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.
Don’t know no C, only /dev/sda1.
I run a Makerspace and teach technology to kids. I don’t think they are getting worse, but the difference between the lowest and highest skilled is bigger than ever before.
Those who are interested, learn so fucking fast and so thoroughly, because they have things like YouTube tutorials and Discord chat groups with like-minded nerds to teach themselves. BUT at the same time, it’s easier to just remain a consumer, and never gain any deeper knowledge.
I think curiosity and attention are quickly becoming the most important skills by far.
92 here. My boys 10 and 8 have their own machines, they are told to Google it first before I come help.
“I’m not raising end users…get your shit together kid.”
Love,
SysEngineer Dad.
fellow tech dad here. how did you strike the balance between “look up shit online” and “hiding the terrors and lies of the internet from my kids”?
Mine’s still little, but knowing sooner is better.
I have the Microsoft safety shit on, and I made every site they can go to a web app. My router blocks nsfw/nonkid traffic. My phone gets notifications when they do anything at all.
And I have extensions blocking all nsfw sites just in case. And I’ve nuked the entry for any web browser on their start menu and task bars. Can’t even scroll to find it. If you open it, it requires my admin PW, which is 14char #$@-123-ABC so good luck turds.
Steam is locked down in kid mode - also they just play Roblox or cool math games anyways lol. Steam has browser disabled.
Only things they have access to is Bing.com with their signed in kid account. And coolmathgames.com.
It took about a week on and off to setup and I just did the two laptops in tandem. Windows 11.
The family thing can be a pain, Microsoft has a lot of half baked ideas https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/how-to-set-up-parental-controls-on-a-windows-11-pc
My parents and school administrators’ attempts at blocking unsanctioned activities is what taught me computer literacy
There was nothing quite as satisfying as getting caught opening addictinggames on a web browser through a proxy when the teacher was convinced they had blocked it completely.
My son’s group in middle school hosted their own proxy overseas. They then pirated a whole bunch of educational videos that the teachers liked to use and made nice clean interface. The games pages had no direct links on the educational videos screens. They had to type in the the page directly in the URL.
So the teachers all loved the site and gave the official “approved for all students” bypass on the districts Chromebooks. The kids had uninterrupted access to all their games.
The kids were smart enough to keep the location of the games to students with a B or higher GPA. Most of the teachers turned a blind eye to them playing games when they did get caught. The games pages also had a home button that sent the students screens to a random educational video. I was truly impressed with their clever approach.
The IT department either never caught on or enjoyed the games themselves because its still up and they are all in highschool now.
I remember when proxies were easy to find and you could get to the most ridiculous stuff. We had college intern system admins for IT at our HS so it was easier to get by alot of things most of the time.
A friend and I became unofficial TAs for a high school computers class when we defeated the remote-viewing software and any web blockers, we knew more than the poor teacher and it was easier to let us do what we wanted if we promised to help other kids do the actual lessons.
That network had terrible security. So many important files stored as unprotected text in the intranet.
The family thing can be a pain, Microsoft has a lot of half baked ideas
I concur, Microsoft forced me to create a family to setup my daughter’s Minecraft account and even then I had to configure it incorrectly to add the game because it’s age rating was too high for a 5 year old and Microsoft’s own parental approval feature doesn’t override that. (I at least could change it back to being a 5 year old’s account afterwards) I need to figure out what setting I have to enable to let her do multiplayer at some point but so far she doesn’t have anyone to play with yet
Yeah, I found Microsoft family to be a pretty half-assed experience. The thing that seems to work best is the screen time management. I had planned to try and set up YouTube access via allow listing channels in a home Linux server, but it turns out that YouTube doesn’t identify their videos by channel in the URL and I’d have to allowlist every single video for a given channel.
You could theoretically host a Piped API instance, and use it to get channel info. I guess you are already using your own SSL certificates, judging by what you are trying to accomplish.
This is the Piped org btw: https://github.com/TeamPiped
It is a YouTube frontend/proxy.
Edit: I made a post on Piped’s community, so we can discuss it there: https://discuss.online/post/16448014
I’m not a sysadmin, I’m a backend dev with enough network knowledge to be dangerous. I’ve set up exactly one super basic website, so I know some of this stuff, I just have to (and can and will) stumblefuck my way through it. This seems like a really great idea, I had no idea Piped could potentially handle that. I’m going to keep an eye on this, thanks!
I’m planning on building a server that rips channels videos and they can have the app for that.
We are a no YouTube without our explicit permission on the video kinda household. Too much actual brainrot. And as much as I don’t like Television, at least my kids are mentally protected from bullshit with the Children’s Television Protection Act.
I’m guessing my kids are younger than yours, but I’ve taken the approach of simply keeping a loose eye and ear on what they’re watching to make sure they’re not on too bad of content and of course limiting how much time they can spend on brainrot content. They spend most of their TV time watching PBS kids or some ripped DVDs on my Jellyfin
my parents did none of this. I had free rein on the internet as a wee kiddo. Granted, that was in the wild west days of the internet, but still, they did nothing. I regret it immensely.
That’s awesome. I would’ve hated dealing with this as a kid. Will definitely steal this when I have kids.
I would’ve hated dealing with this as a kid.
same, except i would love to bypass this as an adult
Yea, my job at work now is to do this but all day lol. I build my network/firewall/and shit and then go around trying to break as much shit as I can so I can fix it.
My kid spends a lot of time helping their friends do basic computer stuff and we have the same rants about users.
I’m so proud.
Raising them right. I have a 28 year old college grad sys admin that I work with…I had to show him where windows updates were.
He uses windows search to open settings…bachelors degree in IT.
I wouldn’t be in the mood to start raising a child st 84
I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought of a 92 YO on Lemmy.
Most parents done feel like raising theirs either. They just stuff them on a tablet and do their thing.
You’re 92 and your kids are 10 and 8? Damn, and I thought I started late.
Old dusty balls still knockin around by my knees but you better be god damn sure I’m fuckin.
“I’m not raising end users…get your shit together kid.”
Quite an important thing. That’s also important if you help your parents/grandparents with something. Guide the through it so you hopefully dont have to help them next time.
Not really. It takes a lot of experience to sort the legit from the not legit.
“Having problem X? Download the system32.dll fix here!”
That’s true. What I meant was like basic stuff like navigating through the settings of your phone or so.
Even then. My mother followed a YouTube video on this including the part where the helpful Indian guy had her download an app and set up a very sketchy VPN.
Yea…
What?
I’m starting to get to a point in my career where I have to turn down helping my family.
I strongly encourage the elderly to “just get an iPad” if they have an iPhone and just drop x86 devices all together. It’s way less headache.
Luckily my mom’s still young and proficient enough with computers and phones.
you should encourage them to use something that’s not google. Startpage, SearxNG, DuckDuckGo are good alternatives.
Ive heard about qwant and ecosia too
They are good options too.
I agree but bing.com is really what they are using because it has the parental controls that coincide with their signed in account.
When they get older and are more “free” on the Internet I’ll migrate them to Linux, I’ll let them choose the DE and then they can do what ever they want.
I spent so much time troubleshooting together with my dad. I found it way more educational than just googling it and owe my current level of knowledge to it. When I was living with my parents part of me was sad when I got to the point where I was able to solve any issues I had faster alone than with my dad’s help. No judgement just thought you might want to know. I totally get not wanting to cross over your work life and your family life though.
I learned electronics through my Dad that way too. And my kids learn through me with this stuff. But if they ask me over and over again to do something, it’s their burden to go research what they need to learn to stop asking me. And it’s usually done with my guidance. I’m not actually flippant with them with their questions lol
You turn your 8 year old loose on google, explicitly and intentionally unsupervised, and hold it up as an example of good parenting.
You assumed absolutely wayyy to much based on a single sentence and virtue signal your superiority based on your own fantasy of what’s going on with inconclusive data. Move along.
Gen Z/A are good at using tech, but they don’t really know anything about how it works. I work in IT support and it can honestly be a tossup sometimes if the person who doesnt know how to clear their cache is a boomer or not.
if a 3 year old can use a smart phone it’s not because that child is a genius it’s because the phones designer was.
Oh no, does this mean Gen X are going to be the wisened graybeards that holds arcane knowledge and seemly executes feats of magic when related to technology?
X and the millennials both had to deal with computers that were computers, it’s the people that grew up in the smart phone/tablet era that have no idea what to do in front of an actual computer…
My litmus test is: “Have you tried Linux?”
Even if they just used a live cd for curiosity, it means they know enough about computers to grasp the concepts that make them versatile, and were exploring around the net enough to read about it.
So I’ve been in the DOS/Windows world for at least 30 years. I have never used Linux, but I can configure a Cisco server or switch and stack a rack. Yet I fail your test?
Look up the term “outlier.”
Go back to Reddit asshole.
You first. You’re far more hostile, so that’s where you belong.
You were working with computers since before smartphones existed, that’s a pass of course.
Now I know I am relatively young (just making the cut off to be considered a Millennial). But my parents were very against allowing kids access to the internet but not ani-technology. As a result I was using a 1996 Toshiba satellite when I was 4yr for Scholastic Reader Rabbit preschool games, but didn’t have regular internet access until I was 15. So I am familiar with the eccentricities of Windows 95, this did help me at work once when we had to use some legacy software from the 90’s that would only run on Win 98. But anyway I only recently have started using Linux in Docker containers for testing environments.
Going to be? We already are, along with older millenials.
Only the 10% or so that paid attention to “nerd stuff”.
All the rest are, at best boomer level, at worst smug about being at boomer level.
Based on how often I have to explain very obvious error messages to ostensibly qualified system admins: Yes.
(Though I insist I’m the oldest millennial and not Gen x)
Xennial!
True, late stage millenials are the same kind as Gen Y/A.
More like Millennials. Gen X may have been around for the duration of the silicon boom, but it was largely niche “nerd shit” when they were kids, and only became widely accessible/acceptable to them with the same changes that have left Gen A lacking basic computer skills. Millennials, though, grew up through the full development of PCs and the Internet and had to learn how to navigate them at their early stages, as well as keep up with the rapid changes. It of course still isn’t universal knowledge there, either, but anyone that used a computer regularly through the early 2000s is going to be levels above most people getting into it now.
Tsss, calling me an old nerd on lemmy. You’re a nerd! You’re on Lemmy!
But yes, i wildly, loudly concur woth most of this thread: my kids can’t be bothered with HOW something works. It just has to work. No interest at all in tcp, udp, whats a bit, byte why is everything in multiples of 8: that’s all nerd shit. And, indeed: my shit. Dad! You’re the nerd: fix this!
Yes.
Gen X is gonna be the tech equivalent of my grandma who knows everything there is to know about sewing and cooking
I wonder if that’s true. Sewing machines haven’t changed much since they started. Cooking hasn’t either. But, if you’re a computer-using Gen Xer, you can’t still be running Windows 95 or something. You’ve had to keep up with the current tech.
Now, you might be using Windows 11 the same way you used Windows 95, and missing out on some of the newer features. But, I think most people who knew how to debug a networking problem in Windows 95 still can figure out how to do it in the newest Windows releases.
It’s like driving. Yes, older drivers are worse drivers, their eyesight and hearing is worse, their reaction speed is slower, etc. But, cars have changed pretty considerably in the last 50 years, and most older drivers know how to use modern cars. They may not be as good at using some of the gadgets, like the GPS system, as younger people. But, they’ve adapted to keyless entry, push-button starts, push-button windows, backup cameras, traction control, and so-on.
“Going to be …”?
I feel like I’ve been that graybeard for at least 10 lifetimes. No beginning. No end. Only servitude.
It’s honestly a toss up whether sysadmins know what the fuck they’re doing. I’m working on a deal now that’s hampered by the fact that a Linux sysadmin for a huge finserv company doesn’t know how to administer a Linux system.
This is why the humanities are important: So you learn how to think about a problem and not just rely on someone writing down every goddamn keystroke for you.
humanities?
You spelt Math incorrectly.
humanities?
You spelt Math incorrectly.
People who think like you make my job a lot harder.
How are you supposed to understand instructions when you read at a third grade level?
How are you supposed to do research to understand an error message if you’ve never looked anything up before?
Mathematicians can usually read.
Except we’re not dealing with mathematicians. We’re dealing with sysadmins who must read well and quickly to do their job effectively.
They need to comprehend complex technical documents. They need to break things down into principles so they can apply them in novel contexts. They need to understand what the words “could not connect on port 4242” mean.
Except they don’t. They get me on the phone, throw their hands up in frustration, and have me push the buttons for them.
Because they didn’t pay attention in their humanities classes.
My confusion is that a degree in humanities doesn’t guarantee that someone can create clear instructions or follow then. (Nor does a degree in mathematics but at least there is some logic involved)
Being able to express yourself clearly and also read and interpret text is a big part of the humanities. Far too many folks in tech think these are worthless skills to develop and become a pain in my ass.
Gen Z are good at using tech, gen A are still learning how to use tech
You in NYC area? I’m hiring.
I’m 2-3 hours from NYC depending on traffic, so… kinda? But I’m pretty happy with my job honestly. I support a niche cloud product that my organization is almost entirely dependent on. Its a union position with good pay and benefits. It can be stressful sometimes and my boss can sometimes be… overbearing, but on the whole it feels like I’ve found a unicorn.
Out of curiosity though, do you have a job posting you’re willing to share? I like to keep my ear to the ground.
That’s awesome to hear. I could tell you’d be a good hire. We do automation contracting. We do lots of logic programming and also have an IT / MSP side of the business (Azure/on-prem domain, email server, cloud, etc.). I’ve been trying out this new app I saw an ad for on the train, advertising for job placement, and started using it the other day.
NYC = new york city
This is a translation provided for free by me because this user has defualted to american defaultism
To the person I’m replying to, THIS IS THE INTERNET, NOT america
If he’s from NYC, he knows what NYC means. If he’s not from there, it doesn’t matter anyway
NYC is one of a number of world cities known by acronyms or nicknames:
- Rio For Rio de Janeiro
- HK For Hong Kong
- TJ For Tijuana
- KL For Kuala Lumpur
- TO For Toronto
- Joburg For Johannesburg
There’s even a whole country that goes by its initials: UK.
So, stop thinking this is some American thing, it’s just a way that people shorten the names of common cities that have a few too many syllables to be convenient.
My dude, he’s from America lol
Gen Z/A are good at using tech, but they don’t really know anything about how it works.
Millennials don’t, either. A tiny fraction of a fraction had technical literacy 20 years ago and now they think they’re top shit because they can write simple CMD commands.
All this jerking one another off is crazy. I work in the industry and I’m surrounded by people my own age who don’t know what Active Directory is much less Linux.
Same as it ever was. The only thing that has changed is accessibility. All these discussions seem to miss that. Most people have not, do not, and will not ever care.
I guess I’m one of the fractions of a fraction. I remember back in the late 90s when that catastrophe of an OS called Windows ME was plaguing our society. Having to manually change registry keys just to make the damn thing recognize a sound card.
It makes me sound old but, kids these days have no idea the kind of hell we went through. If/when I have kids I’m going to start them off with DOS 6 and gradually move them up to current OSes. They need to know the pain we went through.
t makes me sound old but, kids these days have no idea the kind of hell we went through
I mean, whose motherboard still needs a sound card in this day and age? But then I could tell you about fiddling with the settings of an old dot matrix printer. I don’t think that qualifies me to set up a Kubernetes cluster or administer a data lake.
The “you kids today” rants seen to miss how hyper specialized computer hardware and software has become. No, Gen A is going to magically intuit an Azure DevOps Pipeline from first principles. Setting that up feels like I’m working through a Master’s Thesis on arcane file types. People need to stop pretending that knowing a bit of Regex from middle school entitled them to talk shit to a guy ten years their junior struggling with a customized .yaml file.
In sorry but this really sounds like boomer-esque mindset
Why should the younger generation have to go through the struggles of the older generation when those struggles are not relevant today
I’m gen z myself and I’ve changed Windows registry settings to disable stuff like caudiolimiter and change a few other things but I only learned to do that out of necessity
Things should not be forced on people unless they want to learn them, people will only learn things they are interested in
Force them to learn something and they won’t bother actually learning it because they aren’t interested and it won’t stick
This mindset is the same thing as passing down generational trauma to a a younger generation
People don’t need to know how to write a program from scratch to have useful tech knowledge. Knowing basic keyboard shortcuts puts a person above the vast majority of other people in terms of tech literacy.
For real. I’ve taught people copy paste shortcuts and they act like I’m an alien.
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.
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.
Computer natives are millennials. In due time, millennials will be what cobol programmers are in the coding world.
“On you want your recycle bin emptied? Yeah, thats gonna cost you.”GenX. We started with nothing and went from there.
I still know my way around autoexec.bat and config.sys
I had my hard earned ZX81 thankyouverymuch.
Well, now that I think about it you’re right, before that there was absolutely utterly nothing at all.
Finally some gen X representation!
On you want your recycle bin emptied? Yeah, thats gonna cost you.
aka what we’ve already been doing to relatives
Anyone who dismisses an entire generation as lazy or stupid is, ironically, revealing their own ignorance. Even Socrates complained about the youth of his time, yet civilization kept moving forward. If every new generation were truly worse than the last, we’d have collapsed long ago. So no, you can’t generalize an entire generation as foolish—doing so only highlights your own lack of perspective.
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.
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 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.
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…
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
You’re like a real-life xkcd comic.
Rube Goldberg machine of office workers
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 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
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.
To be fair, file structure navigation became more of a pain in the ass when Microsoft decided to rework their start menu to feed into their fucking store/web browser. It’s not a hard fix but tablet natives wouldn’t know any better. At work I still end up accidently searching the web sometimes when im searching for a file that wasn’t important enough to pin. I know basic file structure the modern UIs are just trash and not designed for local users.
Granted, but the inability to learn what isn’t “intuitive” is staggering.
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!
Fuck Microsoft. I’m out on my build coming up.
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.
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.
Graduating? These people have been in the workforce for years now. Many of them are teachers.
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
I had a meeting with a young person who had to have the concept of a directory structure explained to them for a half hour…and they’re in charge of designing a file browser. 🤦♂️
I don’t think the exercise was even successful.
how do people with no skills even get hired? I cant even get interview for job I fit perfectly for every thing they are asking for.
I’m pretty sure the people who do interviews are not the ones who have to train them. Also, if you use chat gpt for writing your cover letter, structuring your CV, running interview prep etc etc. You don’t even really need to be literate to come across as pretty put together.
Interviewers look for excess confidence, not skill
i guess i’m not getting hired for any work ever then… i just want to work and do my work well, not play their sick mindgames or pretend to be someone i’m not. I dont have any motivation to force myself to do work on fields outside my education either anymore.
Yeah, smartphones don’t teach kids file structure at all.
Late GenX (really, between X and Millennial): we expected everyone after us to understand tech. Nope.
I wonder: Has this happened with anything else?
Where an older generation struggled to understand at all, a middle generation adapted to it early enough to witness all of the quirks, and then a later generation was born into an already-smoothed out system — and they all lived simultaneously?
Seems like a uniquely modern thing, but then again agriculture and clothing and currency have all had periods of rapid change in the past.
Like were there Generation F dudes out there like “omg we’re the only ones who understand knitting frames smh”?
Ford Model T came with a complete manual for disassembly, maintenance, and repair. It made a generation of Americans fluent in mechanics who then went on to win World War II, to the Moon, and higher up skyscrapers than ever.
“Learn this as a child:”
“Do this as an adult:”
Never again. Right to repair doesn’t do much when the manual is so expensive only brand-dedicated repair shops can afford it.
Have you heard about our Lord and Saviour, iFixit?
For real though, look it up. Some 100k or so free repair manuals in twelve languages from phones to washing machines. And often enough, the necessary toolkit in their shop.
Upgraded every old MacBook (2009pro, 2015 pro) I had with bigger harddrives and did small repairs with ifixit instructions. But you notice they get less repairable over time. The 2009 thing was built like a tank and you could upgrade ram, replace a broken GPU and this thing over all felt very repairable. I still works but isn’t that useful any more 16 years after release. 2015 was way less repairable.
Yeah sure, repairing devices got harder over years and some devices simply aren’t repairable at all (at least not for laypeople who aren’t training or experienced in certain techniques like soldering) or you need very special equipment. But the manuals are less of a problem.
Re-Legalize Right To Repair and pirates will take care of the rest
The old cars were also designed in such a way that you had to understand how the thing was constructed and functioned in order to make it work. Nowadays, I only barely understand how shifting gears works mechanically and drive an automatic. Modern cars do much of the work for you, much like modern computers.
Cars also used to be a lot less reliable. Knowing how to change a spark plug for example used to be common knowledge.
My library gives us free access to Chilton online. It’s not the best for everything, but all of the information comes from the factory service manual. Plus you can find a lot of information online. You just have to learn what to look for.
There’s loads of places scattered around the internet where full service manuals are hosted for free for nearly any consumer product that has one available. The trouble is actually finding them…
Artificial scarcity enforced by capitalism.
Analog mechanical systems are so much more intuitive than digital ones though. The ability to physically see and touch and connect and tinker with things feels vastly more human than pointing and clicking and cursing and screaming.
Not unintuitive for lack of trying - some big minds tried hard and failed. Jerome Bruner, Seymour Papert, Alan Kay, Bret Victor.
Alan and Bret are mentioned in the “Sick sad history of computer-aided collaboration”:
https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen
Never thought of it this way, but you could be right
Such a shame americans seems to think the only thing they need is to be american now. Don’t get me wrong, you’re still the most innovative (with europe?) but that’s what it feels like from the outside anyway.
Feel free to tell me I’m wrong though, it’s just a feeling 😅!
I think OP mentioned “a generation of Americans” because that’s the example they thought of, not because they think being American made the people exceptional.
You’re not wrong though - a lot of Americans definitely seem to think that just “being American” is some kind of accomplishment in and of itself. Meritless jingoism is intense here.
But I don’t see it being related to the previous comment.
This happened with the shift from manual to automatic transmissions. I used to frequently hear/read people complaining that no one knows how to drive a stick anymore.
no one knows how to drive a stick any more!! .
Oh, your mom can drive a stick all right
Sticky stick
the last car she drove was a stick i believe it was a 1990 mazda protege in a blue green color. but i know she had a Camaro at some point too
its a lost art
My parents tried to teach me how to use a manual transmission, but I simply could not get the timing down no matter how much I practiced.
No shade to your parents, but they were teaching you wrong. It only takes a few hours of good instruction to properly drive a stick, and it’s not about timing, it’s about clutch feel.
You start by sitting on your right foot (like half Indian style) so that only your left foot can work the controls. Push in the clutch and find 1st. Let out the clutch until you feel it just start to grab and the car starts to move forward. Clutch back in a bit to keep from stalling, then back out until you are idling forward in 1st. You are gonna stall the engine A LOT here. This is the most important foundational skill. Keep practicing until you can start the car moving with the clutch alone. Then, using both legs now, add a bit of gas and shift to 2nd, then back to a stop. Should be a small addition to what you now know.
Next, we learn to reverse. Hold the engine from neutral at 800 to 1200 rpm (don’t rev the nuts off it) and let the clutch out to the friction point again. The clutch is like an inverted gas pedal in an automatic. Push the clutch pedal in to slow down, let it out to speed up.
All that’s left after that is figuring out starting uphill. You are going to stall it a few times, but in two weeks of driving a manual, you’ll be good at it. Only thing from here is double clutching, which doesn’t buy you much since syncros were added to transmissions.
Landline telephones.
Original ones you rotated a hand crank to talk to an operator.
Then came rotary phones, that knowledge is slowly going away and old farts are like ‘young people are stupid because they can’t use a rotary phone’.
Now we have touch tone phones.Maybe commercial flying or electricity
Electricity definitely spent a generation or two in the “requires technical knowledge from the user” zone before all the standardization and safety requirements got figured out.
Yes, but not as widespread.
Multiple toolmaking skills has been lost and had to be rediscovered. Metalworking, mechanical computers (clockworks), etc.
Secrecy in trades and lack of documentation used to be the main cause. Now the cause is lack of interest…
I’m also really curious. I feel like this has to have happened, but I wonder if the level of change from a technical and societal perspective in such a short time frame has happened. As the world becomes more global, the speed that technology impacts other aspects of society also becomes quicker.
I assume it’s happened with pretty much every technology at some point.
You start with a product that isn’t very reliable or user friendly. You need good knowledge of how it works to even use it, and the manual process it replaced. It breaks often enough that maintenance is done yourself. Entire manuals will be provided that tell you everything about how it works.
Then as it gets reliable, the need for the user to poke around falls away. You can still do that, but you don’t need to in order to just use it.
Eventually, they realise the reason they’re still getting failures is that people are poking around and breaking it, so they make it harder to do that.
And then you end up with an opaque black box. It just works (until it doesn’t), and people don’t concern themselves with how it works. When it breaks they get a new one, or take it to a master of the old ways.
Looking back, I don’t know why people are so surprised it happened to computers as well.
How many people you know could explain to you what happens when you turn on the light?
An electrical current runs through a thin wire with an extremely high melting point in a vacuum, safely using resistance to turn electric potential into heat and light. Do kids these days not know that?
LEDs kinda ruin the simplicity. Current runs into a chunk of Gallium Nitride and mumble mumble quantum mumble mumble bandgap and light comes out!
TL/CCFL kind of ruined that simplicity already.
Tru tru
Yeah, pretty much.
The whole thing about guys not stoping to ask for directions and never reading instructions for assembling things all comes out of that generation where you never left home unless you knew where you were going, and everyone had basic level carpentry, plumbing, and electrical skills because had built a barn or assembled a kit house or installed a sink before.
Hand someone from that generation a manual of a swedish amorphic blob giving you a thumbs up to assemble an IKEA end table and they’re like “yeah I don’t need that”. It’s not about the end goal of having a table. It’s about having the knowledge to assemble the table. What is this part? How is it used? What would it do if I put it here vs there?
I’m a xennial. I was so excited by computers, and later the internet. It completely absorbed me to the point that I would get up an hour early for school so I could mess around with the computer before catching the bus. A beautiful (ugly) Compaq with a 200n megabyte hard drive, 2 megs of ram. 86 architecture. I was about 11 years old.
I played a few games, but I spent much more time messing around the system in DOS. Making batch files, then working with qbasic. Of course I played Nintendo games as well. After we got internet I used a 28.8kbps modem to upload my own webpage via FTP.
I remember thinking, even as a child/teenager, that the kids of the future were going to be incredible, being born into the digital internet age. I was so wrong. My classmates struggled with computers because they weren’t amazed by them like I was. Touch typing class had nothing on ICQ.
I think there are a lot of xennials on Lemmy. It was crushing to see that the generations before and after us can’t comprehend the basics of computers. Then smartphones happened and everything got so much worse.
You were a nerd interested in computers. They still exist in younger generations. Just became way less common because the necessity disappeared for most people. Most prefer computers (or any device or tech really) that “just works”. Some are interested in how things work. 90% of Lemmy is the latter, from all generations but many in their 30s and 40s because that was peak computer learning age: rather cheap hardware, software still needed to be hacked together somewhat, clear rewards when doing so (for example messing with game settings IRQ etc to get it running).
I’ve met people born late 90s early 00s doing PhD in computer science who barely seem to know basic general computer stuff… All they know is that one extremely niche thingy they’re into. They never needed to learn general basics that much, stuff just worked out of the box.
Yeah it’s wild. I don’t think it’s good but I’m not doing a great job teaching. One of my gen Z nephews expressed an interest so I gave him my old PC, took it apart with him and put it back together, explained everything.
He rearranged his room and told me when he hooked everything back up his games were super slow. Every time I touch his PC I clean it up from scam shit spyware etc. I pretend not to notice where all this stuff came from.
But this time was different. He’d plugged his monitor into the motherboard instead of the graphics card. He recently redid his room again and got it right this time! Small victories.
Every time I touch his PC I clean it up from scam shit spyware etc. I pretend not to notice where all this stuff came from.
Let they that never borked the family PC with “boobs.exe” from limewire castle the first stone!
Carving an entire castle from one stone would be incredibly impressive engineering. Or a very small castle.
Fucking Autoassume…I’m leaving it because it’s fucking funny 🤣
At first I had assumed you’d look at my profile and were making a topical joke. I’m a Stone Mason, and I work in Conservation. So, this is incredibly fun/funny and I’m absolutely here for it!
Gen Z here and I can agree. I used to mess with computers, especially when I got older, so I could play games. Later I kind of slipped into the open source and tech bubbles. If there is a problem that annoys me enough to overcome my laziness I will fix it. I have no problems with writing scripts so I don’t have to do stuff manually each time. And then I look left and right and realise that most people in my age dont even have a computer and only use iPads and such stuff. They have zero fucking clue what happens behind the scenes.
I think the real cross-generational parallel here going back is Boomers and cars. Their parents before WWII had the equivalent of bare bones stuff, but Boomer era cars were more complicated, but also meant status and were a hobby.
Looking forward, the Gen Z and A kids are just utterly abused by the social media that we xennials/millennial told them was a safe new requirement for life. It wasn’t. It was our leaded gasoline and secondhand smoke. However, their opportunity environment is that they don’t behave like we did as consumers. Their expectation that all media should be free and immediately available is where the world needs to bend to them. As Boomers loose their grip on the economy, open source everything is going to be the world they created for us.
We don’t need to expect everyone to learn like we did because it was a unique moment in time where tinkering got us somewhere in that specific area. But can you fix a carburetor float? No, and Boomers see your lack of awareness there the same as you see deficiencies in others.
I can fix a carb float and also use a computer
People who can do both certainly exist, but they exist within a sliver of purple in the Venn diagram.
Can also fix a carb and write code too. Skills are useful!
Specialization is for insects
They’re about as well prepared to deal with computers as people who had a teddy bear when they were children are prepared to be a veterinary.
