A related anecdote - i’ve observed that computer skills in successive generation cohorts is dropping and dramatically. I’m a millennial but was fortunate enough to have grown up with parents who had no idea about tech but gave me tools and manuals to learn. Most of the books i read before the age of ten were computer manuals. they were in the trash and easy to access. Tech was also fragile in the 90s and 2000s so the fiddling led to higher understanding.
In stark contrast are gen z and gen alpha (?) where many i’ve interacted with do not understand folder structures, startup sequences or even how to type with more than two fingers. They are excellent at typing on a screen with their thumbs but writing an excel macro? It is completely alien. navigating folders? A struggle.
As tech matures, skills are dropping and alarmingly so.
We make products that intentionally hide any aspect of computing from the user, make up branded terminology for what they do, and vaguely threaten people with the police and financial ruin who dig into them or try to use them in a way that they weren't intended to be used. We do this in order to lock them in. Over the past couple decades we've done our best to keep users ignorant and fearful of switching from our products because all of their skills and data will be lost. I think it started with the "ribbon" in Office, but it was full blown after the introduction of the iPhone (and Android, later.)
A reckoning is coming. You can't intentionally make an entire generation stupid and not feel the consequences eventually. Who's going to teach their kids?
> A reckoning is coming. You can't intentionally make an entire generation stupid and not feel the consequences eventually.
There are more things to learn today at school. They teach feelings for a start, that didnt happen in my day which perhaps explains why skills in computing are dropping. Not only that, people are no longer concerned with what part of town are they going to live in, settle down etc etc, now they consider what part of the world they want to live in. The constraints of family & school friends, region and country are being battered by globalisation which is mainly being driven by the internet.
Watching the BBC news, here in the UK and you could be forgiven for thinking the population in the rest of the world are just criminally insane terrorists, but thats what the UK press portray the rest of the world as to the British people.
I think they are using Project Fear to keep people here, in a desperate attempt to maintain GDP amongst other things.
So all in all, beside computing, today I know more about finance and biology than I would have ever learnt if I didnt have a job that gave me easy access to the internet, and the GP's hate me for it, when I have to deal with them, rattling off info is like a game of top trumps, until they lose and storm off!
But they only know what they have been spoon fed, look at Wimbledon champion Andrew Murray, if his nutritionists and the NHS were any good, he wouldn't be the only player with an artificial hip playing tennis at Wimbledon, and yet for some mad reason, people think thats a good thing and something to be proud of!
I'm sure the women who were portrayed in the Hollywood film Hidden Figures have probably lamented how the skills to land a man on the moon have been lost to mainframes, its a human trait to point out problems and then discuss them, but when will we be discussing these things with AI's and get credible advice back from the code?
It's interesting the differences between gen z and older generations when it comes to computers. I'm a cusper (millenial/gen z) so I grew up with computers, just like my parents who are gen x, so we all understand it just fine. But I'll help out someone who can't be any older than their late 40's with a $2,500 laptop, who almost started crying when I opened a new tab in her browser because she thought I deleted it. She didn't understand the concept of tabs. Or just last year when I met someone who had never owned a laptop, and returned their school laptop and bought an iPad Pro instead because they understood it.
It's so strange, I feel like I'm in this weird middle ground of understand desktop and mobile OS's just fine, but the older generation and the younger generation are siloed into one or the other.
As someone on the cusp from X to Millenial, I get mobile fine, but the loss of screen space is why I'll never prefer it. And this is made worse by the natural degradation of eyesight as I get older.
I did have to make an intentional effort to become comfortable on a mobile device, though.
I find I'm almost mad when I have to actually do something on a mobile device. I can scroll through feeds just fine but if I need to start finding answers to questions, or editing text, it's just obnoxious and I'm mad the whole time.
On the editing text at least, I recommend one of the soft, foldable or rollable keyboards with bluetooth and a phone mount. Walked India and Nepal a few years ago while writing posts and software when I hit hostels or hotels and it worked quite well. There's some fairly lightweight ones (also fairly cheap) that also have touchpads, which may help with the feeds and finding answers.
I can type reasonably fine, but anytime there’s a skeuomorphic control (like a joystick) it all goes to hell. The screens are too small and my thumbs too large to get anything resembling accuracy. And so many huge developers are unwilling to put in the effort to support external controls.
Smaller fingers and better eyes are what’s required, I guess. So, not me.
Meanwhile I have small hands and have trouble with modern phones being too big. Have to use them two-handed or risk dropping the phone as I shift my grip around.
I can only one-hand my "standard" sized iPhone comfortably with a pop-socket. I love that they make those as mag-safe attachments, as an aside. Otherwise, I'm with you on two-handing it, even with my large hands.
When you don't have to struggle to learn the basics of how to use something, you won't develop the mental model of operation you can carry forward.
We (Late X, millenials) did have to struggle just to operate a computer. We had to build a mental model to work around inadequate tools in the OS and beyond.
Younger people have had adequate tools to interact with computers, so they've never been forced to build that mental model - to build an intuitive understanding of how a computer works. So, yeah, it's not too surprising to me.
They can absolutely learn such models, but it's going to take more effort and intentional digging for rough spots to do so. For the most part, it's not like we can just give them a '95 PC with Windows 95 and say "go for it."
It’s insane. I don’t wanna generalize but anecdotally (I’m gen z or whatever is younger than millennial), it’s staggering how illiterate most peers are. Several times I’ve explained memory in the “u ever have a bunch of tabs open, Spotify, and some game, and now it starts buffering and ur fans go nuts” very simple way and it’s enlightening to them.
And not even having the willingness to learn the basics of these tools you use for hours daily breaks my brain. The profit optimization which tries to drive the barriers to entry for usability to the ground are a big problem too. Removes incentive/requirement to learn about it for those that needed it.
And personally I cant stand using my iphone while my gen seems perfectly content with navigating pop ups and unblockable mobile youtube ads and profiling and no customizable workflow etc. I find it sad as fuck that tech is trending toward the masses blindly accepting what’s served to them but I guess that’s the way most things have gone.
Fixing houses, crafts of different sorts, knitting, cooking etc. have always been old peoples game. Computers will be the same. There was a moment in history young people were on top, but in the future if you have trouble with tech your best bet is to find the oldest computer person you know and ask for help.
on the topic of tools, i want to add something i rue - the loss of printed instruction manuals. My iphone can do a lot and has many features but most are useless to me because one - there is no printed manual i can use (a screen is a sub-par replacement) and..
two - the discoverability is terrible. With more things moving mobile-first, the discoverability of features is just gone. there’s a delicate balance between the capability of software and the east of use. TeX comes to mind a a good example.
Even digital `man` pages would be nice sometimes. Not the watered down "Help" pages.
> With more things moving mobile-first, the discoverability of features is just gone.
I'm on the fence about this one. Curiosity will drive a lot of discoverability, but the "locations" of features changes so quickly that all your prior discovery is rendered moot.
"I know this feature exists but can't find it," is little different from "This feature doesn't exist."
Consult the geniuses (no pun intended) that patrol the Apple help forums!!
But yea it’s terrible. Whether intentional or not, ignoring “power users” cuz they’ll figure it out regardless vs coddling the rest and not overwhelming them sucks ass
I think this is interesting and come from a like background as you. Building machines and discovering our router had wifi on a Sony PSP.
Some thoughts:
1: Boomers and Gen X kinda screwed later generations with incredibly awful computer education in schools. Most schools are basically marketing firms for Google and Microsoft Office. Kids are just not taught the basics at all and instead are handed endless document tasks that are absolutely meaningless to real life.
2: One can argue that all of what you define as 'tech skills' are actually just legacy thought processes that have gone by the wayside. Folder structures are often silly on modern devices with great search. Startup sequences are unneeded to be known because their modern hardware solves it's own problems when things go wrong (ChromeOS for example can just re-image and restore files/settings automatically upon boot failure). They know how to type with their thumbs because the full size keyboard is not relevant and once again, schools don't teach it. Microsoft will gladly have GPT 4.0 write a macro faster than you could.
3: I would also bet that later generations are better at some things. Notably handling the social web, personal image, and expecting to deal with scams and fraud. Our generation got thrown head first into a world where everything is there always. Where your past follows you. They grew up with it, it is native. They know to be more careful in sharing. Their bullies sit down at their dinner tables and on their nightstand because the internet and social networks exist after school hours. General smartphone use skills are likely better. Gen Z is also, according to other reports, less likely to smoke or drink and generally more willing to make stable life choices.
It's easily to point the finger at a next generation but I think
A: The problem tends to be the prior generation's fault. It is wild that so many generations will say 'kids these days' but it is their kids.
B: The lens through which the generation is judged is not actually fair. I would also note this: The generation before us would argue that we don't know how to drive stick, read an analog clock, or balance a checkbook. The world moved on.
>Startup sequences are unneeded to be known because their modern hardware solves it's own problems when things go wrong (ChromeOS for example can just re-image and restore files/settings automatically upon boot failure)
Yes, because nothing ever goes wrong or needs to be changed to fit your own process Silly user, just do it my way.
This type of thinking os anathema to developing computer skills. Computer skills are the knowledge to decompose work processes into logical sets of instructions such that you can utilize artfully arranged sand to do the work for you. That still requires knowing how that sand works at some level, and the thought that went into the tools for you to use.
I will never use an Android/IOS phone to the level I will my linux systems. Why? Because the people who architected Android specifically did so with their own and not my interests in mind.
When you need to read an asinine amount of literature to realize mofos did everything possible to keep you away from the hardware, to keep them from having to have a "support division" because they weren't interested in empowering you beyond in the capacity as a consumer of their service, it gets to point I reject anything going on under that paradigm as legitimate computing tbqh.
In stark contrast are gen z and gen alpha (?) where many i’ve interacted with do not understand folder structures, startup sequences or even how to type with more than two fingers. They are excellent at typing on a screen with their thumbs but writing an excel macro? It is completely alien. navigating folders? A struggle.
As tech matures, skills are dropping and alarmingly so.
Here is the original report: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/9789264258051-en.pdf...