My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.
My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.
It seems like my generation (Gen Z) is a lot worst with technology than millenials. Most of my generation don’t know simple stuff like how filesystems and directories work or how extract a zipped folder. I blame the usage of phones as the primary computer and really dumbed down software that dosen’t allow any sort of self troubleshooting or configuring.
This is 100% it. Worked in IT 15+ years, started with building desktops, servers, virtual machines, building networks, troubleshooting in-depth kernel issues, tracing TCP/IP chatter, which built a really broad platform for my current job as principal cloud architect. I and peers of my vintage understand how to troubleshoot down to a low level, and we understand the implications, benefits risks and constraints of putting certain cloud technologies together even through the multiple levels of abstraction.
We’ve had the benefit of experiencing these technologies grow and develop first hand, we understand how they fit together and where to look when something isn’t working. Recent graduates have not had the benefit of that journey, are so used to operating at the top layer of the abstraction that works most of the time, that I find they really struggle to decompose a problem, simplify and troubleshoot one logical component step at a time. Problem solving is a learned skill and multiple layers of abstraction make knowing where to start very difficult if the error message isn’t crystal clear.
I think there are different aspects. I know how to use that, I’m an IT professional, but people are always asking me “how to do X in Y app” and I have NFI, I don’t use most of the apps and have no plan to.
I get that one a lot and I always ask if I can have a look at it for them but then they turn around and tell me they can’t be bothered. It’s fucking weird. I’m here ready to solve your problem, all you have to do is log in, and you can’t be bothered.
They don’t want you to figure out something that they couldn’t. I can admit I’ve been there.
Millennials had to learn how to handle technology from the ground up, recognizing file extensions to avoid viruses from the wild jungle that were Limewire/eMule for exemple. Troubleshooting software and hardware, navigating an untethered web. As technology and intuitive tools arose, the need to develop this knowledge disappeared mostly, that is the bad side of progress.
Even more so when millennials had to help their parents for that, whereas the following generation didn’t have to, except for specific cases.
There was an intern at my work who is a junior in college and going for a business degree. I had to teach her how to copy stuff from excel and enter it into salesforce. I was going to teach her how to do mass sf imports, but there was no way she was going to figure that out and it was more trouble than it was worth….so I kept her busy by sending her sf updates to enter manually. That’s all she was good for. More trouble than it was worth to teach her anything else.