Fuck them kids, it’s job security as far as I’m concerned.
Wasn’t Indy knowingly bluffing in this scene?
Skipped gen z, but I know my gen z folk are barely a step above alpha but and below millennials
At least us earlier gen z grew up without smartphones being the thing. If I wanted anything done I had to use a computer. Smartphones only became as prevalent as they are now when I was about 12-14 (at least that’s what it feels like).
Holy crap, this meme is on point! Both in the Indy movie grab and the base message.
They get handed locked down chromebooks or iPads at schools. They’re only really exposed to a walled garden, and they also aren’t explicitly taught a lot of concepts that need to be taught (almost all MS/HS I’ve met have passwords which are just sliding their finger across the keyboard - it’s bewildering. I teach “correct horse battery staple.”)
You can’t learn much if you can’t install your own software. Learning is breaking things though, and most schools seem allergic to hiring competent tech teams/setting up sandboxed computer labs. Security concerns are huge - eg, if your kids school uses PowerSchool they probably got hacked this year - but when your teaching physics and can’t install MathLab or whatever…
There are still the little geeks that figure out how to get video game emulators going - Pokémon Emerald is probably more popular among middle schoolers today than it was in 2005.
Late GenX (really, between X and Millennial): we expected everyone after us to understand tech. Nope.
Generation Oregon Trail or Xennial, depending on your life choices.
Digital safety seems to have disappeared
The internet is a scary place, you should treat it like a scary place
Bingo. We straddled the digital divide, figured it out and deployed it to the world. Until a radical new technology comes along, there won’t be another generation like us.
AI is that radical new tech
Not yet.
I have an 'intern` I’m working with on a project, kid doesn’t know how to read docs. Maybe doesn’t know how to read? 🤷 Thing is we are doing devOps and using powershell or terminal or whatever. So it’s literally all reading, all day long every single day. I don’t know what to do honestly.
Cut your losses and get a new intern, it’s gonna take ten times longer to teach this kid to read than if you just do the project solo.
I can read docs and would be interested in an internship… Paid ideally, but would love to have a mentor to learn devops. I also know multiple programming languages and am comfortable in a terminal
This has been a worrying trend in education. Parents assumed kids just knew how tech worked so they stopped teaching things like typing, office, or how to use the basics. Now we have people graduating who know how to use iPads and Xboxes, but have no idea how to manage a file structure (many honestly just use “recent”), or make a PowerPoint, and a lot don’t know typing.
Graduating? These people have been in the workforce for years now. Many of them are teachers.
i’ve said it time and time again, the second you simplify an interface, it lessens the bar for entry, we’ve only done this over the last 20 years in tech, it should be no surprise that people who never have to use C drives, don’t know what the fuck a C drive is.
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On iOS for example it’s also hard. Every app has its own silo of files and then there’s a shared file system. The file manager app is far less capable than Finder on macOS.
Granted, but the inability to learn what isn’t “intuitive” is staggering.
Fuck Microsoft. I’m out on my build coming up.
With the search Powertoys can help, it is really good. Plus the other features it has is just amazing, windows without it is pure trash.
On windows the best search is https://www.voidtools.com/ by voidtools.
And by far, it hooks up right into the mtbr in the drives and knows instantly where all files are at all times. Copy 100.000 files? They are already “indexed”! Clean GUI too.
One of the few tools windows has that’s better than the linux ones. Or if you have an equivalent please let me know!
Typing is irrelevant. Office software is irrelevant. There is one thing, and one thing only, that determines whether a person is computer-literate or not: whether the person can put together a custom workflow to solve a novel problem.
I don’t mean “programming,” per se, and I don’t mean “scripting,” per se, and I don’t mean “piping together commands on a text command-line,” per se. But I do mean being able to (a) understand the task you want to accomplish, (b) break it down into its component steps, and (c) instruct the machine to perform those steps, while potentially (d) reading documentation and/or exploring the UI to discover how to do said instructing if necessary.
A computer-literate person can be sat down in front of a computer running an OS and/or other software they’ve never used before and (eventually) figure out how to use it via trial-and-error, web-searching for tutorials, RTFM, or whatever, without shutting their brain off and giving up or demanding that some other person spoon-feed a list of steps to memorize by rote.
I wish this were the case, and in a world where software was perfectly documented and there was clearly one (or maybe 3) ways to accomplish a task I could see this being the case. Unfortunately there really is an intuition that needs to be built up over years of the underlying logic of how the most prominent software packages work and how to efficiently accomplish some basic workflows. There is no chance that someone with zero prior knowledge of excel is going to reach the same level of competency on their own as someone with 5 years of supervised experience.
I hate that Microsoft products are the de-facto standard in every workplace, but what I hate more is that they have shaped how we expect software to operate: the underlying logic (or lack thereof), where to look for tools, what keystrokes/operations result in what actions, etc. In this way they’ve also monopolised software design in a way that prevents innovation, since we all already understand how to use Microsoft’s products (at least to some extent) it makes breaking that mould a really dangerous proposition for competitors. It also means that someone with a really deep knowledge of the M$ suite is going to be far more valuable to most businesses than someone with less experience but a better grasp of how to acquire knowledge.
Grown up in Microsoft-contorted concept space, hard to think of anything better. Thinking limited incremental, starting from a bad place.
Free yourself, unlearn, wash eyes, air the brain, make a clean slate, pure design, intuitive for a new generation of children, helping all life.
The sick sad history of computer-aided collaboration
https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen
It’s shocking how few people know things I consider using a PC like organizing, customizing, automating tasks etc.
I always have to hold myself back and think I am not going to tell you how exactly to do this.
And expecting a list they can work off instead of thinking? Infuriating! These people are not old, it’s a mentality.
I think knowing something like office software helps since that novel problem. Knowing how to do a pivot table can get you an outcome you need in a fraction of the time if you don’t know how to do one. You need to know how to use the tools to create a solution.
I need to store my emails for later reference, so I print them out.
But I don’t want to keep stacks of printed emails around, so I scan the prints and save them as pictures because that’s what the scanner does automatically.
But I need to search through the emails, so I found a browser plugin that can scan a picture for text and give me a summary in a new file.
But my company computer won’t let me install browser plugins so I email the scanned pictures to my personal address and then open them on my phone and use the app version of the browser plugin to make the summaries and then I email those back to my company address.
But now I want to search through the summaries, which are Word documents, but Office takes forEHver to load on my shitty company computer so I don’t want to use the search in it, so I right-click -> Print the summary files and then choose “Print to PDF” and then open them in Adobe Reader so I can search for the information I want that way. I usually have 200 tabs of PDFs open in Reader so I can cross-reference information.
I have a great custom workflow. I’m the most computer literate person in my office.
Okay, I guess there’s one more criterion for computer literacy: being able to distinguish between a reasonable workflow and a batshit-insane one. (That might even include a little bit of understanding of complexity: not enough to be able to classify an algorithm using “big O notation,” but maybe enough to avoid a basic “Schlemiel the Painter” situation, for example.)
When you don’t understand the tools, every possible solution that reaches your end goal seems equally valid, no matter how convoluted. Unfortunately, the design philosophy that attempts to make every tool as compatible as possible with every other tool enables this sort of Rube Goldberg-esque nonsense (and creates development hell and permanent legacy dependencies).
It’s… difficult for someone who does understand the tools to even imagine being in the mental space of someone who doesn’t, which is why IT people frequently come off as arrogant, judgy, even rude - they expect other people to understand things the way they do, when they’ve been taking computers apart since high school. What seems reasonable to you is perfectly opaque to them. Also… sometimes people who are technically literate are the hardest to pull out of their batshit processes (doctors are the worst patients).
When you are trying to help someone, always keep the XY Problem in mind. They’ve arrived at a solution which seems insane to you, not because they’re unreasonable, but because they ran into an obstacle and bounced off of it in a path-of-least-resistance direction and they have shit they need to get done. Try to solve the real problem, not the problem that is presented.
You’re like a real-life xkcd comic.
Rube Goldberg machine of office workers
Reading this felt like the computer version of whatever the SAW movies are.
Torture porn? It’s so repugnant but I want more.
I had someone take an email they received about a technical problem someone else was having. They then printed it out, highlighted the important part, then scanned it back in as a picture all offset and grainy, then used that picture in a web chat to request help for that third person without direct contact
They were an IT Manager
Hopefully they were fired.
Out of a cannon.
Into the sun.
It actually takes more delta-V to fire someone into the sun as it takes to fire them out of the solar system. We like efficiency.
They’ll meet up with Voyager II for a close flyby in about 156 years. They’re the universe’s problem now.
The worst sentence is the last sentence, when you really think about what it implies.
Nah. While the text does successfully destroy the notion that “if it works it isn’t stupid”, I still see this as an improvement over so many people who are incapable of anything…
Please tell me this is sarcasm meant to push the limits of their statement.
Get out more. This is entirely realistic in my experience.
The worst one I ran into was early in my career. This was back during the XP days.
The lady who who did the job before had a certificate e-mailed to her from a lab. She printed the certificate off then slipped two certificates front and back into a plastic sheath and put them into a 4" 3 ring binder.
She then deleted the labs e-mail and electronic copy to save space in her mailbox.
There were around 4,000 of these certificates every year for 5 years when I started. So around 20,000 pages. We had ONE physical copy of a legally required certificate.
Around 15 shipments per year required her to find around 300-400 specific certificates She then had to pull them out of the plastic sheaths, make 3 physical copies and scan one PDF to load to the government agencies webpage.
She would then delete the PDF, and laboriously refile the certificates back into the the plastic sheets.
Oh the binders were also ordered in a way that nobody but her could find anything. It was about as close to random as you could get.
The 15 shipments took around 50% of her time every year.
I hired two temps and gave them a few very boring days. When we were done the certificates were all organized in a logical numerical order and in long-term secure storage. I had a folder on the server with 20,000 PDF files all with a unique name. It took me around 15 minutes to locate, print, and upload the required files for each shipment.
I can kind of see the reason though. If she’s old enough then digital storage space was a really big issue. I can totally see someone having been told 30 years ago to make sure they leave nothing in memory and never updating that knowledge. I don’t know what to say about the rest of it though.
Poor workflow management sadly is quite normal, not the exception. She was in her early 20’s at the time, just completely computer and workflow incompetent. I have seen similar issues with people of all ages. It’s not a generational thing, it’s an aptitude and interest thing.
oof, yeah there’s no reason for even the deleting stuff then.
I remember reading a story where the persons job was literally copying data from one program into another, may have even just been between two excel files
New hire came in and wrote a script that did it, and automated that person’s job out of existence
And the new hire made less than the person they fired. Efficiency is supposed to save us but if the benefits aren’t shared with the workers, we end up where we are headed today.
Man I think this is just ensuring job security. Until you hired the interns and ruined it!
Corporate IT is fun!
Oof, I hope they pay your bar tab.
I blame the education system, not the parents. Most parents can hardly work a computer themselves, much less teach it to a kid who will ask 20,000 questions
Or they stopped using Windows and only use Unix for development.
I’m an 80’s kid. We had to learn everything: MS-DOS, Windows, how to install OS’s and software, serial ports, etc. Nothing was easy or convenient. You had to LEARN how and why things worked if you wanted to run games and things.
My dad never used any of our actual PC’s. He wouldn’t know which way to hold the mouse, much less anything else. We tried to teach him, but he just couldn’t grasp any of the fundamentals.
But with an iPad? That’s easy. It just works. He can e-mail, do Facebook, watch YouTube or other streaming…
Point is: we made shit way too accessible and convenient. Kids never have to learn anything anymore. So they don’t. We literally had to teach interns the basics of working with a desktop; all they’ve ever used was an iPad and phone.
It also lead to the destruction of the old web. Back in the early to late ‘90’s, you had to be a nerd to use it. To WANT to use it even. But now that it’s so easy and convenient even my completely tech illiterate dad can get online, things have turned to shit. We never should’ve made it this convenient.
“They know every smartphone”
It’s gonna be really funny when all us millenials die and the tech infrastructure evaporates.
What age do we think they’ll be set back to? Pre industrial? Bronze?
My prediction seems extreme but don’t forget that while books continue to exist, the average adult born after 2000 would rather die than read one.
It won’t evaporate, there are plenty of IT folks among youth.
It doesn’t make sense to characterize users by age brackets - it’s not that millenials are predominantly well-versed.
I’m responding to the premise of the thread. I agree it doesn’t make sense to characterise people based on age brackets, however I am noting a pattern I’ve observed in reality, not speculating a fictional scenario. It’s also true my view is anecdotal, backed up by memes and other anecdotes and not by science or extensive research.
However I’d like to point out that we are in a group called “memes” and the thread is about “used to consume not produce”, the OP’s meme image is specifically talking about the pattern where younger people don’t understand fundamentals of tech and just consume it. As an IT professional of nearly 20 years I have observed the same phenomenon and so I wrote a funny reply based on that.
You’re right IT probably won’t entirely evaporate that’s crazy. As crazy as picking apart a funny comment to wag your finger at a well meaning stranger.
Ah, I have mistaken it for genuine statement. I have well intentions, too :)
I was always fascinated by the Middle Ages… The idea that you could live in the ruins of a civilization more advanced than your own is really interesting.
I used to teach math in the local school. The kids had a great interest in 3D printing because I had a few fun items in my classroom that I had 3D printed. I decided to spend a couple of weeks teaching a bit of CAD through having the kids spend it designing a personalized key chain to print.
It took me 3 days of class time to teach them how to use a mouse…They couldn’t grasp the idea that a touch screen and CAD don’t go together, you need that mouse to make it work. It quickly became apparent that things quickly became difficult for them if it doesn’t have a touch screen.
And while some classes are always a bit better than others, there was always a noticeable number of them that struggled with using a mouse.
To be fair: I switched to Linux 6 years ago. I’m using a tiling windowmanager, a lot of custom scripts, a different keyboardlayout with six instead of two layers (great for writing greek math, and other symbols) and an enthusiastic emacs user. I know the my System in and out. As a CS end math student, I know a fair bit about a Computer. But when A sit in front of an ordinary windows PC, I am a little bit upset. I stumble a lot of times over the thought: “You don’t have a keyboard shortcut for this! You have to use the Mouse, to switch Windows or you have to click yourself trough a menu to change this setting. There are no man pages you can search with regex” I hate it!
“an enthusiastic emacs user” Well, there’s your problem! (Sorry, I couldn’t resist the poke)
To be serious, Windows and that mouse are just tools-- same as any Linux distro is. A means to an end. Nothing more. There is nothing to be miffed about when you need to use that tool. Be proficient with all your tools. And when you need to use a tool, don’t be concerned about comparing it to the other tools. It diminishes you skills with that tool and and offers no gain to the solution.
But being stuck using windows when its not the right tool for the job is like having to use a pickaxe when you could be using q jackhammer, only the idiots in procurement don’t like power tools.
I think that’s being a bit unfair to Windows. Some of its keyboard shortcuts are stupid, but it does have them. When it doesn’t, the problem is the application.
Generally, you’re totally on point, but I just wanted to drill into that mention about hotkeys for switching windows. You mean something other than alt+tab, ctrl+tab, and in some applications shift+brackets?
It’s because Windows has to save its keyboard combinations for the important things, like opening a new LinkedIn tab.
CTRL - SHIFT - ALT - WIN - L opens linkedin.
Thanks, Captain Obvious. No need to post such common shortcuts like this
It was news to me. But then I haven’t used Windows more than trivially in years.
Gives me even less of a reason now.
Truly only the most useful of functions for this great operating system
I use Arch (btw) because it’s easy, simple, and beginner friendly
Absolutely lost in Windows, nothing ever works, and the documentation isn’t laid out well. Support is just sfc /scannow
Some of the legacy keyboard shortcuts still survive to this day.
I live by Windows+R for the run dialogue.
If you populate %userprofile% with shortcuts named after keywords to your commonly used apps (eg fire.lnk for Firefox) then you can just slap Windows+R, type fire, Enter.
Win+X is also great. Especially since the Start Menu doesn’t allow for quick shutdown commands since Win 8.
This is why windows is here for a few games and Linux is for everything else.
I haven’t run into the problem of people not being able to use a mouse - but I’ve found that very few young people are able to tell if something is saved on their own computer or being accessed over the internet. Saving or downloading files is not something they are familiar with. (Which I suppose is because a lot of modern software makes cloud stuff so silky smooth that people don’t notice it.)
At a recent gaming expo one of the tables was showing a new game for pc. 50% of the kids that approached the table didn’t know how to use mouse and keyboard. The next day they added Xbox controller support and more than half of the people that didn’t know before then were able to figure out how to play.
I think this boils down to not education but poverty. Entry level computers cost way more than an entry level console. Sure you can buy a piece of crap laptop for $250 but it won’t be able to play ANYTHING. A $250 Xbox does everything you need and more. Most games today are not made to be played on $250 computers.
Me who grew up with old thinkpad from my dad’s work’s ewaste box:
And they haven’t heard of used or sailing the high seas.
you can buy a piece of crap laptop for $250 but it won’t be able to play ANYTHING
a thinkpad t490 can’t play anything new but it can play quite a bit. I play emulators on mine.
A brand new T490 was over 900 bucks retail depending on the specs, and a used one is still less cost effective than, let’s say, a used PS3 or PS4…
cost effective
I’m not so sure. A used Thinkpad comes with everything you need, whereas a PS3 or PS4 also needs a screen and a controller at bare minimum. The Thinkpad also has access to a game library of (checks notes) almost every single game ever made excluding mainly AAA titles from the 2010s onward. The PS3/4 is only the better value proposition if you specifically want to play those kinds of games, or if you highly value plug-and-play ease of use.
The Thinkpad also has access to a game library of (checks notes) almost every single game ever made excluding mainly AAA titles from the 2010s onward.
The same can be said of (Checks notes) a console with a Custom Firmware, plus a cheap TV brand new is around 90 dollars. The thinkpad is only good to play retro games or non demanding titles, also the experience of playing in a 14" display with laptop keyboard and a PS/2 trackpad sucks.
True, but most modern games are focused on online play and very few are cross platform. So if a kid’s friends are playing one particular console they’re going to want one too.
And on top of that, I feel myself losing skills too. So if other millenialsare like me, it won’t be just gen alpha.
I sort of feel that way. I don’t think I’m losing skill so much as not wanting to spend more than 3 minutes thinking about a problem.
CD drives were too big so drives were developed that only took half a CD, which is shaped like a C.
The D clan never left, they simply went into hiding until they were needed to usher in the new dawn.
The D shall rise again?
C-discman:
C-cassette player:
Wow. I never saw this type of player, with cassette partially sticking out. Now I will look for something like this, thank you for the photo! 🙂
