My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.
I am an older millennial born in 83 and I’ve been in IT for about 21 years now and grew up building and fixing PCs for everyone. I think the newer generation is going to be the ones that need the most help. Might be anecdotal but in my years in IT at first it was the older folks with all the problems taking on and using tech. Now it’s the younger kids coming in. In my opinion it’s the way we consume tech now. All tech in the 80’s - early 2000’s required a lot of tinkering and figuring out I always figured the older folks were just set in their ways and didn’t want to learn anything new. My first 15 years in IT I always heard people say “I’m not a computer person” as an excuse to not knowing how to change a signature in outlook, an app they’ve been using for a while, or some other basic business app everyone should know how to use.
Now consumer tech just works. Out of the box you don’t need to tinker or do shit to the stuff. Younger gen is coming us used to shit just working and when anything goes wrong they don’t do well with troubleshooting also companies make anything beyond basic troubleshooting nearly impossible without them so most just don’t try to figure shit out. This type of behavior is getting worse now people get tech that can do a few hundred things and they only use it for two of the few hundred and now you are stuck trying to explain how to do basic tech tasks to an end user who is just going to forget it an hour or so later.
I’ve noticed this with IT employees and the rest of the business. Maybe I’m just a salty IT guy but I do cyber security now and the tech skill levels are just bad and it causes me grief on a regular basis.
I feel this is very similar to working on a car. Back in the day they fixed those things up until they crumbled to dust. Pretty much EVERYONE’S dad knew how to do at least a little something on the car. But I didn’t. The car was just a tool, not a hobby, my dad would fix things when they went wrong and sometimes I’d help and learn a bit, but other than that, I had it repaired or tagged it for a new one.
Cars were always there and easily accessible, but I had to learn DOS to play video games! Computers are now our dad’s cars.
I think this is an apt analogy in more ways than one!
Older cars, you really did have to keep messing with them to keep them running and if you had to go to the mechanic every time, it would be too expensive, so it was almost a necessity. Just like with computers 2 decades ago.
These days you hear of people who drive a Honda for 100,000 miles without even changing the oil once and it just keeps running somehow. Why bother learning to fix something like that?
Feel this, I was lucky(?) enough to have a mechanic living at my house who basically told me to fix it myself, he guided me through of course but he emphasized how important it is doing these things on your own.
That guy cannot figure out how youtube works and he’s only 45.
I’d say it all depends on how much you had to use something, while the hurdles in software may seem small to someone experienced. those who are first trekking through see it as a huge wall
Also keep in mind things are less tinkerable now, especially cars and there are a ton of added anti self repair things added that weren’t there before
100%
My buddy bought a new BMW after decades of working on older models. The whole bottom is covered in plastic. You can’t jack it up on the side of the road without a part you have to buy from BMW. Then the brake caliper bolts were metric half size. He sold it the same month he bought it.
100% this.
I have even noted a huge deterioration since I have been in the IT industry, and that’s just been since the mid 2000’s
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People have no idea how to do basic process of elimination troubleshooting anymore.
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They have no ability to look at logs and extrapolate what could be going on.
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They don’t understand how to use a search engine effectively anymore or how to rapidly filter through large amounts of information to find answers (I have no idea why)
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The ability to understand how the various bits of tech actually work together and how this is happening seems to be getting more and more lost. So then which things fail people have no idea where to start.
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More and more products as you said “just work”… Until they don’t and give you jack shit to go on.
Basically just “oh… It didn’t work, try again later” nothing is more infuriating than something not working and also giving you no information to troubleshoot, it’s why I am basically allergic to anything made by Apple in particular but this is becoming more and more the standard.
They don’t understand how to use a search engine effectively anymore or how to rapidly filter through large amounts of information to find answers
This bit, at least, may be at least as much a fault of the environment - the increasing awfulness of search results these days. It used to be you could search a specific issue (e.g., “borked.exe high CPU usage” or “how to partition a drive”) and your first results would be relatively well-written sites run by actual tech people. More recently, though, it feels like:
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The first 5-8 results are near-identical “help” sites that are 40% introduction, 40% basic troubleshooting steps, 15% “download our app!”, and 5% actually useful tips.
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There are tech site results listed… but they’re from 2016, a different software version, maybe even a different OS.
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"Okay, so, to fix this problem you first need… [SIGN IN TO CONTINUE READING]
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If you’re very, very lucky, you’ll find a Reddit (or now, Lemmy) thread on the issue.
I’d consider myself pretty technically savvy, and even I find it frustrating to search for IT info or fixes these days. The newest problem is AI-written answers cooked up for you on the spot, which are frequently completely unhelpful yet pushed to the top of the results.
Exactly this.
I’ve been tinkering with computers since the mid 90s, and I lost count of how many I built or repaired years ago, but now, using Google to check something I’ve forgotten just leads to sales pages and massively out of date articles that were ‘last updated’ three days ago.
On top of that, you’ve got sites like the official Microsoft help site giving bad advice. Everything is just run sfc /scannow then dism /whatever. I genuinely saw a question recently where someone asked what to do when dism /online-cleanup doesn’t work, and the top answer, marked as correct by the mods was, run dism /online-cleanup.
Online search results have been optimised for seo so much now that finding the right answer can be very difficult.
Don’t forget that those first 5-8 sites are all written by a aithat doesn’t know what it’s doing! You can tell those apart from ones written by a person because they cram as many keywords in different combinations as they can. Like, if you searched “windows 10 Firefox connection error” the first result will be:
"How to fix Firefox Connection Error in Windows 10
Firefox connection errors in windows 10 are annoying. Luckily, there is an easy way in windows 10 to fix Firefox conne tion errors. The Firefox connection errors in windows 10 can be caused by a few different problems. In this article we will explain how to fix Firefox connection errors in windows 10."
It’s infuriating, because those articles inevitably are wrong about the solution, but they’re always the top results because they win the keyword battle. I use QWant for my search engine now, and while it’s WAY better than Google it still serves some of those sites up when I’m troubleshooting something because the keywords are just too strong.
You’re not alone. The generation raised on the iPhone/iPad struggle to figure out how to use a “real” computer and everything related to it. There’s all sorts of studies about it.
also companies make anything beyond basic troubleshooting nearly impossible
I hadn’t really thought about this before, but it’s a pretty good point. Not just the companies who make the tech, but employers and providers seem do just about everything in their power to get you to submit a ticket or (even worse) chat with “support” rather than give you the tools to solve the damn problem yourself.
And the menus/settings you need to make more than superficial changes to your device get buried deeper every year.
It can be so frustrating. I’m not a tech person, but I can generally troubleshoot my way around most issues I come across. Windows updated on my home and work PC and it rendered the search function unusable on both. So I figured out how to fix the situation on my home PC and it was fine. Came in the next day to try to do the same thing on my work PC and was blocked by a request for Admin permissions, which I don’t have, our IT does. I had to send a request for IT to remote into my PC and type in a password so I could click two buttons and fix the issue myself. A 3 minute process became a 25 minute process where IT can now charge my company for the time they spent typing in a password.
Nah, it’s a thing. Youngest of the Millennial generation and I can concur with your comment after being in IT for a few years - pretty much it’s either Baby Boomers or Gen Z people who have a tough time with technology, with a 50/50 shot of a Gen X person being either super tech savvy or a technological troglodyte. AI has also made things worse since it can now do some light coding, but I’ve seen some people use it to code out entire projects only for it to not work properly at all or break UI on websites.
I’d argue that Gen Z is the worst for the same reasoning in your post: everything works OOTB, and if something goes awry then they don’t know anything or can’t do things the old-fashioned way - which at least Baby Boomers have the option to if they want to be stubborn enough.
It’s funny you say that. Husband and I are 2 years apart in age. It’s amazing what 2 years does. He doesn’t understand tech. At all. He’s definitely gen x. I grew up being told I was gen x but now I might be millennial, I might be gen x or I might be a weird 2 year micro generation between the two. I’m really good with tech. I can just look at things and generally see how they work. I also started using tech/computers a lot earlier than he did, so maybe that’s why.
Now consumer tech just works. Out of the box you don’t need to tinker or do shit to the stuff.
I have the exact opposite experience , I happen to encounter software glitches nearly every day (especially in shitty apps like Spotify or Todoist) when back in the late 00’s/early 10’s everything worked as expected (except some occasional Windows blue screens or Linux kernel panics I guess), I guess it’s just because how companies design their software for normies and if you happen to use some more advanced features, you will encounter software bugs all the time.
Useful features are removed all the time because apparently marketing departments think that people don’t use them, and some of us depend on some things with no real alternatives.
Error messages were also actually helpful back then, nowadays it’s just “Something happened” or “Unknown error”, good luck finding out what’s the problem with that info.
We need to separate early Gen Z (I’d say 1996-2004) from late Gen Z & Gen Alpha. Early Gen Z was born pre-iPad and mostly used desktops and laptops as they grew up, with iPhones and iPads only becoming available later on. I may be biased being born in '02 but when I spoke to my IT teachers even they said that the younger kids were becoming more and more difficult to teach to the basics of using a desktop OS.
i could be thinking this because i grew up around tech but im from 2002 i feel like im WAYYY ahead of the curb for tech problems. NOTHING EVER WORKS and the internet only has solutions that are close to what i need which teaches you how to extrapolate instructions til eventually you hardly need google. making minecraft servers always cause a lot of headache whether it be java not working or port not forwarding. mods not loading or an internet problem causing lag but its a wirlesscard thing not the internet ugh. or just lag in general blah blah
bottom line is im tech support for my friends and my friends are illiterate
Coming from a simulation software company here, not everyone in my company will know how to deal with servers or IT security and I think it’s ok. The programmers and engineers are brilliant, creative thinkers, all highly educated, but some just never bothered to learn this one thing. It’s almost offensive how our IT department treat the engineers, as if we’ll break anything we touch, but I get it from a security stand point.
As a student, I used to work part time in server maintenance for our uni, that’s how I personally got that knowledge. But even people working in the “tech industry” don’t all have the same sets of skills or tech interests.
Speaking of security, our company has found that students now account for the largest group to fall for phishing scams. It used to be the older folks, but gen z doesn’t seem to understand email. They’re used to DMs on authenticated and moderated platforms and they don’t get that anyone can send an email and pretend to be anyone else.
I used to use the analogy of snail mail and how anyone can write anything on an envelope, but they aren’t familiar with that either.
You should see my zoomer partner and friend try to work a computer. They all grew up on iPads 😅
I swear I saw a study that basically came to the conclusion that there is a distinct curve in technological literacy where younger generations are used to tech “just working” and not knowing how to navigate anything outside of app-based interface. Take all of this with a handful of salt bc I don’t have source on hand.
This is a very interesting point and I can see it throughout zoomer culture when it comes to the down and dirty technical stuff, but I think there’s a distinction to be made between being technically apt and being able to grok whatever the hot shit consumer-grade tech paradigm is right now.
In the former context, a lot of zoomers have already “failed” but that context is the territory of people who reach out to learn it - in other words, the nitty gritty tech stuff will always be for the technical types. In the latter context, I imagine millennials will probably mostly be fine and zoomers will, too. I say “mostly” because we’re already seeing millennials start to kind of skip the latest trends (TikTok comes to mind immediately). Zoomers are already coming to grips with not being able to understand Alphas sense of humor via memes. Whatever the next social media platform is, I imagine it’ll be primarily a home for Alphas, leaving zoomers and millennials where they are.
Will there be spillover across the board, with members of different generations populating the other platforms? Sure, there are always exceptions.
As far as physical tech goes, like how millennials got the smartphone and zoomers grew up with it? It’s highly dependent on how ingrained it becomes in society. Hard to exist without a smartphone these days, so everybody has to know how to use one. Boomers have more trouble because they got it later, but there are plenty of them who are just fine with current phone tech precisely because they need to be for professional AND personal use.
As a instructor of IT I can absolutely confirm. A lot of Gen Z have not grown up with computers as a tool. I have a class of around 20 students, and maybe 4-5 have any knowledge of the various compression archives. I have to give primers on the proper way to save various file types otherwise they’ll just create default.config.txt (6) and wonder why an install isn’t working.
I thought you said zoomer parents and was about to get really mad and sad at the time.
I mean older Gen Z are 20-24. I’m a millennial and I was a dad at 23 haha. It’s early, but not unreasonably so.
Heh heh heh, I thought he said Boomer parents and I was wondering where the heck they got iPads
Yeah, this is a thing. I know a lot of younger folks who don’t really have a clue about how to do something if they don’t have iOS version whatever or some other bespoke interface. (And no, I’m not a boomer)
CLI ultimately runs the world, and the younger folks who understand CLI are probably at a ratio roughly even to the other generations.
Work tech retail, a lot of young people don’t know shit about any tech tbh
It’s because everything is now UI driven and done for them. They didn’t have to debug or solve computer issues. It’s a sad state of affairs that the better technology gets the less the population understands it. I’d say, with respect to this post, millennials may be the only generation that can truly problem solve tech, both past and future.
Not sure why this got downvoted. Things “just working” have a lot of upsides too: saving time, better accessibility, etc.
They don’t know how to troubleshoot tech. Gen X and early millennials had to get things to work far more often than later generations. Today most things just work.
Even beyond troubleshooting.
Basic things I’d expect people to know:
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What and HDMI cable is
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what an Ethernet cable is
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That Samsung isn’t the only Android manufacturer
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That different tablets are different shapes/sizes and hence use different cases (seems like common sense to me but apparently not)
Etc…
You’d never hear from (and might even never see) those that knew anything.
No, I think we’ll be fine. It’s Gen Z and Gen Alpha that are acting like boomers in regards to technology. My eldest niece and eldest nephew are tech-illiterate even though they grew up with PCs, tablets, and smartphones in their daily lives.
My eldest nephew can’t figure out how to use Libby, or how to install unlock origin on his mobile Firefox browser, and my eldest niece has no idea how to troubleshoot or look up solutions to any tech problems at all.
It’s frustrating and I had ban them from asking me anything tech related because I got tired of being the free, family tech support. Now I tell them “well, what did the sources say after you researched the solution?” And that always shuts them both up because I know they didn’t even try looking up the solution on their own.
They also have the bad habit of believing everything they read online. I tried telling them both that they should look at more than one source when researching important information (nephew was doing a paper on the American Civil War) and they stared at me like I was nuts.
They are the living, breathing examples of Intelligence VS Wisdom.
I think us Millennials will, for the most part, have an easy time keeping up with new tech, even as we get older.
Man that is my biggest pet peeve is someone coming to me asking for help saying IT DOESN’T WORK without either trying to figure it out or even doing the tiniest bit or research. It usually takes one single Google search. My mother in law thinks she has the nuclear codes and she’s gonna blow everything up if she touches her laptop wrong
I don’t really like bashing or putting the new generations in negative light… But in this case it is true. Late gen x, Millennials, and early gen z grew up with computers and tech that was more troublesome and where forced to learn how to naturally troubleshoot. On top of that we got eased into the more advanced and user friendly stuff.
Later generations where born with the easier user friendly stuff and don’t have to troubleshoot nearly as much.
Of course this is also a generalization and does not reflect on an individual bases
Every piece of tech today is made so that it works out of the box with usually a tutorial on an app showing you what to do. So, yeah, young people have a hard time with tech because 95% of the time, it works out of the box.
It’s easy to blame them, but they never really had to debug anything. The tech has been dumbed down all the way so that anyone that is remotely functional can use it.
Yea, I don’t like bashing my niblings generation either, but it’s not just the two of them I’ve had to provide tech support to; my cousins kids as well. They all act like troubleshooting is an alien concept and panic when the WiFi stops working on their tablets.
Fortunately my nephew’s high school has a computer class he’s required to take. I hope he learns something useful.
I’m thinking new interfaces/concepts of interaction might be where we lose touch.
Just like the previous baby boom generation had people with a lot of technical knowledge about for example how punch cards were used to configure computers and how to type with an old typewriter, we might know much about more advanced technical software and touch interfaces, but many might skip the Snapchat/TikTok scene and feel out of place.
Not to mention future upcoming things like a Brain-Computer Interface connected to an AI; perhaps to socialize, to create tools / content. Some of us, and maybe you as well, will join this scene too, but I already see people giving up and staying away from new stuff.
We will have a role in the technical side because of our knowledge, but that core knowledge is not that important any longer in many fields just like most developers don’t have to worry about machine code any more.
Programming with punch cards was a niche skill very few had.
People who grew up in the 80s and 90s didn’t just grow up with tech, we grew up with rapidly evolving tech that ranged from clunky and buggy to completely intuitive. We definitely have a better chance of keeping up as we age.
Social media like Snapchat/TikTok is less about knowing how to use tech and more “who gives a damn?” I care about that about as much as learning about Pokemon. Just toys for kids that I will never need or want to know about. THAT sort of generational divide is inevitable.
It’s probably right that exposure to earlier tech taught us different troubleshooting norms. But…To be fair, how old are your niece and nephew? Could be a maturity thing they’ll grow out of.
There’s actually a regression where millennial who grew up with pc are still the best at it gen z is as bad as boomers. If it’s not an app or website they are lost at even the smallest issue.
I notice this way more today with my job. The people we used to hire for computer support would know most of the things they were supposed to. Today most of the people we hire it seems like they can only follow a script or SOP and that’s it, basic troubleshooting or logic just goes out the window. It’s super sad… and even worse having to manage them.
Edit: I also don’t think it helps that they only get to deal with systems that have been made so user friendly anymore that most options to do anything are just built in or a command away so they really never deal with any of the stuff underneath to figure out how systems run.
