I swear I read the same article about my generation when I entered the workforce, about how millennials were expected to be magic tech wizards by growing with the internet through osmosis
Well if you were on the internet 10-15 years ago you were at least somewhat familiar with computers. These days smartphones mean you can use the internet without ever using a PC.
I think the dumbing down of devices will reduce the tinkering in younger generation.
I got into programming because I was gifted an old pentium 1 with DOS and QBasic installed - trying to figure out how to play games on it.
If someone just gave me a gaming console I'd just be glued to that.
It is less about being tech savy, it is the "tech" the Gen Z is savy at. And that tech has close to nothing to do with the tech they encounter in the workplace. Maybe in the field of social media ads, but even there the backend of social media might be different from the consumer front end.
One problem I have, almost daily which tells me I am getting old, is some people assume they are tech savy because they can handle stuff like MS Teams and Jira or SharePoint, and assume stuff like ERP systems and so on are as easy to understand. And should be as easy to use as social media apps. And simce they either feel they are tech savy, or have serious cases of imposter syndrom because they think everyone expects them to be, refuse to listen to seasoned people. As a result, mistakes are repeated over and over again, e.g. realizing unit-of-measure is important when moving and consuming inventory. Some people seem to prefer to learn the hard way, if so, please do it o your own time, and not that of your employer or co-workers.
On average though, we were. The previous generations were slower to use personal computers, cell phones, gaming systems, and the internet. If you had to sit in front of a PC and install 7 discs from DOS in the mid 90s, or navigate the early web before Google, or cracked some $1200 Adobe software that you couldn't afford, or punted someone from an AOL chat room, you got way more technical education than someone that grows up with sleek touch screen mobile devices that self update over wifi and back up everything to the cloud.
> If you had to ..., you got way more technical education than someone that grows up with sleek touch screen mobile devices that self update over wifi and back up everything to the cloud.
Maybe a little. But:
Us older folks have more technical education because we actually had technical education in school. We had actually schooling where we learned to type, learned to use word processing, to do this and to do that.
My grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley and used a computer every day. My father had to do programming on the university mainframe to solve his college psychology homework. We are now in the 4th or 5th generation of workers that are expected to be "tech savvy" at work. But this is the first in which we've completely abandoned the idea of teaching them how to be "tech savvy". And it's not going well. Who would have thought???
I don't know how old you are or how close the generations run in your family but this is so far off my reality I've had to reread this.
I'm close to 40 and my parents got the first computer just because they had a company and it was to replace an electric typewriter in 94/95. We knew like 3 other families who had a computer. Everything you call technical education was a complete joke when I was in school (mostly the 90s), but yes, my mom learned touch typing on a mechanical typewriter many years ago - but that's about it. (Also I think there was a single person in my parents' generation who had gone to university.)
This also kinda matches my experience with my peers of the same age. We learned everything ourselves because computers were fancy and new and we had them in our teenage years.
If your grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley, and your dad programmed a university mainframe, you aren't representative of the general public. The general public didn't really start to adopt personal computers en masse until the 90s. And if you look at, for example, conversations between David Letterman and Bill Gates regarding the internet in the 1995 (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tgODUgHeT5Y), and Gates tries to explain to him the advantage of it and David pans that he doesn't get it, with the audience laughing along to dismissive jokes about it being unnecessary complexity versus radio and cassette tapes. That was the prevailing attitude regarding computers even well into the 90s (now, they're pervasive).
> If your grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley, and your dad programmed a university mainframe, you aren't representative of the general public.
Hey, maybe so. But as it turned out, I went to pretty-damn-bad public school in the rust belt. We had those Acer clones of the Apple II in every classroom starting in kindergarten/first grade. We learned to type and played math and word games. And then IBM PC clones in the school library in middle school and high school, learning WordPerfect on DOS because they made special writing assignments just so we had to use a computer.
And in my working class neighborhood, where a house cost about $50,000 in 1990, about every other family had a Commodore 64 or better.
David Letterman made a career out of acting dumb for laughs. That's what he did.
That exchange between him and Gates was him acting dumb so that Gates could hit a home run, and Gates whiffed. To record a radio-broadcast baseball game with a tape recorder, somebody needed to be physically located within the broadcast range of the station at the time of the broadcast. And then stop and start the recording between half-innings just to have any hope of fitting the whole game on a single cassette. And then get the cassette to you, wherever you are. The internet broadcast eliminated all of those constraints. I appreciate watching that video clip, it demonstrates just how little Gates understood the potential of the internet in those "early days" :)
Fair- I did have all those experiences and perhaps they taught me to tinker with tech. But I really wasn’t magically good with configuring the printer, excel and photoshop though, but my first job assumed that I would be and I had to learn it because everyone else assumed I would be more efficient at it or something. I think this is the dominant effect that these articles get written about, older people expecting instant learning from younger people.
What is it that motivates older generations to diss younger generations? I’m a Millennial, and people love to shit on us, today still, but especially in the 2000s and early 2010s.
It's true that there's always generational tensions, and the funny thing is that people now young are going to do exactly the same thing when they get older. In that sense, it's cyclic.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't discuss gaps or issues unique to a generation. In the interest of the new generation as well as the older ones.
I'd say smartphone-addiction is a serious and impactful one. One of my friends owns a wood processing company. These youngsters simply abandon their station (a massive machine) and go take a dump for 30 mins, playing on their phone. Multiple times per day. Simply shutting down production altogether.
Another friend owns a logistics company, order picking and such. He doesn't want to take away their phones, tried to solve it with warnings. Yet he keeps finding them hiding in shelves, on their phones. Like heroine addicts.
My sister-in-law works in a large grocery store, and reports that this generation calls in sick 4 times more than anybody else. They very regularly simply can't be bothered to show up at all.
Earlier young generations were not this broken, unproductive, disloyal, addicted and useless. It's a real and serious issue.
Why must we motivate the opposite when the answers to these conflicts are in front of us? When a younger generation lacks a skill, don’t complain and blame them for it—they’re the ones who are new here—figure out how to train them. When an expectation is violated then interrogate the expectation on both sides of the equation—-many people simply don’t know how to act in certain situations because there wasn’t clear communication from those in power. And if a large enough group exhibits a behavior habitually then don’t make them conform—your workforce has changed and you need to adapt to that for a thriving business.
Another thing is that I disagree with the statement that Gen Z is broken. They are as much a product of their time as the generations preceding them. Individuals belonging to older generations need to remember that they had to grow into the person they are today.
No. The workplace isn't there to teach you basic discipline, good faith effort, self-control over your urges and basic reliability. These things are to be expected from the very start. For every generation. This is the first to fail this lowest of all tests.
There are no mysteries here about what to do or how to behave. When you work at a place, you do the work. You show up and do the work. That's it. It's not a skill problem, it's a behavioral problem.
Are there larger forces at work causing this? Yes. Overprotective and distant parenting. Pampering. Addictive tech. Zero effort convenience services. No hardships. No accountability. No social skills. Spending 18 years of your life on easy mode, and then being plunged into the real world.
I think we fundamentally disagree about this. Teaching those skills is what an entry level job is supposed to do for someone. Then they level up, make mistakes, and learn some more as they gain experience in their profession.
It sounds like the argument you are pushing is that anyone but the business owner is at fault for what employees know and how they behave. While some of that is true, it’s disingenuous to demand that employees will come in knowing what a business owner expects out of them or have the context specific skills to do a job. Reflect on your own experiences here. Can you genuinely state that your personal work history shows a perfect employee who always knew what to do? C’mon. Be real.
We're talking about a job where you attend a machine, feed it things and push 3 buttons. We're talking about picking orders. Here's the order. Collect it. And do this for 8 hours per day.
I started doing simple jobs at the age of 11. Here's a car. Wash it. Here's bricks, bring them to the brick laying guy. I think I would have understood those concepts at the age of 6.
There's no unclarity about expectations. A job surely is not some alien concept where at the age of 18 the very idea of work is unheard of?
It's not a skill issue, it's work ethic, and behavior. You're paid to work, not to be on your phone.
That’s a cute reduction, but the case being made doesn’t account for workers being humans in an ever evolving society. A job is, in fact, an alien concept to someone who has never had one before. And even people who have had jobs may have never been trained in a way that works for all employers. You’re making a moral judgment against the people with the least power in the employer-employee relationship. If a business owner wants the big bucks then their work ethic should be reflected in the training and care they take when bringing in new employees. What you’re talking about is closer to slavery than employment.
tangentially, it's so strange that the "nerd culture" has only changed in people's perception, but the actual nerd culture of the 80s-90s is still considered something only people with no social skills would appreciate.
It feels like the sweet spot of technical proficiency is younger Gen X + older Millennials who were there early enough before a lot of the underlying nuts and bolts of how things work got hidden away behind a pretty GUI, but also not too old to no longer want to learn how the new things worked.
Is half the problem that gen Y grew up with email as a communications platform and had actual computers with actual mice and actual software installed on said computers.
Gen z may be plugged into their phone, but a phone is a far cry from the tech that is actually used on the office. And Tik Tok isn't like an Excel spreadsheet.
Further, prior generations had to write letters etc which transfers across to email in a professional setting more than YOLO lol .
The skills used in writing a letter are closer to an email than a text or whatever.
I'd be more confident that my gran who doesn't use a computer could compose a company wide email, compared to someone who has never had to send such a one way conversation.
I don't think this is the case at all, my brother and I are at opposite ends of the GenZ age scale and we both had full-on computer labs in school, winxp/7 for myself and win8/10 for him. We didn't go to posh, expensive schools either.
I think this comment parallels the same attitude that older generations take about tech issues in the linked article, where they don't feel shame for having 'poor' computer skills since they didn't grow up with it.
> One in 5 of the 18-to-29-year-olds polled in the report, which surveyed 10,000 office workers in 10 markets including the U.S. and U.K., said they felt judged when experiencing technical issues, compared to only one in 25 for those aged 40 years and over. Further, 25% of the former age group would actively avoid participating in a meeting if they thought their tech tools might cause disruption, whereas it was just 6% for the latter cohort.
Industry newcomers are embarrassed about everything, though, in my experience. They're stressed they're not working hard enough, or that they're not smart enough, or that they caused a serious issue in production.
When I've managed or mentored newcomers to tech it takes constant reassurance to make them feel like they belong. Or at least a number of people require this sort of reassurance.
I think it would be more interesting if these folks they interviewed felt like this only about tech-savvy and not about other aspects about the job they might feel judged.
This was similar to my take. Is the issue that they aren't as tech savvy? Or is the issue that they are more likely to feel ashamed? Maybe older workers feel more comfortable in their roles?
I have come across a mountain of references talking about "digital natives" in the past, but I don't recall any of them talking about the fact that "tech" and "digital" is usually about the UI first. Nobody is going to feel comfortable on a UI they haven't experienced. The more non-standard a UI feels, the more there will be an uncomfortable learning curve. And of course, no comfort with the UI will help you with background fundamentals, such as troubleshooting your internet connection.
"Nobody is going to feel comfortable on a UI they haven't experienced."
Well, the difference is that earlier newcomers in the work force did experience that UI. Because home computing back then was highly similar to what is found in the workplace. In that sense it's a new and unique problem to Gen Z.
Except it's not new, because before the early 2000s, it was still pretty common for people to not have a home computer at all, but still have to use one regularly at work.
No, in that case it's still the case that every computer you did encounter, however many or few that was, had similar mental models and UI's.
Very broadly similar but still more similar to each other than anything from before y2k vs ios or even chromeos.
A mere lack of owning a pc yourself didn't teach you some other mental model.
If you didn't own a pc, you still encountered them in possibly several places, school, work, library, friends. And by work I mean even as a kid with a kids job, may still have involved a pc at work, so still in the learning time before later entering the work force for "real". And whatever that total level of exposure was, even if it wasn't much and even if it wasn't all the same platform, it was still all of a similar level of complexity and involved similar mental models to understand what is happening and how to interpret the interface.
None of them were an Android or IOS phone where it's not even clear when one app is native vs a pwa, or that even most native apps are still not really native, but merely local.
I very much think this is the correct take, a few comments in this thread seem to come from users who are a bit too deeply embedded in the tech world, and can't see this perspective.
I have only my personal experience and perceptions, but I think most people here (likely technically savvy) would agree that, quite simply, most people of any generation are not technically savvy.
While I don't "get" TikTok, I understand how it works, on a broad technical level. A 20 year old might understand the social scene of TikTok and "get" it, but my guess is the average 20 year old will have no idea how a webpage even shows up in their browser, let alone how an app like TikTok works.
I think most people would struggle to diagnose technical issues with web-conferencing tech. The older folks in the workplace have had the advantage of observing the rituals other people do to try and get it to work (turn it off and on a again, restart your router, etc.)
Another part of the problem is that a good chunk of kids only use phone/tablets/gaming consoles, and have little experience with desktops/laptops. Likely as a result, several university professors have reported issue with gen Z students not understanding what files and folders are: https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...
This, plus all the recent UI/UX improvements across every software in the past decade.
Millenials are more tech savvy not just because we grew up with computers, but also because computers & software when we grew up was much more complex and complicated to use than the software today's users are facing...,
I would say that it is not about being tech savvy it is more about how their brain is wired. Some people just do not do analytical thinking: break down a complex a task into smaller, more manageable parts and make a plan. In other words, they do not think step-by-step.
And majority of computer task require that type of thinking.
I agree but I think that is why they are not technically savvy. I've seen clever, analytical people become technically savvy through necessity and exposure simply because they are an analytical thinker and the understanding came easily to them. I see it in BAs all the time who come in fresh with little technical understanding, but after a year or two working on a system they understand it almost as well as the developers who created it. Then they start making the connections to the other tech in their life and their understanding grows.
> Some people just do not do analytical thinking: break down a complex a task into smaller, more manageable parts and make a plan.
I would venture to say that most people do not think like this. And the people who do and the people who don't usually have a hard time communicating or understanding one another.
Much of my success in my career has been acting as a liaison between technical and non-technical folks.
Most people of any generation are not technically savvy. Most people here in HN were technically savvy before formally joining the tech industry.
Our industry benefited a lot from new employees who had prior experience fighting against buggy Linux distributions or writing random hacks for fun [1]. One of the many consequences of the abatement of general purpose computing is making it harder for teenagers to accidentally discover this wonderful world.
> I think most people would struggle to diagnose technical issues with web-conferencing tech. The older folks in the workplace have had the advantage of observing the rituals other people do to try and get it to work (turn it off and on a again, restart your router, etc.)
Every single company I've worked for has had at least one meeting where a group of developers all sit there awkwardly as one of us tries to fix the conferencing setup.
> where a group of developers all sit there awkwardly as one of us tries to fix the conferencing setup.
Or the more hilarious one where the group of developers each take turns to try, and fail, to fix the setup only to proclaim "Can't you just use your phone" before passing the baton to the next hopeful subject.
* the problem may or may not have any fix within their control right now, may or may not even be diagnosable in a short time
* and that the most effective way to get the problem solved is to leave whoever is working on it alone until they declare victory or defeat or ask for something.
I mean that is why I would be sitting and waiting patiently rather than trying to "help" if there was already someone working on it.
maybe if I didn't think this problem was really something they would be good at hunting down I might make it known that I'm available but only in the least suggestive most casual way I could manage. Or I might quietly prepare some alternative to have ready in case plan A doesn't work.
We have one conference room at work with a display that's inside the table and there are no instructions to be found how to get it to go up.
Turns out you actually have to connect something via HDMI (or whatever) and it will automatically turn on the motor to emerge from the table.
The room is 007 and actually being dubbed the "James Bond room" by building management but due to working from home none of us had ever been to that room.
So yeah, sometimes even a group of usually tech-savvy people can't figure it out because it surely can't be "just connect it". Nothing ever just works.
The curse of knowledge applies here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge Most/all of these things are so basic it's hard to remember learning them, and thus hard to remember that each new hire needs the basic onboarding to Slack or whatever.
Of course it's different now. You can't just ask your teammate beside you if something goes wrong or learn by watching when they've already done what you have to do. And as aluded to, those over 40 are likely less self-conscious.
Gen Z are savvy with iPhones and other touch devices. They type incredibly fast on their phones but probably slower than millennials on computer keyboards. While we grew up with using laptops and PCs from a young age, they've been using smart phones and tablets.
I don't have statistics, but I work with teens and it is a thing. I've also noticed it's a point of social expression to align themselves with phone for tasks, and even claim they're easier than on a laptop/desktop when they're obviously not.
I was lucky to get a laptop before a smartphone, which probably influenced my opinions greatly. But I'm thinking that for most kids now, they get a smartphone long before a personal computer. Perhaps this is part of it.
Maybe parents should supply their children with a bluetooth keyboard from the get go and make a real effort to teach kid how much faster they can type on it?
I say this while I'm typing on my phone, so who knows ;)
I think one of the issues is that Gen Z’s tech devices are more geared towards content consumption. Phones and tablets are great for consuming content, but not so great for producing. A laptop or even better a desktop with a large high resolution monitor is much better suited towards content production which is what businesses actually need.
Previously, this was not as big of a difference as the personal computer of the past was typically a desktop computer. Now the personal computing device is likely to be a phone.
In addition, computers/phones/tablets are more appliance like, in that it is very easy to use and set up and not much reason for the average person to trouble shoot and fix issues. This is great, but can result in the average person treating it more like a black box. I think in the past, if you wanted to get anything done with your computer, you needed to be familiar with the system and troubleshooting (or else have someone in the household who was).
Used to be for a fresh out of college worker, you just needed to show up to work on the first day, then anything you didn't know you could observe and learn through a mixture of osmosis and inquisition. Now, if you start a remote job, you have to have a baseline set of skills to navigate the corporate structure. Reaching out to the "people team" (read: HR) is unlikely to be all the helpful, and you may end up asking the wrong person, who will now be silently judging you for the rest of your tenure. In person, you make a quick friend over lunch and ask some questions off the cuff.
It's incumbent on us as more senior engineers to reach out to younger folks, not the other way around. That is an art I see properly practiced less and less these days.
Yet another reason I love co-op/intern programs. It's a great way to start building these skills for the junior members of the team, while also having fresh eyes on your product and codebases.
It just isn’t happening in my experience. I learned so much being in the office when I started out but now it seems like most people just silo away and reappear at the next standup. The seniors get a bunch done and the juniors feel stuck and aren’t progressing.
I remember learning so much about business just listening to people talk around me but now all of that knowledge is in private calls and you’ll only hear what you strictly need to hear.
I’d love to go back to the office at this point but unfortunately the local businesses just aren’t competitive with remote work and WFH is still preferable to moving state.
This is the way it should be. Older generations that have been exposed to technology longer should be more savvy about its use and its perils.
The only reason younger generations in the past (millennials) had more skill with high technology than old folks is because the old folks didn’t grow up around tech or computers. This was a fluke. The bar for being considered tech savvy was much lower. Building a simple web page would make you seem like the Wizard of Oz. Nowadays it’s just cute.
But someday millennials will be very old, and after a lifetime of using computers they should still be more tech-savvy than some young kids that know nothing except tapping a screen; the result of a lifetime of exposure to ever changing tech.
There is a possibility though that we have made tech so easy to use and abstract to the user, that new generations might always see it more as “magic” than for what it really is, meaning millennials may be the only generation that on average possesses greater understanding for how technology works and how to fix things; vestiges from their early experiences with the analog era.
My intuitive takeaway here is that people who grew up with all this incredible technology, do not appreciate the power it bestowed upon us (because "that's just how things are"). Secondary, using all this tech growing up deprived people of learning certain things, the tech made it too easy, now even a middling effort is too much. Lastly, and this one is timeless: they're too cool to care.
GPT summary of the article:
- Gen Zers are not as comfortable with new technology as older generations would typically presume
- 1 in 5 18-29 year olds in the study felt judged when experiencing technical issues, compared to 1 in 25 for those aged 40+
- 25% of 18-29 year olds would avoid participating in a meeting if they thought their tech tools might cause disruption, compared to 6% for those aged 40+
- Organizations should ramp up their technical training programs for their youngest workers
- Gen Zers may be accustomed to digital environments, but this doesn't always carry over to professional tools
- U.K. workers rate digital skills as the most crucial for the current and future workplace, but 27% do not feel confident in their digital capabilities
- Future workers lack awareness of the importance of digital skills
- The U.K. is facing a digital skills crisis and must educate parents and children on the importance of digital skills
- Gamification is a critical learning and development facilitator
> Lastly, and this one is timeless: they're too cool to care.
I hadn't heard this elsewhere in the comments, and it landed surprisingly hard for me.
What would have to happen to make tech cool again? The old hook seems semi-dead: culturally, tech is no longer the hotbed of creativity & possibility that at least some of us once were so drawn to; it's much more settled/established, the advances originate in far less cool & human places/far bigger & more imposing attention-capitalism. There's a lot of talk about apps and the skinner-box worlds of especially mobile. So like, what hooks could tech have today? Where would youngsters get more involved with tech?
And what changes to the industry or our paradigms might be open to us to allow tech to re-exude cool & empowerment?
Step 1: People old enough that it's deliberate effort for them to learn new things, can't be arsed to learn something new
Step 2: Older people notice the younger people still in the "absorb as much about the world as possible" phase of their life are more skilled with the new thing
Step 3: Older people assume the younger group is uniquely skilled with the thing
> One in 5 of the 18-to-29-year-olds polled in the report
Couldn't part of the problem be that "how to work" is itself a skill that needs to be learned and at such young age nowadays no much work experience has been accumulated yet?
For people who graduated I believe the first real job is at > 24-25 years.
Consumption software and production software has diverged tremendously over the past three decades. It used to be that the software you used to read the news and the software you used to write the news were both fairly clunky and required your brain to be on. Today, production software is still about the same but consumption software has been polished to the point of being completely effortless and largely brainless. Just keep scrolling.
Consumer uses of software are 100:1 in favor of consumption which now teaches essentially no useful skills because we got good at UX and good UX means the user doesn’t have to think.
I wonder how much of this has to do with poor tools being rolled out that entry level workers have to deal with. I feel like this is definitely the case in my big company. I was lucky enough to promote out of the front line rolls before any of the tools were replaced with strictly inferior alternatives. I can't use them effectively either, but at least I don't need to use most of them anymore. I have a lot of sympathy for junior employees that need to do their day-to-day work.
Now I just have to deal with garbage tools where it takes maybe an hour to process an expense report in concur or find the right training module to be compliant
Maybe this is more of a lagging generational tooling thing.
When I entered the workforce as an 16 year old, I used popular tools like TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, Trillian, xFire, mIRC, and more. The workforce was stuck using email and in-person meetings.
Now, the workforce is using similar concepts to those popular tools I would use all built into a single platform known as Slack/Teams/etc. I'm in the peak years of my career 30 y/o+ and thrive on these tools.
But maybe gen z is used to other tools like Discord, OBS, TikTok, etc. Slack/Teams doesn't exactly transfer over 1:1 to these tools. So they have to learn the lagging way until the leading way becomes the new way?
To say they are not tech-savvy seems very odd. They are especially tech-savvy, just not with the current tools.
I'd say I've been an early Discord user (not a huge fan, but a seasoned user nevertheless) and I don't get what fundamental difference to slack there would be.
Except that the longer I use Slack the less I hate it and it's the opposite for Discord.
I think each of these apps have different working models and cultures surrounding them. I'm constantly surprised of how people contribute in discord in comparison to Teams / Slack. Perhaps there's less barriers with tools that are more comfortable for the users?
I'm not surprised at all. (I actually assumed this, when the talk about "digital natives" was en vogue.) As it happens, we tend to accept technology that was mostly sorted out when we were born for granted and this tends also to be the kind of technology we're least prone to investigate. E.g., when I was born, high frequency (HF) was mostly sorted out. But, just before this, it was a hot topic in research and hobbyist magazines. To me, however, it had always been a given and I'm probably the last person to ask about this. There is no comparison to the kind of knowledge an individual who followed the emergence of a technology with some interest may have. (These will be always a minority, though.)
This is a great perspective. I can troubleshoot a lot of PC issues but would be pretty helpless with diagnosing a grounding issue or wireless interference. I recall my dad identifying a DOS-era virus that my cousin and I introduced to a PC via a DOOM cheat downloaded over a BBS, and he showed me the assembly and patched out the virus for us so the cheat continued to work. I would have a hard time doing the same thing.
I tend to agree with your assessment, but I see a key difference is that computers are simply versatile and you can make them do everything you want (skills in configuring/coding notwithstanding) but even big leaps seem so much easier than working with electronics or hardware. So even the people in my parents generation who were good with hardware could do some fun stuff, but the possibilities of any computer (and access to the internet) can do so much more if you want to solve a problem or create something - that's where I think the comparison breaks down. To solve something in a mechanical or electronic way I need a very high level of skill/knowledge, but to do it with software (even just making several tools work together) enables much more in less time/less knowledge.
The computing environment of earlier young generations were near-identical to what is found in the workplace. Desktop, mice, filesystems, office programs, the like. So the transition is smooth. Not so much for smartphones.
My nephew is 18 y/o and his "tech" experience is gaming on his phone. His sister is only on social media. When I asked them to forward a document, they took a photo of it with their smartphone, which is quite telling.
I gave my nephew my old gaming PC. As soon as anything unexpected happens or there is a problem, he's helpless. Not only does he not know what to do, he can't be bothered to self-resolve it. Spoiled with tech that "just works".
There's other differences. For example, they don't do email. They may have it but never check it. My niece was warned that her admission to university would be handled via a form and email confirmation, which then needed her final confirmation, with a strict deadline. Everybody around her told her to check daily, it's of a life-changing importance, and still she didn't. They simply can't seem to imagine a world outside snapchat or whatever the hell they use.
And there's differences in etiquette. Meme-like poor writing skills. Different expectations of privacy (none), things not professional-proof.
Apart from these generation-specific issues, I'd still emphasize the more generic issue that affects all generations. Training on these tools is absent or poor. I work in a giant company and the typical employee has absolutely no idea how Teams or SharePoint works. They get by memorizing the 3 things they absolutely need, whilst not knowing about 90% of the tool's capabilities. And due to these tools rapidly changing, they simply stop bothering to learn it.
We VASTLY overestimate people's abilities to intuitively understand these tools.
> The computing environment of earlier young generations were near-identical to what is found in the workplace. Desktop, mice, filesystems, office programs, the like. So the transition is smooth. Not so much for smartphones.
> My nephew is 18 y/o and his "tech" experience is gaming on his phone. His sister is only on social media. When I asked them to forward a document, they took a photo of it with their smartphone, which is quite telling.
This is it. Complexity and friction begats skill, but if everything you use is dumbed-down to be "easy," you won't develop many skills in that area.
I see a ton of comments here laying some blame on the physical platform by which information is relayed (PC vs Phone/Tablet/etc.), but I think just as much blame can be put on how we access that information on any platform. UI has changed drastically over time, and what is considered good UI depends on what context the UI is used from.
What's good for regular old consumption is not good for utilizing tools in the workplace, at least for the most part. Apps such as TikTok and the like are very little more than Skinner boxes, and having to go through extra steps to get the reward when using an honest to goodness tool UI on the job immediately disrupts the reward pipeline in one's head and causes frustration.
Sure, phones have contributed to the one touch paradigm of such applications, but it comes down to usage context just as much. It's no wonder that kids are struggling with what millennials understand to be applications.
I'll also add that despite rumors of the age of the hacker's demise, it is very much alive and well. It's still the case that only a fraction of the population has that itch to take a look under the hood. Only the technological landscape has changed
Older generations (my parents) were totally technologically inept. Most wouldn't even try. Problems that would be solved by clicking a bit left and right to try and find the solution would get them blocked. A few among them were working in the technology sector, back when you pretty much had to install whatever OS you needed yourself, and before the internet could give you a (bad) answer to any questions you have. Most were tech wizards, simply because that was the only way to survive in the tech industry.
Newer generations of devs had more exposure to technology, and so some of the fundamentals like not getting scared because stuff has a screen, or searching a bit for options. But no shit, Facebook and tiktok don't make you a tech wizard. With tech having evolved you don't need to do as much tinkering, and why would you develop a muscle for that then?
When I was a kid, the only way to play with the home computer was to spend 1/2h copying code from a magazine, so of course I learned a couple of things on the way, because I didn't have a choice. I will wager and say that installing a game by clicking on a button is a better thing. You can still play with code if you want to, and lots of people do, it's just not the only way, and so playing with the computer does not equate to knowing how it works in the way it used to because of necessity.
I do feel like a lot more devs than before can't solve a medium complexity non-code related problem, like restoring a broken dev environment or installing an OS. I think it has got less to do with age or any true generational aspect, and more with the increased size of the group. 1) dev used to be a geek job, and that's not true anymore, 2) if you started dev recently, whatever your age, the toolsuite is much better than it used to be, requires less of you, gives more attention to usability, with the downside that you don't exercise random tech skills as much as was needed in the old days. If everything you do is webdev on node, why would you need to know much about networking, OS and even compilers.
Those are skills that are less useful in proportion than they used to be for "dev" because "dev" is much more diverse than it used to be, and naturally people who don't need them will not acquire them.
That's my perspective, based on personal anecdotal evidence, so it's worth nothing. It's hard talking about that without sounding like an old fart.
I work with a bunch of middle-schoolers. While they use a lot of tech, lot more devices than me & visit a lot of (imo questionable) domains, they refer to things in a very non-canonical fashion.
Like, they don't ever, ever, say file. They'll say googledoc. Where's your homework ? "Its a googledoc - here's the link". Or "its on google classroom". But not - "its a pdf file. or txt file. or jpg file.
Similarly, "I like this song." ok where's the song - can you email it to me ? I don't get an mp3 file - instead its a spotify link.
Can you email me that video ? I don't get an mp4 file - instead its some youtube shorts link.
Like wtf happened to files ?
Everything is a file. Atleast on Unix, even domain sockets are files. You open a socket, you get a file descriptor with inode, you can invoke fstat. I mean, I don't except middle-schoolers or even high-schoolers to know all that - but atleast you should know that on a computer, content is stored as a file. Know a bunch of common file formats. Like stop calling things pictures & sending me links - its a jpg file, send the file.
Sometimes they click on the download button - but they don't know that the content got downloaded as a file and its sitting in the Downloads folder! Instead, they'll click the same Download button on the browser several more times until it finally shows them some link where they can click & view the content - super-infuriating.
Even Professors have dropped the ball.In the 90s, they'd just email you the homework as a file. I have tons of calculus homeworks sitting as pdf files in a usb drive. But nowadays, its all "on Blackboard", or on some cms. No notion of file.
I'm a computer programmer heading into my 40s. One of my kids is a pre-teen now who is on various computers and devices a lot every day.
I knew way more about computers back when I was that age than my kids do! And believe me, I've tried to offer to teach them more about programming and how things work under the hood, but they're just not interested.
I think the common assumptions around "young = tech-savvy" "old = luddite" has gone completely out the window in recent years, perhaps in the last decade. In fact, I now generally trust the opinions of technologists who are in their 30s+ way more than 20s and below. I think there's been a tragic lack of proper education around open source, open protocols, networking, ethics in computerized communications, and other vital issues in tech.
Perhaps it's somewhat analogous to how many people a few decades ago were pretty knowledgable about how automobiles work, the parts of an engine, etc., and some folks were amateur mechanics who liked tinkering with their cars. These days, I think it's safe to assume the vast majority of drivers know next to nothing about cars technically-speaking and aren't even interested in knowing.
The difference now though is that you don't need to know anything about cars to work most jobs, and arguably we need a less car-dependent society which prioritizes mass transit. On the other hand, a fair degree of computer & internet knowledge is useful for many jobs in the modern economy and even in terms of policy-making in general. Younger generations not having a handle on it is a real concern.
I'm in your age range, but totally different trade, worked in two contexts, one with my parents, one with coworkers younger than me, in both places I was the one who had to solve everyday tech issues. I think the comparison with mechanics is very fitting. My dad and other guys of his gen used to disassemble and reassemble their scooters, while me as a kid felt was useless and too much difficult doing that. Probably there's a golden age when a technology is mature enough to be accessible but still open to personal contribution of the amateur and a point when it reaches a level of industrialization, complexity and is perfected enough that you don't feel the necessity to spend time tinkering with it.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 47.9 ms ] threadI think the dumbing down of devices will reduce the tinkering in younger generation.
I got into programming because I was gifted an old pentium 1 with DOS and QBasic installed - trying to figure out how to play games on it.
If someone just gave me a gaming console I'd just be glued to that.
One problem I have, almost daily which tells me I am getting old, is some people assume they are tech savy because they can handle stuff like MS Teams and Jira or SharePoint, and assume stuff like ERP systems and so on are as easy to understand. And should be as easy to use as social media apps. And simce they either feel they are tech savy, or have serious cases of imposter syndrom because they think everyone expects them to be, refuse to listen to seasoned people. As a result, mistakes are repeated over and over again, e.g. realizing unit-of-measure is important when moving and consuming inventory. Some people seem to prefer to learn the hard way, if so, please do it o your own time, and not that of your employer or co-workers.
Maybe a little. But:
Us older folks have more technical education because we actually had technical education in school. We had actually schooling where we learned to type, learned to use word processing, to do this and to do that.
My grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley and used a computer every day. My father had to do programming on the university mainframe to solve his college psychology homework. We are now in the 4th or 5th generation of workers that are expected to be "tech savvy" at work. But this is the first in which we've completely abandoned the idea of teaching them how to be "tech savvy". And it's not going well. Who would have thought???
I'm close to 40 and my parents got the first computer just because they had a company and it was to replace an electric typewriter in 94/95. We knew like 3 other families who had a computer. Everything you call technical education was a complete joke when I was in school (mostly the 90s), but yes, my mom learned touch typing on a mechanical typewriter many years ago - but that's about it. (Also I think there was a single person in my parents' generation who had gone to university.)
This also kinda matches my experience with my peers of the same age. We learned everything ourselves because computers were fancy and new and we had them in our teenage years.
Hey, maybe so. But as it turned out, I went to pretty-damn-bad public school in the rust belt. We had those Acer clones of the Apple II in every classroom starting in kindergarten/first grade. We learned to type and played math and word games. And then IBM PC clones in the school library in middle school and high school, learning WordPerfect on DOS because they made special writing assignments just so we had to use a computer.
And in my working class neighborhood, where a house cost about $50,000 in 1990, about every other family had a Commodore 64 or better.
David Letterman made a career out of acting dumb for laughs. That's what he did.
That exchange between him and Gates was him acting dumb so that Gates could hit a home run, and Gates whiffed. To record a radio-broadcast baseball game with a tape recorder, somebody needed to be physically located within the broadcast range of the station at the time of the broadcast. And then stop and start the recording between half-innings just to have any hope of fitting the whole game on a single cassette. And then get the cassette to you, wherever you are. The internet broadcast eliminated all of those constraints. I appreciate watching that video clip, it demonstrates just how little Gates understood the potential of the internet in those "early days" :)
It's true that there's always generational tensions, and the funny thing is that people now young are going to do exactly the same thing when they get older. In that sense, it's cyclic.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't discuss gaps or issues unique to a generation. In the interest of the new generation as well as the older ones.
I'd say smartphone-addiction is a serious and impactful one. One of my friends owns a wood processing company. These youngsters simply abandon their station (a massive machine) and go take a dump for 30 mins, playing on their phone. Multiple times per day. Simply shutting down production altogether.
Another friend owns a logistics company, order picking and such. He doesn't want to take away their phones, tried to solve it with warnings. Yet he keeps finding them hiding in shelves, on their phones. Like heroine addicts.
My sister-in-law works in a large grocery store, and reports that this generation calls in sick 4 times more than anybody else. They very regularly simply can't be bothered to show up at all.
Earlier young generations were not this broken, unproductive, disloyal, addicted and useless. It's a real and serious issue.
Another thing is that I disagree with the statement that Gen Z is broken. They are as much a product of their time as the generations preceding them. Individuals belonging to older generations need to remember that they had to grow into the person they are today.
There are no mysteries here about what to do or how to behave. When you work at a place, you do the work. You show up and do the work. That's it. It's not a skill problem, it's a behavioral problem.
Are there larger forces at work causing this? Yes. Overprotective and distant parenting. Pampering. Addictive tech. Zero effort convenience services. No hardships. No accountability. No social skills. Spending 18 years of your life on easy mode, and then being plunged into the real world.
It sounds like the argument you are pushing is that anyone but the business owner is at fault for what employees know and how they behave. While some of that is true, it’s disingenuous to demand that employees will come in knowing what a business owner expects out of them or have the context specific skills to do a job. Reflect on your own experiences here. Can you genuinely state that your personal work history shows a perfect employee who always knew what to do? C’mon. Be real.
We're talking about a job where you attend a machine, feed it things and push 3 buttons. We're talking about picking orders. Here's the order. Collect it. And do this for 8 hours per day.
I started doing simple jobs at the age of 11. Here's a car. Wash it. Here's bricks, bring them to the brick laying guy. I think I would have understood those concepts at the age of 6.
There's no unclarity about expectations. A job surely is not some alien concept where at the age of 18 the very idea of work is unheard of?
It's not a skill issue, it's work ethic, and behavior. You're paid to work, not to be on your phone.
me too.
But when I got in the tik tok of the time was called IRC and really cool people used Bitchx and double booted Linux and BeOS
tangentially, it's so strange that the "nerd culture" has only changed in people's perception, but the actual nerd culture of the 80s-90s is still considered something only people with no social skills would appreciate.
Gen z may be plugged into their phone, but a phone is a far cry from the tech that is actually used on the office. And Tik Tok isn't like an Excel spreadsheet.
Further, prior generations had to write letters etc which transfers across to email in a professional setting more than YOLO lol .
The part about letters is not fair though, since most people also just learned it by having to write business letters.
I'd be more confident that my gran who doesn't use a computer could compose a company wide email, compared to someone who has never had to send such a one way conversation.
I think this comment parallels the same attitude that older generations take about tech issues in the linked article, where they don't feel shame for having 'poor' computer skills since they didn't grow up with it.
I had a pc at school and at home, and I didn't have IT support at home.
Not everyone had a pc then, but I would guess more had them than now. People now use tablets and phones, which aren't as good prep for the workplace.
Industry newcomers are embarrassed about everything, though, in my experience. They're stressed they're not working hard enough, or that they're not smart enough, or that they caused a serious issue in production.
When I've managed or mentored newcomers to tech it takes constant reassurance to make them feel like they belong. Or at least a number of people require this sort of reassurance.
I think it would be more interesting if these folks they interviewed felt like this only about tech-savvy and not about other aspects about the job they might feel judged.
I have come across a mountain of references talking about "digital natives" in the past, but I don't recall any of them talking about the fact that "tech" and "digital" is usually about the UI first. Nobody is going to feel comfortable on a UI they haven't experienced. The more non-standard a UI feels, the more there will be an uncomfortable learning curve. And of course, no comfort with the UI will help you with background fundamentals, such as troubleshooting your internet connection.
Well, the difference is that earlier newcomers in the work force did experience that UI. Because home computing back then was highly similar to what is found in the workplace. In that sense it's a new and unique problem to Gen Z.
Very broadly similar but still more similar to each other than anything from before y2k vs ios or even chromeos.
A mere lack of owning a pc yourself didn't teach you some other mental model.
If you didn't own a pc, you still encountered them in possibly several places, school, work, library, friends. And by work I mean even as a kid with a kids job, may still have involved a pc at work, so still in the learning time before later entering the work force for "real". And whatever that total level of exposure was, even if it wasn't much and even if it wasn't all the same platform, it was still all of a similar level of complexity and involved similar mental models to understand what is happening and how to interpret the interface.
None of them were an Android or IOS phone where it's not even clear when one app is native vs a pwa, or that even most native apps are still not really native, but merely local.
While I don't "get" TikTok, I understand how it works, on a broad technical level. A 20 year old might understand the social scene of TikTok and "get" it, but my guess is the average 20 year old will have no idea how a webpage even shows up in their browser, let alone how an app like TikTok works.
I think most people would struggle to diagnose technical issues with web-conferencing tech. The older folks in the workplace have had the advantage of observing the rituals other people do to try and get it to work (turn it off and on a again, restart your router, etc.)
Millenials are more tech savvy not just because we grew up with computers, but also because computers & software when we grew up was much more complex and complicated to use than the software today's users are facing...,
And majority of computer task require that type of thinking.
I would venture to say that most people do not think like this. And the people who do and the people who don't usually have a hard time communicating or understanding one another.
Much of my success in my career has been acting as a liaison between technical and non-technical folks.
Our industry benefited a lot from new employees who had prior experience fighting against buggy Linux distributions or writing random hacks for fun [1]. One of the many consequences of the abatement of general purpose computing is making it harder for teenagers to accidentally discover this wonderful world.
[1] https://xkcd.com/519/
Every single company I've worked for has had at least one meeting where a group of developers all sit there awkwardly as one of us tries to fix the conferencing setup.
Or the more hilarious one where the group of developers each take turns to try, and fail, to fix the setup only to proclaim "Can't you just use your phone" before passing the baton to the next hopeful subject.
* any one of them could diagnose the problem
* the problem may or may not have any fix within their control right now, may or may not even be diagnosable in a short time
* and that the most effective way to get the problem solved is to leave whoever is working on it alone until they declare victory or defeat or ask for something.
I mean that is why I would be sitting and waiting patiently rather than trying to "help" if there was already someone working on it.
maybe if I didn't think this problem was really something they would be good at hunting down I might make it known that I'm available but only in the least suggestive most casual way I could manage. Or I might quietly prepare some alternative to have ready in case plan A doesn't work.
Turns out you actually have to connect something via HDMI (or whatever) and it will automatically turn on the motor to emerge from the table.
The room is 007 and actually being dubbed the "James Bond room" by building management but due to working from home none of us had ever been to that room.
So yeah, sometimes even a group of usually tech-savvy people can't figure it out because it surely can't be "just connect it". Nothing ever just works.
Maybe parents should supply their children with a bluetooth keyboard from the get go and make a real effort to teach kid how much faster they can type on it?
I say this while I'm typing on my phone, so who knows ;)
Big tanks to all the gray beards and gray ladies who taught me to hack Gibsons back when I was violating COPPA or whatever :-)
(Folks used to joke I looked like Abbie Hoffman when I had hair but you shouldn’t trust anything I say now according to him)
Previously, this was not as big of a difference as the personal computer of the past was typically a desktop computer. Now the personal computing device is likely to be a phone.
In addition, computers/phones/tablets are more appliance like, in that it is very easy to use and set up and not much reason for the average person to trouble shoot and fix issues. This is great, but can result in the average person treating it more like a black box. I think in the past, if you wanted to get anything done with your computer, you needed to be familiar with the system and troubleshooting (or else have someone in the household who was).
I remember learning so much about business just listening to people talk around me but now all of that knowledge is in private calls and you’ll only hear what you strictly need to hear.
I’d love to go back to the office at this point but unfortunately the local businesses just aren’t competitive with remote work and WFH is still preferable to moving state.
It doesn't happen much but itself anymore, which is why I find a lot of value in explicitly "just chatting" with people.
The only reason younger generations in the past (millennials) had more skill with high technology than old folks is because the old folks didn’t grow up around tech or computers. This was a fluke. The bar for being considered tech savvy was much lower. Building a simple web page would make you seem like the Wizard of Oz. Nowadays it’s just cute.
But someday millennials will be very old, and after a lifetime of using computers they should still be more tech-savvy than some young kids that know nothing except tapping a screen; the result of a lifetime of exposure to ever changing tech.
There is a possibility though that we have made tech so easy to use and abstract to the user, that new generations might always see it more as “magic” than for what it really is, meaning millennials may be the only generation that on average possesses greater understanding for how technology works and how to fix things; vestiges from their early experiences with the analog era.
GPT summary of the article:
- Gen Zers are not as comfortable with new technology as older generations would typically presume
- 1 in 5 18-29 year olds in the study felt judged when experiencing technical issues, compared to 1 in 25 for those aged 40+
- 25% of 18-29 year olds would avoid participating in a meeting if they thought their tech tools might cause disruption, compared to 6% for those aged 40+
- Organizations should ramp up their technical training programs for their youngest workers
- Gen Zers may be accustomed to digital environments, but this doesn't always carry over to professional tools
- U.K. workers rate digital skills as the most crucial for the current and future workplace, but 27% do not feel confident in their digital capabilities
- Future workers lack awareness of the importance of digital skills
- The U.K. is facing a digital skills crisis and must educate parents and children on the importance of digital skills
- Gamification is a critical learning and development facilitator
I hadn't heard this elsewhere in the comments, and it landed surprisingly hard for me.
What would have to happen to make tech cool again? The old hook seems semi-dead: culturally, tech is no longer the hotbed of creativity & possibility that at least some of us once were so drawn to; it's much more settled/established, the advances originate in far less cool & human places/far bigger & more imposing attention-capitalism. There's a lot of talk about apps and the skinner-box worlds of especially mobile. So like, what hooks could tech have today? Where would youngsters get more involved with tech?
And what changes to the industry or our paradigms might be open to us to allow tech to re-exude cool & empowerment?
Step 1: People old enough that it's deliberate effort for them to learn new things, can't be arsed to learn something new
Step 2: Older people notice the younger people still in the "absorb as much about the world as possible" phase of their life are more skilled with the new thing
Step 3: Older people assume the younger group is uniquely skilled with the thing
Step 4: some time passes
Step 5: *surprised pikachu face* they're not
Couldn't part of the problem be that "how to work" is itself a skill that needs to be learned and at such young age nowadays no much work experience has been accumulated yet?
For people who graduated I believe the first real job is at > 24-25 years.
Consumer uses of software are 100:1 in favor of consumption which now teaches essentially no useful skills because we got good at UX and good UX means the user doesn’t have to think.
Now I just have to deal with garbage tools where it takes maybe an hour to process an expense report in concur or find the right training module to be compliant
When I entered the workforce as an 16 year old, I used popular tools like TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, Trillian, xFire, mIRC, and more. The workforce was stuck using email and in-person meetings.
Now, the workforce is using similar concepts to those popular tools I would use all built into a single platform known as Slack/Teams/etc. I'm in the peak years of my career 30 y/o+ and thrive on these tools.
But maybe gen z is used to other tools like Discord, OBS, TikTok, etc. Slack/Teams doesn't exactly transfer over 1:1 to these tools. So they have to learn the lagging way until the leading way becomes the new way?
To say they are not tech-savvy seems very odd. They are especially tech-savvy, just not with the current tools.
Except that the longer I use Slack the less I hate it and it's the opposite for Discord.
My nephew is 18 y/o and his "tech" experience is gaming on his phone. His sister is only on social media. When I asked them to forward a document, they took a photo of it with their smartphone, which is quite telling.
I gave my nephew my old gaming PC. As soon as anything unexpected happens or there is a problem, he's helpless. Not only does he not know what to do, he can't be bothered to self-resolve it. Spoiled with tech that "just works".
There's other differences. For example, they don't do email. They may have it but never check it. My niece was warned that her admission to university would be handled via a form and email confirmation, which then needed her final confirmation, with a strict deadline. Everybody around her told her to check daily, it's of a life-changing importance, and still she didn't. They simply can't seem to imagine a world outside snapchat or whatever the hell they use.
And there's differences in etiquette. Meme-like poor writing skills. Different expectations of privacy (none), things not professional-proof.
Apart from these generation-specific issues, I'd still emphasize the more generic issue that affects all generations. Training on these tools is absent or poor. I work in a giant company and the typical employee has absolutely no idea how Teams or SharePoint works. They get by memorizing the 3 things they absolutely need, whilst not knowing about 90% of the tool's capabilities. And due to these tools rapidly changing, they simply stop bothering to learn it.
We VASTLY overestimate people's abilities to intuitively understand these tools.
> My nephew is 18 y/o and his "tech" experience is gaming on his phone. His sister is only on social media. When I asked them to forward a document, they took a photo of it with their smartphone, which is quite telling.
This is it. Complexity and friction begats skill, but if everything you use is dumbed-down to be "easy," you won't develop many skills in that area.
What's good for regular old consumption is not good for utilizing tools in the workplace, at least for the most part. Apps such as TikTok and the like are very little more than Skinner boxes, and having to go through extra steps to get the reward when using an honest to goodness tool UI on the job immediately disrupts the reward pipeline in one's head and causes frustration.
Sure, phones have contributed to the one touch paradigm of such applications, but it comes down to usage context just as much. It's no wonder that kids are struggling with what millennials understand to be applications.
I'll also add that despite rumors of the age of the hacker's demise, it is very much alive and well. It's still the case that only a fraction of the population has that itch to take a look under the hood. Only the technological landscape has changed
Newer generations of devs had more exposure to technology, and so some of the fundamentals like not getting scared because stuff has a screen, or searching a bit for options. But no shit, Facebook and tiktok don't make you a tech wizard. With tech having evolved you don't need to do as much tinkering, and why would you develop a muscle for that then?
When I was a kid, the only way to play with the home computer was to spend 1/2h copying code from a magazine, so of course I learned a couple of things on the way, because I didn't have a choice. I will wager and say that installing a game by clicking on a button is a better thing. You can still play with code if you want to, and lots of people do, it's just not the only way, and so playing with the computer does not equate to knowing how it works in the way it used to because of necessity.
I do feel like a lot more devs than before can't solve a medium complexity non-code related problem, like restoring a broken dev environment or installing an OS. I think it has got less to do with age or any true generational aspect, and more with the increased size of the group. 1) dev used to be a geek job, and that's not true anymore, 2) if you started dev recently, whatever your age, the toolsuite is much better than it used to be, requires less of you, gives more attention to usability, with the downside that you don't exercise random tech skills as much as was needed in the old days. If everything you do is webdev on node, why would you need to know much about networking, OS and even compilers.
Those are skills that are less useful in proportion than they used to be for "dev" because "dev" is much more diverse than it used to be, and naturally people who don't need them will not acquire them.
That's my perspective, based on personal anecdotal evidence, so it's worth nothing. It's hard talking about that without sounding like an old fart.
Like, they don't ever, ever, say file. They'll say googledoc. Where's your homework ? "Its a googledoc - here's the link". Or "its on google classroom". But not - "its a pdf file. or txt file. or jpg file.
Similarly, "I like this song." ok where's the song - can you email it to me ? I don't get an mp3 file - instead its a spotify link. Can you email me that video ? I don't get an mp4 file - instead its some youtube shorts link.
Like wtf happened to files ? Everything is a file. Atleast on Unix, even domain sockets are files. You open a socket, you get a file descriptor with inode, you can invoke fstat. I mean, I don't except middle-schoolers or even high-schoolers to know all that - but atleast you should know that on a computer, content is stored as a file. Know a bunch of common file formats. Like stop calling things pictures & sending me links - its a jpg file, send the file.
Sometimes they click on the download button - but they don't know that the content got downloaded as a file and its sitting in the Downloads folder! Instead, they'll click the same Download button on the browser several more times until it finally shows them some link where they can click & view the content - super-infuriating.
Even Professors have dropped the ball.In the 90s, they'd just email you the homework as a file. I have tons of calculus homeworks sitting as pdf files in a usb drive. But nowadays, its all "on Blackboard", or on some cms. No notion of file.
Think grandma's desktop
That's why Apple products (specifically the iPhone) have been shying away from files.
Personally, I like the convenience and ubiquity of urls. It can work with any messaging method, email notwithstanding
You can charge someone for access to a file that is pointed to by a link
I knew way more about computers back when I was that age than my kids do! And believe me, I've tried to offer to teach them more about programming and how things work under the hood, but they're just not interested.
I think the common assumptions around "young = tech-savvy" "old = luddite" has gone completely out the window in recent years, perhaps in the last decade. In fact, I now generally trust the opinions of technologists who are in their 30s+ way more than 20s and below. I think there's been a tragic lack of proper education around open source, open protocols, networking, ethics in computerized communications, and other vital issues in tech.
Perhaps it's somewhat analogous to how many people a few decades ago were pretty knowledgable about how automobiles work, the parts of an engine, etc., and some folks were amateur mechanics who liked tinkering with their cars. These days, I think it's safe to assume the vast majority of drivers know next to nothing about cars technically-speaking and aren't even interested in knowing.
The difference now though is that you don't need to know anything about cars to work most jobs, and arguably we need a less car-dependent society which prioritizes mass transit. On the other hand, a fair degree of computer & internet knowledge is useful for many jobs in the modern economy and even in terms of policy-making in general. Younger generations not having a handle on it is a real concern.