this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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[–] [email protected] 141 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Nielsen and Norman group know what’s up. I learned this at my first office job. Everyone thought I was a wizard hacker when I showed them inspect element. I got in trouble with my director who flagged IT Security when I showed my team lead an inspect element on some intranet page. I had changed a title to something else as a proposal and they had thought I had hacked their intranet and changed it myself. Triggered a whole security incident.

I thought everyone with a computer knew about this. I was wrong.

[–] [email protected] 94 points 4 months ago (5 children)

i used to worked for a public school district, and i once pointed out a guys laptop was infested with porn popups (~2000). the cops investigated me for reporting it.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 4 months ago

That’s absolutely fucking bonkers. I’m hoping that this didn’t cause you any lasting consequences at work.

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[–] [email protected] 70 points 4 months ago (7 children)

Wow, this is bleak.

I read somewhere (I think the deloitte tech survey from a few years ago) that many people have replaced their pc with smartphones and use their phone as their primary tech device. Would be interesting to see if any of these low-level skill folks are actually high (or higher) on mobile skills.

[–] [email protected] 79 points 4 months ago (2 children)

From what I recall, particularly the younger generations that exclusively use mobile devices (though of course this is not limited to them) actually have terrible tech literacy across the board, primarily related to spending all of their time in apps that basically spoon-feed functionality in a closed ecosystem. In particular, these groups are particularly vulnerable to very basic scams and phishing attacks.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I work in tech at a credit union and we’ve hit a weird full circle point where the new folks entering the job market need a lot of training on using a computer for this reason. It’s been very bizarre being back at a point where I have to explain things like how to right click because a lot of people have grown up only using phone/tablets.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 4 months ago (3 children)

I'm in IT. There was a time when I was sure that the younger generations would be eclipsing my technical skills. I knew where I came from, and what I was exposed to and assumed that the younger generations would have everything I had, and even MORE technical exposure because of the continuing falling cost of technology. For about a decade that was true, and then it plateaued and then, as you experienced, I saw the younger generations regressing in technology skills.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

There was a time when I was actually worried about job security due to an overabundance of young people wanting to enter the field. Nowadays, not so much.

On the other hand, I'm instead now worrying that younger generations might become even less able to understand the importance of digital rights if they don't even understand the basics of the technology.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Think back to when we were kids. Remember that period of time when not everyone owned a computer? Or if they owned one, it wasn't necessarily used much? There were people that were "computer people", who used computers daily for entertainment or tinkering or socializing (once the consumer internet took off) and there were people that didn't need or care about them outside of their workstation at the office.

Even after the Internet, this dynamic was there. You had the enthusiasts who really spent time on their computers and got to using them well, and you had people that simply owned them and checked email or browsed the Internet from time to time.

The enthusiast/non-enthusiast dynamic has always existed. There's always a gap. It just takes different shapes.

Now, everyone owns a smartphone and uses for everything. They're critical to life, enthusiast or no. That's the baseline now. The gap is entirely in skill and usage, not so much hardware or time spent on it.

Before computers and the internet, no tech skill was needed to interact with our modern world.

After them, and for a few decades, the skill floor rose. You needed to learn technology to participate in the modern world.

Now technology has reached a point where the skill floor has dropped down to where it was before.

The mistake we made was in thinking that our generation learning to use technology was happening because they wanted to. It was incidental. Skill with technology comes from desire to obtain it, not simply using technology a lot.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago

The mistake we made was in thinking that our generation learning to use technology was happening because they wanted to. It was incidental. Skill with technology comes from desire to obtain it, not simply using technology a lot.

We learned the technology to accomplish specific mundane goals, and along the way learned the inner workings of the technology which became applicable to the working world. Now, to accomplish those same rather mundane tasks there is very little to learn, and very little ancillary learning benefit derived from doing those mundane things.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

I keep hearing this but it's perplexing.

Students have been using laptops in school and college for a long time now, no matter how much time they spend on their phone.

What I encountered in IT isn't people who have no idea how to use a computer, it's people that have very little idea how to use Windows over Apple or occasionally Chromebook. But even then, they usually still know Windows from needing to use it at some point in school. It's the settings and other little things they struggle with, not the basics.

I have to explain things like how to right click because a lot of people have grown up only using phone/tablets

Or they come from iMac or MacBooks where right clicking is less emphasized as it is on Windows.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

They're also market-locked. If you have so little ability to function outside of an app, you become incredibly resistant to moving from one to another unless it's identical, and you're incapable of using marginally more complex things.

It also gives immense market control to the app stores, have been allowed to exist mostly unregulated. Thankfully that might be changing.

When everyone must be spoon-fed, that makes the only company selling the spoons insanely wealthy and powerful.

It's also going to have a degrading effect on popular software overtime. When the only financially viable thing is to make apps for the masses, you are not incentivized to make something extraordinary.

Compare Apple Music to iTunes, just on a software level. Just on the sheet number of things you can do with iTunes, all the nobs and levers, all the abilities it grants a user willing to use it to its max potential. At some point, it no longer became viable to create an excellent piece of software, because most people have no skills or patience or desire to use it.

So you start making things that don't empower the user, instead you make things that treat them like children, and your products get stupid.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Would be interesting to see if any of these low-level skill folks are actually high (or higher) on mobile skills.

"Mobile skills" are likely still lower skill. Tablets and phones are mostly content consumption devices instead of content creation (photos/videos excluded). Does anyone do serious software development on a phone? How often are mobile users writing papers or prose using only their touchscreen? How many people are doing complicated video edit on an iPhone? Can those tasks be done on a table/phone? Sure, but I don't think its common.

The reason this is a problem is that it means there is a barrier between deeper computer skills and the devices/environment that people are using daily. The reason many of us became computer savvy on a desktop wasn't because we wanted to, its because we had to to get the game running we wanted or we had to write the paper we were required to. So being familiar with other uses on a computer, it is only a very mild extension to writing a script if the need arises. The only "new" or "foreign" part is the script, not the environment or interaction of where you're creating it.

With a tablet/phone as your primary device it means learning not just scripting, but learning all the skills necessary to use a computer. Its a high barrier.

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[–] [email protected] 66 points 4 months ago (13 children)

I believe the most computer proficient people were born between 1975 and 1995. Before that and they were too old to figure it out without a lot of effort. After that they grew up with touch screens and it’s all just magic. Right in the middle we were able to grow along with advancements in computing.

I was teaching a class with mostly students born after 2000. One of them had never used a computer with a keyboard and mouse. Never used folders and files. Kind of blew me away.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 months ago (13 children)

I saw middle school students preferring to type a report on a fucking touchscreen rather than a pc with keyboard “because in this way is faster”. Then for some reason they share a fucking screenshot of the document instead of just attaching that to the email

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (3 children)

I have seen worse. Normie's around me use their phone to capture photo of the laptop screen and send the low pixel photo with less than half part in it including the actual document.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago

When I read "never used a computer with a keyboard and mouse" my first thought was "wow, they only ever used punched cards" until I realized you meant they only used touch screens.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago (4 children)

I was born in 98, my brother was born in 2000. The level of computer literacy just between the two of us is astounding. While a lot of my aptitude with computers stems from a personal interest, even growing up many of my peers were relatively tech savvy -- as far as laypeople go. But people in my brother's grade in school, people just two years younger than me, i noticed a meaningful difference in how they interact with computers vs how people I spent the formative years of my life around do. It's insane.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Hopefully my rough estimate of 1995 was not too exclusive. I’m sure there’s not a hard cutoff, and the same goes for pre-1975. But being right in the middle of that range, it was pretty cool to use the full spectrum of PCs, and all the game consoles, and see the internet bloom and explode and decay.

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 4 months ago (10 children)

I am by no means top at anything I do with a computer, but I do find it said that I tend to know more than almost anyone I interact with in real life when it comes to using computers.

For the most part the way I became proficient with a computer has come down to reading comprehension. I would like to see studies showing the overlap of computer proficiency, and reading comprehension.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 4 months ago (13 children)

In my experience, it's not just a lack of reading comprehension, but often some combination of an utter lack of curiosity, laziness and defeatism. Many other things, like video games, have escaped the realm of being reserved only for nerds and gone mainstream, yet computers remain something people just constantly assume are hopelessly complicated.

I know for a fact my mother-in-law can read just fine, as she spends most of her day reading novels and will gladly spend the rest of it telling me about them if I happen to be there. Yet when it comes to her cell phone, if there's any issue at all, she just shuts down. She would just rather not be able to access her online banking in the Citi bank app for weeks or months at a time, until one of us goes and updates it for her, rather than reading the banner that says "The version of this app is too old, please click here to update and continue using it." and clicking the damn button. If anyone points this out to her, though, she just gets worked up in a huff and tells us "I'm too old to understand these things, you can figure it out because you're still young." She will eventually figure these things out and do them for herself if nobody does it for her for a while, but her default for any problem with her phone is to throw her hands up and declare it a lost cause first. I've seen a lot of people have the same sort of reactions, both young and old. No "Hey, let's just see what it says," just straight to deciding it's impossible, so they don't even bother to check what's going on.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I know too many people like that and I hate them

“I’m no expert so I will dismiss this dialog without reading it” - “it gives me error but because I’m not expert I’m not going to read it” - “it says something but you need to come here to read it - no, I’m unable to read it because I’m not expert”

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago

My father-in-law got a Master's Degree in Computer Science 30 years ago. IIRC, it was heavy in C programming and involved typical CS fare like algorithms, pointers, sorting, data structures, etc. He was a high school math teacher at the time (he's now retired). He took the classes mostly because he enjoyed learning.

I did ok during the Dos/Windows 95 era, but as time went on, he seemed less and less able to solve his own computer problems. He can't even Google a problem effectively (or even remember to try to Google his problem).

Most recently, I had to hold his hand while he bought a new computer at Best Buy and then further hold his hand as he went through, step by step, the Windows 11 installation/first time start up process.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Yeah the biggest problem for people who can't use a computer always seems to be that they just won't ever read what it says on the screen. The solution to problems is often very obvious if you just actually read error messages or tooltips or anything

[–] [email protected] 30 points 4 months ago (1 children)

There's an XKCD for that, of course.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I've discovered over the years that curiosity is maybe the most important aspect of being good with technology.

Technical skills, patience, problem solving, organization, all that is critical, obviously.

But more often than not, it all starts with just wanting to know what's possible. I'm the kind of person that, after installing something for the first time, be It software or a game or whatever, the very first thing I do is open the settings, and look all the knobs and levers that are available.

I was genuinely stunned to find out that the vast majority of users never look at the settings ever. And maybe that's why developers seem to be increasingly unwilling to even provide options for those of us that like tweaking settings.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Dude, you're on Lemmy. That means you're probably in the top 1% of people with computer skills.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago (3 children)

I've done support for sysadmins for almost a decade, and the ones that are the biggest pain in the ass to deal with are the ones who can't or won't read the error message and think a little about it. And my kids' friends all have the same problem: They don't read what's on screen and if they do they make no attempt to understand it.

This is why the humanities are important. All those times you have to explain why the curtains are blue is practice for reading other things and determining meaning.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

That reminds me: i once searching for jobs in the usual local aggregators, it didn't have a link to the original offer nowhere, so i used developer console's picker to figure the URL out. My mother: did you just hack the job page?

Computers are magic and we are wizards because we understand more or less how it works.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (25 children)

I teach math to undergrads, and damn it's sad. They don't know how to send a PDF file from their phone to laptop, and upload it to Canvas. One guy ended up emailing it to me. They don't even know what a folder/directory is.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Well, in his defense, I could save a file from 8 different applications and they end up in 8 different locations on my phone file system. You would think they would all go to Documents or Downloads...nope. apps dont let you pick locations, and if they do, you don't get to pick anywhere you want

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Managing digital information today is a horrible mess of silos and big business driven incompatibilities. It often drives people to use PDFs, as there is nothing appropriate. Blame the software/businesses, not the victims/users.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (8 children)

They don't know how to send a PDF file from their phone to laptop

With USB cable? Because outside of that it gets complicated and/or vendor-specific quickly.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (7 children)

That's what KDEconnect is for. Oddly enough I think it even works in windows nowadays.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 4 months ago (5 children)

As frustrating as this may be, it's even more frustrating when I see exactly the same thing among PROFESSIONAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS!

directory structure and basic text editing are foreign concepts to them. If it's not in their IDE, they really don't understand it.

Also, 90% of them are hunt-and-peck two finger typists.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago (4 children)

I'm honestly blown away by how many developers don't even know the basics of git

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 4 months ago (5 children)

I started noticing this 10 years ago. To me, this isn't some new phenomenon. However, it feels even worse now than it did back then.

The number one thing that makes me go JackieChanWTF.jpg is when people don't even know how to navigate through directories.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I post this a lot but it’s true. Younger people definitely have problems with this.

https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z

My aunt is a teacher and I remember when she started talking about how her school was getting Chromebooks I thought that wasn’t going to be good for learning how to use “real” computers. Same with phones and tablets. Everything is too abstracted away from the user so they never have to know what a directory is.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago (2 children)

It's like a vicious cycle:

  1. People are tech illiterate
  2. Tech companies design things for the lowest common denominator.
  3. People don't need to learn anything new and become even more tech illiterate

AI is going to make it so much worse. You'll soon be in the top 5% if you have a keyboard app installed on your phone.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I use Arch btw. You should try Arch. Everyone in this post should stop what they're doing and try Arch. I never go outside.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago (2 children)

It has always been this way. Part of my "age-driven degradation" is that I can see the same patterns repeating themselves often at odds with the age of the people in question. The average competency age always shift younger as any skilled profession does. I however am constantly having to show people that should have a newer skillset than me basic problem solving skills and somehow we can both read the same documentation and they not see the solution.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

There was a post here a while back about how younger generations often don't understand concepts like file system structures because concepts like that (which are still relevant in a lot of contexts) have been largely stripped out of modern user interfaces. If your primary computing device is a cell phone, a task like "make a nested directory structure and move this file to the deepest part of it" is a foreign concept.

I guess my point here is that I agree with yours about this being cyclical in a sense. I feel crippled on a cell phone, but I'm also in my comfort zone on a Linux terminal. Using web apps like MS Teams is often difficult for me because their UIs are not things I'm comfortable with. I don't tend to like default layouts and also tend to use advanced features which are usually hidden away behind a few menus. Tools built to meet my needs specifically would largely not meet the needs of most users. A Level 1 user would probably have a better experience there than a Level 3 like me. It's hard (maybe impossible) to do UX design that satisfies everyone.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago (6 children)

From the tasks described, it seems to me they were not measuring 'Computer Skills' as reasoning, patience, tenacity - people could have similar issues with similar tasks involving a pile of papers.

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