• ssillyssadass@lemmy.world
    8·
    6 months ago

    Computers have been dumbed down and simplified for the masses. When I was a kid a computer did not cooperate until you raised your voice.

    • IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works
      7·
      6 months ago

      I do industrial programming. Everything is so far behind that yelling at the “computers” does nothing. Physical violence is just about the only thing they respect.

    • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      Yeah, newer generations have been raised on tech that “just worked” consistently. They never had to do any deep troubleshooting, because they never encountered any major issues. They grew up in a world where the hard problems were already figured out, so they were insulated from a lot of the issues that allowed millennials to learn.

      They never got a BSOD from a faulty USB driver. They never had to reinstall an OS after using Limewire to download “Linkin_Park-Numb.mp3.exe” on the family computer. Or hell, even if they did get tricked by a malicious download, the computer’s anti-virus automatically killed it before they were even able to open it. They never had to manually install OS updates. They never had to figure out how to get their sound card working with a new game. They never had to manually configure their network settings.

      All of these things were chances for millennials to learn. But since the younger generations never encountered any issues, they never had to figure their own shit out.

  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
    81·
    6 months ago

    I can:

    • Accomplish damn near anything from a command line
    • Write machine code
    • Remember a fairly broad swath of special character altcodes without looking them up
    • Disassemble damn near any computer or other machine, and stand a good chance of putting it back together

    But also:

    • Use modern programming languages, including object oriented paradigms
    • Actually read what is on my screen and comprehend it, including error messages
    • Understand and operate any arbitrary interface without having to have it explained to me by rote

    Behold my mixture of skills, and tremble.

  • Vespair@lemm.ee
    3·
    6 months ago

    I think Zoomers need a generational divide in their generation, tbh. In my experience, older Zoomers are intelligent, capable, motivated, and largely leftist. For some unknown reason though, younger Zoomers are ignorant, prudish, too easily contented, and weirdly conservative. I have yet to understand what happened to cause the divide, and I can’t point to any stats or evidence to support this belief, but anecdotally I have noticed this trend within my own life and spheres of influence.

    • Camelbeard@lemmy.world
      1·
      6 months ago

      Even with millennials (1981 to 1996) there is a big difference when you where born.

      If you are an early millennial you grew up with MS-DOS, so you had to learn the terminal to get anything done. You probably had your first smartphone after you where 25.

      If you are a late millennial you grew up with Windows XP and probably had a smartphone as a teen.

        • locahosr443@lemmy.world
          1·
          6 months ago

          Maybe the younger ones still elastic brains were just too vulnerable

          E: Usenet, irc, forums etc were like an early training ground hardening us against the purveyors of bullshit. When bullshit became the business of billionaire corporations online we were ready for it. They never had a chance…

    • Doctor_Satan@lemm.ee
      1·
      6 months ago

      For some unknown reason though, younger Zoomers are ignorant, prudish, too easily contented, and weirdly conservative. I have yet to understand what happened to cause the divide,

      The online manosphere/tradtube spent the past 10-15 years raising these kids while their parents fucked off. That’s what happened. These are the kids who made people like Andrew Tate famous, and made Joe Rogan way more relevant than he has any right to be. It’s a great lesson in why people need to pay more attention to the media that their children consume.

      • Vespair@lemm.ee
        2·
        6 months ago

        I agree with this, but what made this different then our generation or early zoomers? I was raised online as a house with an internet-connected home PC in the early-to-mid 90s with two parents who worked until night; there were grifters and proto-manosphere groups then and I’m sure moreso for the early zoomers, so I have to assume there was either some change in the methodology behind the delivery in these messages or, more likely, some change in the parental oversight, but I can’t identify exactly when or what

        • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
          1·
          6 months ago

          Yeah but there wasn’t an algorithm picking out all of that shit and giving us a constant stream of 100% pure troll heroin.

          Seeing one post in fifty telling you garbage puts it into the context of “that guy is saying some weird shit”. Seeing only garbage in your feed makes it seem normal and those opposed to it are the weirdos.

        • kugel7c@feddit.orgDeutsch
          1·
          6 months ago

          I think perhaps in tandem with education - parental or institutional - getting even worse/changing from what you or I might be used to. The shift from search to algorithm as the primary way to interact with the Internet is also a significant factor, the Internet might’ve changed significantly before I was really there, but it certainly changed 2008-2016 mostly in that shift from search to platform/algorithm.

          And early zoomers might’ve started their online existence just around the start of that transition while late zoomers, basically only know the Plattform/App/Algorithm world we have today.

          If you were to be really cynical about it : The powers at be started losing the control over the messaging specifically to the online world, and managed to grapple it back starting in the mid 2000s just as the size/power of the space became significant. Zoomers might be here or there depending on how and when their first online experiences played out.

          I’m just on the very earliest of zoomers, and my cohort largely got hit with 2008 as we were just starting to grapple with politics, and with 2016 right around graduating high school. For me Search was the Internet starting point, Wiki, YT and forums all in service to my curiosity and also there for my entertainment/ placating.

          perhaps for someone a bit later it’s all just entertainment, no problem solving, no strange sub subculture, just whatever you desire to see or listen to or read imidiately there, without you even needing to think about it, so accurately getting your attention that it’s perhaps more attractive than thinking, or making a decision.

          The bad habit is there for me too, I think some younger people might not be able to even recognize it as such, maybe for them that’s just how the world works.

      • kameecoding@lemmy.world
        1·
        6 months ago

        That, and it’s unsurprisingly connect to the piewdiepie fascist pipeline thing, Helldivers popular as fuck, Warhammer 40K having a renessaince, I see plenty of shorts about how boys want to die a heroic death, that’s a fucking staple of fascism

        This is such a good video on this stuff, how young kids get sucked into fascism layer by layer https://youtu.be/pnmRYRRDbuw

        https://youtu.be/P55t6eryY3g

        • SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          6 months ago

          Most of the reasonably intelligent people playing Helldivers know full well that it is satire with a side of sick sarcasm.

          If anything it’s antifascist indoctrination on a grand scale.

      • Vespair@lemm.ee
        1·
        6 months ago

        That has not been my experience, no. I am speaking younger adults, not teenagers; I don’t really have many interactions with teenagers or children these days so I don’t have enough experience with alphas to have really any sort of opinion on them. As I understand it, Gen A starts after 2010, so any adult today would still be a Zoomer. Granted of course that “generations” are a loosely-defined concept so the years they are defined as may vary, but it is my understanding that the typical understanding of Zoomer goes as far as 2010 at least.

  • tantalizer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    6 months ago

    The amount of my students that wrote the whole email in the subject line is crazy. At first I thought it was a mistake or something. But there are sooo many…

    They also don’t know what a file browser/explorer is. As soon as the download notification is gone, the file doesn’t exist anymore.

    Giving files proper names? Unheard of!

  • TommySoda@lemmy.world
    2·
    6 months ago

    We got a new kid around 19 working at our office for processing data and I hate how true this is. The amount of times I’ve had to say “No, you have to double click to open folders” is entirely too many. Either that or “You have to actually right click on the icon you want to copy you can’t just click anywhere on the screen.”

    • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
      3·
      6 months ago

      The amount of times I’ve had to say “No, you have to double click to open folders”

      That’s a real problem when you’re used to Kde and have to use a windows machine.

      (Why is this damn thing so slow ? Oooh, right, double click)

        • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
          2·
          6 months ago

          It is in the latest versions but it’s very recent. The default has always been single click. They changed it because of windows users.

    • krashmo@lemmy.world
      2·
      6 months ago

      Fuck me I’m not ready for that. You expect it from the old people but I might have to leave the room if a young person asked me something like that.

      • Thwompthwomp@lemmy.world
        1·
        6 months ago

        I teach undergrads, and every year basic computer skills get worse and worse. I guess it’s not entirely their fault, but things like just asking them to save a file to their computer is insanely difficult. Lots of universities are starting to get task forces to figure out how to teach (or where to teach rather) basic digital skills, it it’s all going to hit the workforce really soon en masse.

    • cepelinas@sopuli.xyz
      1·
      3 months ago

      We are getting this teached in 6th grade what country is this from? Edit: Įn 8th rudementary python.

  • ganbramor@lemmy.world
    1·
    6 months ago

    The number of people in this thread stumped by the “rotate a PDF” comment, even what it means at all, while a smartphone has been 95-100% of their “computer” usage in their lives.

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
      0·
      6 months ago

      I was born in the 80’s, I did IT bachelor’s and then print design studies which used all of the Adobe suite and I genuinely don’t understand what rotating a pdf means.

      My first OS was DOS.

      Edit my point is I’m sure I know how to, I just don’t know what it means

      • Psychadelligoat@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        01·
        6 months ago

        PDF is in landscape orientation, you need it portrait (say someone scanned the documents in sideways, it happens annoyingly often), or some similar situation

  • shads@lemy.lolEnglish
    1·
    6 months ago

    OK so I have a pet theory about this. I grew up in a period when computing involved friction and lack of ready resources to ease that friction. Solving problems involved actual research, in the research process more and more details of how computers operate were exposed to me. I had the time and focus to learn and the motivation to stick at it when it was difficult. I then did something horrible to almost everyone who asked me for help, I removed that friction.

    With the noblest of intentions I prevented everyone around me from experiencing that friction, I made it easy. Consequently I caused those people around me to miss out on those basics I struggled with. I uncovered the arcane lore of endianess so everyone around me who wasn’t already an adept would be spared. I plumbed the mysteries of the parallel port so that others could use a printer with only mild mystical invocations. I immersed myself in SCSI termination so that my friends and family might partake of IDE (retroactively named PATA) in peace.

    I came from an era of computing where these things mattered (at least to some degree) and they moulded me and shaped how I use a computer to this day. My brothers will always be dependent on myself and my ilk to act as guides and so much of what I know is functionally useless today so a neophyte could not follow the twisted path I did.

    I was blessed as well to come of age in a time when a computer was a comprehensible assemblage of parts, when I could identify at an IC level the components of it. I feel like that is what is missing in the modern incarnation of technology. I also worry this is where we stagnate, the field is too large for anyone to compass it entirely and we splinter in to specialisations.

    However this is also a sign that technology has come of age. I am certain, absolutely positive, that if I was to pick an arbitary topic, say music, I would seem as illiterate and helpless as the Zoomers we are bemoaning as mere consumers of Tech. I can enjoy a piece of music, I can even take a rough stab at the rusiments of how it is made. Ask me to explain the nomenclature of a time signature on sheet music and I will look the dunce before I finish the first sentence.

    So maybe we should give them a break and realise that for a lot of them, It… Just… Isn’t… Important…

    They will learn this stuff if and when they need to. Otherwise “magic box does things when I perform this ritual” is enough for them to function in their world, the same as “Car starts when I turn this key” is enough for me to function in mine.

    Holy crap, I wrote this on my phone, what is wrong with me?

  • Chloé 🥕@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    1·
    6 months ago

    in today’s edition of “why are the kids I raised so damn incompetent?”

    i long for a day where people understand that it’s not the ipad kid’s fault they were given a tablet at age 2

    • chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      0·
      6 months ago

      That’s… part of it, but part of it is just ease of use. In growing up, I had to figure out issues with my computer,and getting games etc working took some work to do. I build a gaming PC for my nephew(under 10, but games a lot mobile and with consoles) and he played a few games on it, but then my sister (a gamer herself) said he couldn’t really get used to keyboard over controller (at which point I reminded her she could just get him a PC controller or use one of the console ones that also work on PC).

      He just seems to prefer to use things that are already intuitive, and since my childhood things have gotten much better in that regard for consoles and mobile stuff. You can definitely do it on PC as well, but it often means more accessories, sometimes figuring out issues . I got another sister of mine a controller for pc and it took a bit of effort getting it properly synced for the game she wanted to play. It would show up properly in the OS, but then the game he issues, so we had to switch through modes and such, and sometimes even though one mode may work an update or something may break it.

      I like using controllers for some games, and WASD for others, but even though IT is my job and I’m good at fixing things, some games have weird issues with some controllers, especially if they have mode options. All that extra fixing and finding the right settings is just frustrating for some, and with easy to use alternatives they may not bother to learn. I had no choice, just SNES and pc while growing up.

  • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
    1·
    6 months ago

    Me: Behold!

    *quickly presses Control+V

    Classmate: Woah! How did you do that??!!!

    True story but as a millennial teaching another millennial in college.

    • dick_fineman@discuss.online
      0·
      6 months ago

      Former boss: How do I make my computer run faster?

      Me: you could install more RAM.

      FB: Oh do I download that from the internet?

      Me: …no, it’s hardware…you have to open the computer up and physically put it in there.

      FB: I should have known that, I majored in Computer Science

      …I was fired a week later because she “felt threatened”. Lol.

      • Krauerking@lemy.lol
        1·
        5 months ago

        I had that happen after I told the IT manager who always showed up drunk that his flash drives weren’t working because he couldn’t expect to buy an 8 pack of 1TB flash drives of amazon for $30 and that he was at worst handing out viruses.

        I also told the interns to demand full time positions for doing all the work and not be taken advantage of so that didn’t help with the HR director.

  • WolfmanEightySix@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    Are they the same generation whose parents said “they’re really good with computers …they go on the iPad all the time”?

  • ramsgrl909@lemmy.world
    0·
    6 months ago

    I am genuinely having a hard time with my Gen Z employee. I have to go through everything step by step each time and it just seems like nothing sticks. I even create documentation for him and he just can’t follow it fully.

    I’m truly baffled and any advice is welcome.

      • azvasKvklenko@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        So much fucking this. So many people these days are straight up just useless at their jobs, but companies and managers tend to fall into some sort of toxic positivity bullshit and it’s just so hard to give negative feedback to someone notoriously bad at their job somehow. An advice would be to just keep it honest and expect some sort of improvement, otherwise they may try their luck somewhere else.

        • ramsgrl909@lemmy.world
          1·
          6 months ago

          I was giving him positive reinforcement his first year (honestly thought it would work with him to reinforce the good things he does), this year is the brutal truth year.

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        01·
        6 months ago

        So many people do not deserve jobs.

        That’s kind of gross… Maybe they don’t “deserve” the job that they have, but they deserve jobs.