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?
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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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
They’ll be worse, as qe abstract computer code more and more, less people actually have any idea how they work.
It seems like most people at my highschool are familiar with their basic favorite apps and can get a not great grasp on new applications and programs. But other than that it seems like a lot of people seem hopeless because they might now how to use their favorite apps well, but the second anything errors out of bugs out or they install a new app that isn’t so user friendly their brain just powers down. They don’t even try to Google it.
This is one thing that kinda concerns me is they people stay in their little apple ecosystem and use the most basic apps they don’t really get that experience of actually googling s error code or a specific bug. Even people who use their phones half the day still don’t know shit about anything because they don’t leave their bubble.
But I know it’s not everyone’s thing to try to step out of the bubble and learn how to troubleshoot and fix stuff. But there is so much cool stuff out there that they just refuse to learn because they didn’t immediately understand the app. It’s like they are scratching the ice with how much they can do with their devices and they don’t even try to go deeper.
phone ecosystems completely obscure how computers work which doesnt help with tech literacy
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.
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.”
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.
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
Not a chance. Millennials had to be good at tech when they were coming up. Everybody after got iOS.
You should see my zoomer partner and friend try to work a computer. They all grew up on iPads 😅
I refuse to use tik tok - so, maybe?
This is the way.
I’ll add my two cents as a Gen Z that realized he was way more tech illiterate than initially thought.
In my undergrad, I was tasked with running molecular simulation jobs on an HPC that I could only access through a terminal. The complete paradigm shift I experienced going from just a Windows user to Linux was shocking. Didn’t realize how little I knew about file system hierarchies, connecting devices, and seemingly unheard of concepts like mounting and partitioning drives. I didn’t know that Bash existed, what a shell even was, or literally anything with networks. Imagine going from using Word and thinking the terminal is terrifying to writing python scripts in Vim without really knowing how to program either.
Linux plus a de-Googled phone is where I’ve been at. After nuking Windows 11 from my laptop, I even saw that it got a decent amount faster. Using software that won’t have its UI drastically changed every year is nice.
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 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.
It’s funny because it’s true
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.
