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‘Scanners are complicated’: why Gen Z faces workplace ‘tech shame’ (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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[–] 11 points 3 years ago (10 children)

I work in a job where a lot of student aged people need to send me evidence to get a tax discount, and they are so bad at just attaching a document to an email.

Half of them I get are photos of the documents rather than scans, the ones using iPhones let their phone compress the image to the point it's unreadable and the android users send me a drive link I can't access as I don't have a Google account logged in at work.

None of them seem to be able to scan a document as a pdf and attacging it directly to an email.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Just wanted to say that - young people don't grok files and folders, it's hard for me to understand how they manage

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Indeed! I teach an introductory web design class for undergraduates and despite my best efforts it takes a lot of students the whole semester to figure out files and folders. If I had more time in the term, I think I'd dedicate a unit to it, just to get everyone up to speed — and I may have to do it anyway. In fairness to the kids, even Mac and Windows machines these days do a lot to minimize users' exposure to file structures in the name of usability. Meanwhile, the phones and school Chromebooks they've grown up using completely obfuscate this information.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I wish you luck with that class, and I expect the students get the other stuff - I have colleagues with masters degrees who aren't really sure how stuff works outside of the downloads folder

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    Thanks! Yeah, students do pretty well in the course overall. It's for non-devs and is oriented toward exposure to different technologies rather than mastery of them — basically demystifying how web apps work.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    To their defense not everyone have a scanner these days.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    that's not a defense, there are countless scanning apps for phones and tablets which magically correct the perspective and distortion and remove the creases. In a way, these are even better than scanners because they have a very high resolution.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    I get that, but theres no excuse for letting your apps crush photos (if I remember my iPhone days correctly it literally asks you if you want to compress or send full quality when you attach) or sending a drive link instead of a file.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I'm a millennial and when I was in university I let people use my computer to send assignments to their lecturers rather than going to the labs a few times. More than once I had to stop them copying and pasting the contents of the word document into the body of the email and show them how to attach a file

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