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’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.”
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
Not sure why this got downvoted. Things “just working” have a lot of upsides too: saving time, better accessibility, etc.
I think so too, but oh well, people disagreed and that’s okay :D
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.
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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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?
IT persons? No
Millenials who only grew up with iphones, tiktok, and has no idea what is folder and/or file? Fuck yes.
TikTok did not come out until the youngest millennial was already 20. They would have been 11 or 12 when the iPhone came out. You might be thinking of Gen Z.
IT people will not be spared the embarrassment of not being able to keep up with whatever bullshit the kids are into. Being a “IT person” doesn’t give you automatic understanding of all tech.
I work in tech and it’s honestly exhausting trying to keep up. I already feel this way tbh, it’s a non stop procession into the future.
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.
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
You should see my zoomer partner and friend try to work a computer. They all grew up on iPads 😅
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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.
I don’t think so. I do think there will be a decline as we get older, but the overall level of aptitude will be higher than the generations before and after. It’s the younger generations I’m worried about. Other commenters have already mentioned it, they’ve grown up with already well-polished UX to the point that they don’t need to understand how a device works to use it. Most of us here have a high level understanding of how computers work, the app or browser you’re reading this from, because we had to understand how they worked if we wanted to be able to use them when we were younger.
When you say high level, could you expand on that? I’m curious where I fall on the scale of understanding
Yeah of course. I mean concepts as simple as a file structure. That’s a big one that a lot of kids today don’t understand. The idea of a hierarchy of folders to store files is alien. You can read more about it here
From there I would say that if you understand that your browser communicates with specific servers to request and receive web pages and content you’d be ahead of curve. For most people “you need Wi-Fi to use chrome” is an adequate explanation.
If you ask me, a lot of this core understanding is missing for younger generations because computers have become too intuitive for the user to need to understand what’s going on underneath. ~20 years ago, back in the Windows XP days computers were fairly ubiquitous but UX was only starting to mature into what it is today. So you needed to learn if you wanted to do anything beyond open a program from the start menu.
I’ll say that I’m speaking from personal experience and the experience of people around me, if yours are different to mine that’s cool 😃
Honestly, I think yes, it’s inevitable. The reason why is that keeping up with constantly changing technologies requires constantly learning how to do everything over again, and again, and again. It will get tiring eventually, and people will feel that learning the ins and outs of yet another social media app just isn’t worth it when they can already get by.
I say this as as software developer who sees a new tool or framework or language come out every year that’s bigger and better than the last, and I see the writing on the wall for myself. I’ll be outdated and just some old geezer who works on legacy tech stacks in 10-20 years, just like the guys working in COBOL or whatever now.
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
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.
