug their HDMI cable into it. It looked like it would fit. The zoomer doesn't understand they need to plug in the computer to the monitor. The computer is already plugged in to the wall. Why plug it in again? Both things I have seen in the last 3 months. If someone thinks their computer is broken but it just needs the monitor turned on, they're more often under 25 than over 55.
Again, these are generalizations. There are individuals who don't fit into these trends. This is just my experience.
I love new tech and I’m gen X. I’ve learned new tech all my life. What will fuck me going forward is bad UI. At some point graphic designers decided a dark gray font was better than black. All the keyboard shortcuts I used were changed by Microsoft and I’m still butt hurt about it. Still use MS office but grumpy with the Ribbon.
I’m GenX and I also hate the ribbon. 🤬
Consider switching over to Linux so you can customize your OS however you want 😀
Exactly, we grew up constantly learning new tech!
I was learning to use computer during the transition to the ribbon in Office 2007, but I actually preferred the ribbon to the old interface and these days I don't mind it. Out of curiosity, what about the Ribbon annoys you guys?
Lost muscle memory and lost productivity. I didn’t really need to move the mouse much while using word programs, especially Excel. I think Microsoft stated during the transition the top end excel users lost something like 15-20% of their use speed? Something like that.
I actually miss the pop down menus that used to be accessible with the Alt key. Every single functional used to be listed there, albeit some things were sub functions, but the display had both icon and description. Icons alone are kind of annoying.
Ah! The other thing that pisses me off about the ribbon is that some parts of it are not visible until the use initiates a certain work type. Like picture functions are only visible if a picture is selected. What other hidden command groupings exist? A user can go poking around to discover what all Excel can do. Got to stumble into the magic combination of clicks to find what isn’t immediately visible.
Not at all. I'm a late Gen Xer, almost a millennial. I thrive on learning new technology. I live for it.
I am sure some gen Xers do fail to adapt, but at the end of the day, I don't even think it's a generational thing: Some people adapt and keep moving, some people get stuck.
In my experience, if anything, late iterations of Gex X tend to be slightly better with new tech than Milennials, because we grew up having to know how it works in order to use it.
In the days of constant blue screen of death.
There seem to be a lot of us GenX /"Xenials" here in the fediverse already and I think that's why. We don't need everything handed to us in its final form.
The people that were near that X/Millennial transition are the best at adapting to new tech in my experience. Enough access to have a computer in their formative years but not far enough along for that computer to actually worked well.
Same. Except when teleporters come around. You’ll only teleport me over my dead body.
Me too
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.
I actually think the opposite. Millennials grew up during the boom of technology and many had to rapidly adjust to all of that in a short amount of time. That's why so many are so good at it. Gen Z on the other hand has trouble managing folders and files. This is largely due to tech getting easier... too easy almost. The direction of tech right now is AR/VR and my grandma was able to quickly grasp it because the controls are so natural.
I don't think that millennials will be behind in the tech field, but trends? Yes.
No. If anything technological illiteracy seems to be increasing again with the younger generations. They've grown up on locked down systems that don't encourage learning and exploration. It's not their fault. It's the tech companies and the schools who have made deals with the likes of Google.
That's why I'm a big advocate for Linux and open-source software, because it's computing with actual freedom. It's good for people to realize that computers are basically just abstractions layered upon abstractions, but at the core of it is the simplicity of a switch being on or off (assuming binary for now). It's not "magic" like some companies are fond of saying. It's not even particularly complex in itself. It's just a lot of simple parts working together. If you starts to understand those parts, then technology becomes demystified and you can often imagine how the underlying parts of any given system might work.
No I don't think so. I think millennials were in a sweet spot where more of us had access to cheaper computers so more of us had the opportunity to use them compared to Gen x and boomers. The strange thing is Gen z are becoming pretty incompetent with computers in general these days because of how much easier computers have become overall. If anything goes wrong they have no troubleshooting skills unlike millennials who had the misfortune of growing up with OS's like Windows ME. Source? I work in a high school and I see how bad the teenagers are all the time with general computer issues. They would much rather use their phone.
It's my hypothesis that this generation that is most tech savvy. This was a time when you had to know how to use a computer in order to ... use a computer. Today's generation has grown up with the app operating systems. They don't need to know the first thing about file manager or even ctrl-alt-del.
My wife is a teacher and often amazes her kids (age 15-18) by doing "ctrl+f". So jepp, they have only surface level knowledge of the tools they are using.
I’m a teacher too and it shocks me. Even kids who are successful in school struggle to use a file system — usually just dumping everything into google drive and “searching it up” when they need it. I almost never see a kid directly type a url (let alone know what a url is) since they google everything.
I’ve even had this interaction:
“Why are you googling everything?” “I’m not googling this is safari, I have an iPhone”
In a lot of ways I think they’re worse than boomers. At least they’re good at making tik tok videos!
I would argue that's actually a good thing for the average user. Computers and other personal electronics have become so reliable that you rarely have to delve into those tools as an average user. You can actually see the trend of simplification and everything but Windows - Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android are all immutable operating systems where user data and applications live separately from a read-only operating system partition. This is obviously not the case for all Linux distros but the point still stands.
Working in IT, I'm glad to see that despite the move to immutability in the Linux world, I actually have access to more tools than I did on base Ubuntu. blendOS and NixOS allowing you to spin up an operating system of your choice in a container, pull down whatever programs you want, all without cluttering your system? It really is the best of both worlds. Plus I still need a rock solid system, Knowing that I will always be able to apply an update without anything breaking is a huge win for all users. Back to the original point, technology has become so reliable and easy to use that you feasibly can just open your browser every morning and leave it at that. No hassling with clearing cache or anything, it just works.
Some of my fellow millennials surprise me, but you might be right in general
Speaking as a millennial I'm not bad at new technology but I really fucking hate how dumbed down and the planned obsolescence in everything nowadays. So that leads me to avoid using new shit a lot of the time. My phone for instance is 6 years old because there's nothing currently available that wouldn't be a downgrade in functionality. I'm also dreading getting a new car because all the newer ones I've been in have really shittily designed infotainment systems and a bunch of extra crap I don't need. I really feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I look at where technology seems to be going these days compared to how optimistic I was a decade ago.
Yep, for a car you really only need a phone holder and Bluetooth (fuck it, you could even get one of those tape deck attachments). All the other infotainment stuff looks 5 years behind even in a brand new car.
I really like CarPlay and wouldn’t give it up for the past.
My daughter turns 4 soon and I already have an old PC for her birthday painted purple. She will learn the old ways, the ways of our people.
May she be blessed in the name of seg fault, the blue screen, and the 3.5inch floppy disk.
Please insert cd "2" to continue.
Best of luck! I remember giving my little brother his first PC - A Raspberry Pi 2 if I recall correctly.
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.
I agree with people here saying that younger people are just not very computer literate anymore. I bought my daughter a starter desktop computer so she would get more computer literate, but it sits on a desk while she uses her iPad. The schools have Chromebooks, which is the push-here-dummy of operating systems, especially when the school restricts it. Apps on phones and tablets just work. There's no learning curve.
Unless they're specifically interested in computers, they don't need to be computer literate anymore.
That said, I think future technology will reflect this. They won't need to be for most jobs.
I actually heard zoomers are worse with computers in general because they just use their phones instead. So I guess it depends on the tech.
I used to teach a python scripting course to graduate students in Biology. With each progressing year, the average base computing skills actually went down. A very large fraction these days has trouble with the very concept of files and folders.
I've read that online, but I assumed it was exaggerated. You're personally witnessing students struggling with files and folders? Because that's simultaneously hilarious and a bit scary.
I work in the software industry, and sometimes I worry that I'm going to be overtaken by the newer generations, and other times I feel like I have nothing to worry about.
I work in schools and kids aged between 5-12 are clueless with computers, they just poke the screen because they have no idea how to use a mouse and keyboard.
If the computer isn't switched on they don't have a clue how to switch it on, just keep switching monitors on and off lmao
Reading comments like these is making me feel better and better about my practice so far of giving my young kids access more to a Linux desktop than to a phone or a tablet.
My family got its first PCs in the mid-80s.
My mother was a huge part of training people how to use PCs. She would drive a night computer lab (RV with 7 PCs) to business and train all the employees in his to use them as they began adopting the technology, and as the moved on she became a leader in information technology and project automation in the engineering world.
Her long, successful career was all very technical. She was an inspiring person who adopted new technology a decade ahead of time and never feared the future.
Now she can't operate the TV remote or her cell phone without cussing about all this damn confusing technology.
Yep, I was in IT from 95 to 2013. Today's tech is much more confusing
Really? But most consumer products work so easily nowadays.
What do you mean, I can plug this USB stick in and it works without me having to turn the system off and start another boot cycle? Then when I finish, I can just unplug it and it doesn't break?
It's like magic.
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."
Speaking as an elder Millennial, probably. As I get older, I get lazier and desire convenience over shiny and new. I recently got back into rebuilding my music collection and the high seas have changed since last I sailed. That being said, my desire for music drove me to learn the new ways, even though I didn't really want to. The bigest things that stop people from keeping up with technology is desire and ease of access. Most people could give a fuck less, so they don't bother with it, and the older we get, the less fucks we give. Those of us with a desire, for whatever reason, will choose to learn.
Arr
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.
The discussions here about how "today's tech is so dumbed down" kinda makes me laugh, because it's what I was saying when Windows 95 released.
I mean, windows 95 was kind of the tipping point for consumer GUI-first general purpose computing, right? For the common person, using a computer went from reading manpages and learning syntax (at least the bare minimum required to launch a GUI shell), to being presented with a much more limited set of easily discoverable operations.
Gen Z using chromebooks and iPads are just the extension of that. The operations exposed by an application are generally way more limited than they were on windows 9x, and also way more discoverable.
I'm an "Oregon Trail" older millennial, whose first computer was a Tandy 286 running DOS (and Tandy Deskmate GUI shell). My parents bought me the thing but had no idea how to use it themselves, so six?-year-old me had to figure it out entirely on my own. I had to understand things like IRQ conflicts, "high memory", the difference between CGA, EGA and VGA, and (to some extent) how to use the DOS command line just in order to get my games to work.
Without that formative experience, I would not have become the Linux-using, self-hosting, software engineer I am today.
Frankly, I fear for the zoomers. I'm currently trying to figure out how to give my own kids at least a taste of a similar experience, because the last thing I want is for them to be slaves to whatever "easy"-but-exploitative technology the FAANGs of the world are constantly trying to shove down the throats of everybody who doesn't know better.
Counter argument: people have grown up with cars for over a century. Still, no one knows shit about cars where many have no clue about even filling it up by themselves let alone check things like radiator fluid, oil, etc.
People will be more accustomed to using tech, but that doesn’t mean the masses will know how it works.
radiator fluid
Kek. Coolant.
I mean... It's not technically incorrect.
They weren't making an argument. They were asking a question. Still, if I assume their position is for or against the idea presented, I'm confused how this car example relates
Their argument centres around the assumption that people become knowledge and adept with technology that they are exposed to. I.E., people will be good with technology because they grew up with said technology. Or written more plainly, “John grew up using a computer so they must know that device intimately.”
The car example shows that’s not the case. That using, being around and generally living with cars has not made people more knowledgeable in their inner workings.
The point is you need to do more than just use or familiarize yourself with something to really understand its inner workings. Cars, toasters, microwaves, TVs. We all use the,, have grown up with them but still most of society has no clue how these things work. Ask people in your life to explain how a simple toaster works. The parts. What heats the bread? How does the power supply work. Hell ask them how many watts their toaster is. Hey, explain electricity, something all of have been privy too for generations now.
I was just thinking about this. I'm really not sure. I think technological progress is not the core issue but rather a sudden paradigm shift in how you interact with what you use on a daily basis.
For instance, there was a generation that grew up without cars and never learned to drive even after they became commonplace. Just too big a jump from previous methods of transportation. But their children who grew up with cars didn't have any issues as the technology matured and new features were added.
So the question is will there be another significant paradigm shift in our lifetime that isn't just an evolution of current interfaces and tools, but rather a sudden change in how we interact with technology?
Who knows...
There's a neat phenomenon where people born before a life changing technology will never see it as being life changing.
Anyone who grew up before the internet only sees it a some place to chat with friends and not the de facto way international business is now conducted. Anyone who grew up before planes only see them as some way to get to a holiday destination quicker and not as the way a huge amount of cargo shipping is done today.
To these people, going back in time seems simple. They could certainly live without the internet or planes or any other new fangled devices! They might, but society wouldn't be able to. I can see AI being the new thing that changes society that we all think of as being some silly little toy.
I think this is right. I've been thinking about this a bit as I watch who in my office starts using LLMs and more importantly how they are using them. The folks in their 40s or 50s have largely ignored it, I remember a gen xer sending an email around in may talking about this neat new ChatGPT her middle school kid showed her. I know one xer in my office whose straight up afraid to even try it. Those closer to gen z will use it, but in a very basic way - just asking straight questions seeking information, get frustrated when it can't handle complex questions or they get lied to, then quit. Millennials seem to be better about using it for what it's good at, generating ideas, startingn places for documents, editing/proofreading, etc. Maybe it's because millennials were in that sweet spot between the older folks who didn't grow up with tech and the younger folks who are used to apps that just work without having to think through how to make the thing do what you want. Maybe millennials are more interested in tech generally since we saw it change so rapidly in our lifetimes. Maybe it's just my small sample size of a 40ish person office.
Generative AI is definitely this. You can tell by how personally offended people got instantly. How they freaked out about what this could change, and how despite their strong feelings towards it, they don't learn to use it.
Also, it's a paradigm shift - it basically lets you grab a random high schooler and ask them to do any task at 1000x speed. Maybe it'll be great, maybe it'll be done all wrong and full of made up facts. It's a random high schooler, you're not sure what they know and you can't trust what they give you, and if you try to blame mistakes in your work on them no one is going to accept that as an excuse - but if you hand them appreciate tasks and properly check their work, you can accomplish tasks drastically faster
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.
Millenial here: No because we're used to change and I'll never be old!
Edit: Fuck, I'm old :( How the hell did this happen???
Seriously though, we've lived through a hell of a lot of change. Arguably more than other generations. I've gone from having a rotary phone to having the world's knowledge in my pocket in 40 years. And we've mostly embraced it all along the way.
The only constant is change.
Even for us younger millenials, we saw the rise and fall of the early internet, the beginnings of social media, grew up with flash games in our browsers, and now we've got these Star Trek-like folding smartphones and checks notes smart sunglasses?
Like you, I'm happy to keep adapting. Hell I'll go full cyborg if that becomes a decent option in my lifetime.
Speaking of having the world's knowledge in your pocket, did you know you can download a local copy of Wikipedia? Check out Kiwix. English Wikipedia with images is only like 80GB. Something to read when you've got no signal.
Absolutely. I work in IT. Some millennial are just as bad, if not worse than the boomers. If things aren't EXACTLY what they expect or they are used to their brains short circuit and they can't do anything. Like the button just moved to another menu dropdown Deborah, put in 20 seconds of effort and you would find it.
The porn tech pendulum:
Boomers: So your telling me that if I know the right people and go to the right theaters, I get to see porn? (Boomers become good at networking)
Gen X: So your telling me if I buy a TV I get to see porn? (Gen Xs don't get any cool knowledge, so they restrict porn on TV)
Millennials: So your telling me that if I get really good at computers and internet, I get to see porn? (Millennials get really good at using computer technology)
Zoomers: So your telling me if I own a phone, I get to see porn? (Zoomers don't get any cool knowledge, move to restrict porn on the internet)
Gen Alpha: So your telling me if I install these image AIs and VR programs, I get to see porn? (Gen Alpha gets really good and working with AI and VR 'interactions')
First: It's been the boomers who invented computers, the internet etc. Second: The average millennial knows little about tech. Give them an Android phone instead of an iPhone or a PC with MacOS or Linux and they'll start looking confused at you. And tell you the way it was before was better. Try to explain to people why something is or isn't necessary or about privacy and how our personal data gets handled and used. Most people are ignorant. Many people also have other hobbies than computers.
Kinda feel the sample on here may skew the answer to this question as Lemmy is 95% Linux nerds.
“I use arch btw”
Sorry my activation phrase was listed
It's true, and i love it
People in here talking about how future generations might be less tech savvy due to growing up with locked down devices and phones. I am worried things might go a different way. If tech companies manage to push open systems out, forcing us all onto locked down computing appliances, I could easily see myself being left behind as I try to cling to the glory days of being able to actually code my own solutions and configure an OS to my liking, etc.
I worry a little about it, but I don't lose too much sleep because in order to actually make anything on computers you end up in more open systems. Apple seemed to want to go hard down that path in the early/mid 2010's with macOS, but even they've backed off and instead started opening more of iOS if only basically (file manager, for example.) Apple is generally the canary in the coal mine for computing trends in general. On the Windows side, they actually added the Linux subsystem thing, which was something you could have told me in 2010 and I would have assumed you were having some sort of stroke. And then there is the simple fact that Linux exists, and I can't see that changing any time soon...
s/left behind/radicalized/g
The copyright cartel can pry my debugger from my cold, dead hands.
How would that make free software and open hardware advocates be left behind? If anything, we would be the only members of society still knowing how things work and being able to figure things out and innovate. All other people would simply be slaves of whatever corporation would happen to own the important tech patents.
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.
Imo it's the opposite, millennials were in that period that you had to have certain computer knowledge to use technology. Today's kids don't use computers so much as they use phones and on the phones everything is super simplified for them compared to a 90s-2000s computer that we had to deal with. I think from here technology will only become easier to use to the point that new generations will actually have less technical knowledge compared to the previous generation.
I think we will be the exception because we came up when you had to figure out how to get things to work whereas everything today is intuitive and seamless and just works.
I'm able to troubleshoot newer tech when it doesn't work where it seems like gen Z can't do it because they haven't had the experience trying to figure out how it all works.
Maybe?
I mean theres boomers who were engineers in their youth who are complete idiots with modern technology, especially computers.
But as an elder millenial myself, I can kind of see it happening to me too. While I do enjoy technology and gadgets, I just dont have a need for all of it, nor the time to tinker like I did in my youth. Like I havent bothered at all with apple devices, so Im kinda clueless with how to navigate those things. Last time I used an apple product was around 2008 when I was using MacOS in college.
I know people that can't use Windows to save their life, but if you put DOS in front of them, it's like something clicks in their brains and they suddenly remember how to type.
The biggest difference is the ui improvements. You don't need to know how to use a command line you can just click an icon. A lot of tech is largely the same as it ever was but just has an easier to use interface. Going forward something like palm readers and facial id scanners will simplify this even further as you won't even need to know what icon to tap. For better or worse.
Yes. Now that tech has been refined and turned into fashion appliences, 20 somethings have no curiosity about tech and no desire to bend it to their will. Learning the underpinnings of tech bores them. I'm a boomer and feel like I grew up at the perfect time for a hacker/engineer. Tech was much simpler when I started out. It took work/programming to get your Commodore 64 to do anything interesting.
I don't think so. I honestly think we grew up in a time that encouraged learning how these things work. Anecdotally, younger people don't seem as interested, because everything's always "just worked" for them; they were raised on iPads. I already see them struggling with technology similarly to boomers when it isn't immediately obvious how to do something.
i think everyone can learn how to use new tech, its more a question if you still want to.
For example i dont feel the need to get into tiktok.....but if tiktok existed 15 years ago i would have.
Here are still old people using CLI text based browsers on a dialup connettion who never felt the need to upgrade to a more visual way to browse the web...even if they could learn it.
At a certain age u just stop giving fucks about new things maybe.
Depends on the personality of the person.
I knew someone born in 1905 who was excited by personal computers and happily using email into her 100s.
I think it could go both ways. Another commenter mentioned the younger generation being used to things just working. You pull it out of the box, power on, good to go. When it comes to troubleshooting, that's where they seem to fall behind.
On a other note, I have a friend that is the same age as me, grew up with pretty similar upbringing. He's the type that if it doesn't work then it's not worth using. Couldn't get a Bluetooth speaker to connect to a computer so he got frustrated and played without sound.
I think it will really just depend on what that specific person was exposed to. Admittedly, there has been a few times I got confused at a card reader. I'm used to swiping or inserting the chip. Some card readers are the touch and go and it took me a few minutes to realize it was scan and go.
I'm 39 and I'm already starting to get bad with certain parts of technology, so absolutely yes. That said, I'm also getting to the point where I'm starting not to care anymore.
Yeah, same age here. I'm easily confused by android aps and sometimes it's just not worth it to figure it out. Still good with the tech i grew up with though.
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.
Your question reminded me of an interesting article I read a while back: Gen Z Is Apparently Baffled by Basic Technology.
It's kind of a click bait title, but I think it's still interesting. Technology is definitely generational, and I'm sure there are some things millennials will be better prepared to use in old age, but there will likely be lots of new tech that will be a struggle to learn.
I feel the've gotten too much of a streamlined experience compared to what millenials grew up with, who had to be able to do a lot more bugfixing to get things to work the way we wanted to.
Definitely. I feel very lucky to have been able to experience it all. I wonder if my personality would have led me to it anyway but I guess my personality was shaped by growing up through it. Would I be as curious otherwise?
I think there are fewer tech-savvy people in the world than people think. Most people are capable of using tech just enough to do what they're trying to do, and don't take the time to learn to use newer technology, preferring to stick with what they know.
On the other hand, people with a desire to keep up with new technology probably will.
Lots of interesting comments! I really enjoyed this thread. Two things I'd add:
It's not that I don't have generational pride. I like my generation, we were and are adaptable. I just can't imagine that the subsequent generations won't be as adaptable to things I can't even imagine yet.
I'm 40 and I've never scanned a qr code in my life. So yes, absolutely.
A lot of websites that offer 2FA will require that you scan a QR code. Are you just never using 2FA?
The only 2fa I've used sends an alphanumeric code that I type in.
