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.
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
Also keep in mind things are less tinkerable now, especially cars and there are a ton of added anti self repair things added that weren’t there before
100%
My buddy bought a new BMW after decades of working on older models. The whole bottom is covered in plastic. You can’t jack it up on the side of the road without a part you have to buy from BMW. Then the brake caliper bolts were metric half size. He sold it the same month he bought it.
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
People have no idea how to do basic process of elimination troubleshooting anymore.
They have no ability to look at logs and extrapolate what could be going on.
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)
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.
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.
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:
The first 5-8 results are near-identical “help” sites that are 40% introduction, 40% basic troubleshooting steps, 15% “download our app!”, and 5% actually useful tips.
There are tech site results listed… but they’re from 2016, a different software version, maybe even a different OS.
"Okay, so, to fix this problem you first need… [SIGN IN TO CONTINUE READING]
If you’re very, very lucky, you’ll find a Reddit (or now, Lemmy) thread on the issue.
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.
Exactly this.
I’ve been tinkering with computers since the mid 90s, and I lost count of how many I built or repaired years ago, but now, using Google to check something I’ve forgotten just leads to sales pages and massively out of date articles that were ‘last updated’ three days ago.
On top of that, you’ve got sites like the official Microsoft help site giving bad advice. Everything is just run sfc /scannow then dism /whatever. I genuinely saw a question recently where someone asked what to do when dism /online-cleanup doesn’t work, and the top answer, marked as correct by the mods was, run dism /online-cleanup.
Online search results have been optimised for seo so much now that finding the right answer can be very difficult.
Don’t forget that those first 5-8 sites are all written by a aithat doesn’t know what it’s doing! You can tell those apart from ones written by a person because they cram as many keywords in different combinations as they can. Like, if you searched “windows 10 Firefox connection error” the first result will be:
"How to fix Firefox Connection Error in Windows 10
Firefox connection errors in windows 10 are annoying. Luckily, there is an easy way in windows 10 to fix Firefox conne tion errors. The Firefox connection errors in windows 10 can be caused by a few different problems. In this article we will explain how to fix Firefox connection errors in windows 10."
It’s infuriating, because those articles inevitably are wrong about the solution, but they’re always the top results because they win the keyword battle. I use QWant for my search engine now, and while it’s WAY better than Google it still serves some of those sites up when I’m troubleshooting something because the keywords are just too strong.
Hah, I think I twitched a bit just reading that! Those stupid SEO answers drive me absolutely insane.
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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.
https://futurism.com/gen-z-baffled-basic-technology
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.
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.
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.
Hahaha, okay, that’s somewhat funny
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
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.
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