This really bugs me at work sometimes. I’m a designer and I often have to split up images in several mails because others don’t understand the concept of archives. Or even worse: send the photos as “excel image file” (slapping them all in a excel sheet). I even once had a printery tell me my file was corrupt because it was (accidentally on my part) compressed as 7z. Oh how I would love to send files more often as 7zip… But that’s black magic apparently.
Well at least windows just treats archives as folders as infæ you can just double click on them. Don’t even have to extract anything to work with the files
Windows 11 also supports rar and 7zip natively
I mean Excel files are zips, so that kinda checks out.
I used to work in a camera shop back in the day. Alot of people came in with a thumb drive of some sorts, and wanted pictures printed of images in a word-document. They were baffeled when we said we can’t print it with our lab. “But it is right there on the screen!”
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This has actually been studied. Turns out, zoomers are so reliant on smart technology like tablets and phones, they never actually learned anything about normal PC file systems or extensions. They literally don’t understand what a folder is because they’ve never been exposed to PC or Mac environments.
I’ve seen people comment about needing to teach folder and file hierarchies to young people in CS classes because they grew up with cloud services and auto-save. Dunno how widespread that might be.
I am a sophomore computer science student and when I entered freshman year I was very surprised as well. Just last week, I was helping some kid with his intro C++ final and the entire semester, the guy has been saving everything to /downloads. He was wondering why every new program he made in Visual Studio failed to work. It kept messing up because he was in the same directory all the time messing about with the other 5 or so programs he made beforehand.
Cloud services like Drive etc have folders anyway.
Yeah, but you can also just upload everything into one giant file orgy. I’d wager most people take that approach.
Animals. Utter animals.
I’ve had to teach folders, file types and extensions to lots of ~18 yo. When I ask them where they saved a files they get confused and generally respond with something like “on the computer”.
Forget the 30 year old boomer, I present to you: the 18 year old boomer!
And there are lots who don’t understand what the shift key is for. They use capslock to shift…
Stop. You’re all hurting me.
There was a tech reviewer that scorched Chromebooks for taking away the CapLocks because… he couldn’t type capitals anymore!
I’m reminded of that infamous game reviewer that couldn’t figure out how to jump over a box on the first level of a tutorial. And then gave the game a bad review
I blame hardware and software manufacturers for locking and dumbing down their devices
And Chromebooks!
I’ve observed this personally but I didn’t know it was studied. Can you provide a link to a study about it?
By study, I don’t mean in a lab setting, but more so the data has been collected by employers reporting that their Gen Z staff is technologically stunted.
https://futurism.com/gen-z-baffled-basic-technology
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
https://www.digitaldisrupting.com/gen-z-kids-apparently-dont-understand-how-file-systems-work/
zoomer programmer here and so glad i have the hobby i do and the dad i so dearly love for introducing me to real technology—the nitty gritty and all
💀
wut is (z, b)oomer. all users are usually dumb. if you are average half are dumber than you
Bro…
Maybe he’s telling you something here though. Like how zip is a shitty format to send anything with?
im a gardener. some apprentice who has never owned a computer, not bcs they couldnt afford it, but bcs due to mobile phones there simply is no need for it, asked me how to shut down a computer. not kidding. it wasnt even some obscure gnu/linux distro, it was bog-standard windows 10.
Pre Win98, you could just flip the power switch.
See, there is a bit of nuance to this. Windows has multiple shutdown states that make the computer appear off, but actually put the computer to sleep. The apprentice probably didn’t know that but this is lemmy and if I can’t “actually” someone with worthless information here, where can I?
This reminded me so much of Reddit comments that my blood pressure went up for a sec.
If I can’t bait reactions on !greentext@sh.itjust.works, where can I?
Hey boss, I want to shut down the computer, should I turn it off completely or do you prefer sleep, if yes which sleep state?
We Millennials were born in a sweet spot where PCs were widespread enough to be virtually in every house since childhood but also not too streamlined and simplified.
We had a pc that sometimes didn’t work properly, we had to use the command line from time to time, troubleshoot and look up errors. When something fails we try to find out why and only after a while we give up and claim it’s an error or look for help.
Also you know, stupid people are in every generation.
I have yet to meet the braindead skibidy rizz zip file zoomers everyone keeps talking about. I assume I’ll find them with the latte avocado toast millennials.
I’ve met them. But I’ve also met tech illiterate millennials. And genius boomers.
I don’t have enough data to conclude yet, so options are open. I do believe zoomers use computers less than millennials do tho, in favor of smartphones.
As far as I can tell boomers know how a computer works and don’t know how to do this weird thing they need to do for some reason or they break it in a weird way. Zoomers seem to be a mixed bag of no IT knowledge or never needing help. Everyone else just drops the laptop and lies about it.
I worked as tech support for a patient portal at a previous job and found that a lot of both boomers and zoomers use their smartphones exclusively. The bulk of our calls were from boomers and trying to teach them to navigate a smartphone over the phone was one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever had to do.
Explaining them how to navigate a computer over phone is even worse.
Had to explain for 15 minutes to some old guy where the location of the start button was.
I know a few. Some of the younger people we’ve hired recently as more computer illiterate than my 93 year old grandfather.
You’d be surprised.
The thing is they tend to be in the same avenues as where you’d encounter tech illiterate people of every other generation too.
While there is a degree to which there’s age barriers, it was more a thing going from no computers at all to computers.
Nowadays age means less in terms of tech competency than things like socioeconomic background, professional background, and general interest.
Sports kids in HS who grow up to go into a nepotistic position at a construction business doing sales have roughly the same tech competency if they were born in 1970 or 2000.
I work in tech and all of the recent hires (Gen Z) are domain-general smart: they have great critical thinking skills, can reason through a problem abstractly, and pick things up fast.
But damn can some of them not use a computer in an efficient manner. Having to walk them through changing display settings or how to set up Outlook rules or basic keyboard shortcuts is a little painful.
As someone who, nowadays, uses his phone for pretty much 98% of all computing tasks, I get it. But it’s still painful
That’s because all they know how to use are iPads. They don’t actually understand how real computers work.
Plus of course there is this attitude that if it doesn’t immediately work on its own you should give up and just pray to the nebulous entity that is “IT people”.
You wouldn’t believe how many people get annoyed that I don’t know what their password for something is.
For me it’s recovering my boss’s files from his broken mac.
I have decades of experience in Linux. I can invoke the recovery shell and rsync his files onto a USB stick. But save that locked down OS? No idea. I’d have to watch a video and hope I don’t make a mistake.
The thing with Mac is, it’s easy if you set it up correctly and if you haven’t set it up correctly (as in you have left it in default mode), it’s borderline impossible.
They grew up on iPads and phones.
Gen Z at uni here. Most of my fellow zoomers know what a zip file is. But some people just don’t computer that much so they simply don’t know.
However if you’re doing a computer job and you don’t know that’s ridiculous.
Someone doing one of those computer jobs here. In the office i work we are 13 people. six zoomers, five boomers and two millennials. 12 out of these 13 people struggle to understand basic computer things such as archives even when I explane them. the same for family and some friends. I live and work germany. From my small sample i’d read its not a zoomer or boomer thing in germany at least.
It is a missed duty of politics to bring the country into tune with this. For example the “IT class” back in school was teached from people who had to google the stuff they had to teach… if the’d knew how to google. I had to listen to many calls mid lesson where the teacher had to ask other people how stuffs done. And just as germany has failed to do this, there are isolated groups or bubbles all over the world that simply do not want or are able to learn it. and that’s just spreading slowly since there is no need to learn on most systems anymore.
But that is just an observation of me with like I said just a smal sample in my close area. I could totaly be wrong.
Some intro college CS courses have had to start teaching things like how folder structures work because enough students are missing that basic information.
I used to balk at this, but after much thought, it actually makes sense. Phones, tablets, and much of the user experience with personal computers is very far removed from file management these days (if you can even do that on your phone).
Back before 2010, we could conflate the idea of “computer owner” with “computer literate”. And even for smart phones of the time, that was mostly true. Now, not so much.
People need to go back to rooting phones.
/storage/emulated/0is basically/home/userIn principle I agree. In practice, no.
Personally, I don’t have the energy to keep hacking my phone after each security update from the manufacturer. And you kinda/sorta need those.
Now, if there was a way to steamroll over the native OS for a Pixel or iPhone with something free that’s also current and well maintained, that would be better. At least that way I could have full control and use the hardware until the battery is well and truly dead.
I work with a couple guys that basically aim to do as little as possible in as much time as possible.
I’m a millenial and it seems i’ve become a boomer, telling these guys to stop building cardboard towers as everyone notices and will tell their supervisor. Then they get angry with me for some weird ass reason while they just spent 3 days doing one hour worth of work.
Our supervisor wants me to get them to work better, but it’s 4 of them and one of me.
I understand the mindset that it’s the employers task to supply you with work, but there’s plenty y’all just refuse to pick it up and get at it.
Either you’re their manager/supervisor and it’s your job to figure it out, or you aren’t, and you shouldn’t give a shit.
are you the manager? if not it ain’t your problem, and now you have a valid excuse if your stuff doesn’t get done. My work tried that shut with me, I just do my work, then leave, if everything isn’t done that’s a management problem.
Our supervisor wants me to get them to work better
That’s nice. Not going to happen but he can want it as much as he wishes.
I have a manager who is a bit like this and expects me to do a lot of his job for him (I mean he is useless), but the thing is if he doesn’t do his job, he gets in trouble. If I don’t do his job bugger all happens to me.
What incentivises them to do more work in less time? How much autonomy or input do they have on deciding what tasks need to be done, and when?
Why is the default ZIP method disabled in their os? Fake
It’s at work…
Why would workplaces disable the OS’s free ability to use a zip?
We have gygabites of storage on our phones and on the cloud, it makes sense that zoomers don’t know what a zip file is. It’s like chastising me, an early millenial, because I don’t know Morse code.
Ridiculous take. Zip is used not just for compression but also for bundeling files. If you’ve used the internet beyond social media you’ve probably encountered a zip file. It’s just incompetence regardless of age.
Especially since even if you didn’t know about zip files at all for some reason, you could just look it up before declaring nothing works.
The real incompetence isn’t what you don’t know, it’s the lack of problem solvingBut they don’t use the internet beyond social media. And chastising them for that is like getting mad at cows because they eat out of a manger.
