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.

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.

Let me guess: they're talking about Millennials, and are entirely forgetting about Gen X once again.

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

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!

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.

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

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."

It only relatively recently occurred to me that the vast majority of people use the Internet either solely or mostly with a mobile phone. It blew my mind since I grew up with PCs and modems and the Internet is so much better on a large screen that's not half full of ads.

Me: Behold!

*quickly presses Control+V

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

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

You can rotate a PDF in your mind. It's free entertainment and nobody can stop you

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?

My daughter (5) uses WASD proficiently, so I have hope.

Boomer don't know how to do shit 'cause computers were so rare. Zoomers don't know how to do shit 'cause big companies profit from people who can't help themselves and have low standards.

There was only a small timeframe where computers were available, accessible yet not enshittificated for profit like today.

Expectation: these new generations are practically born with computers in their hands when they grow up they are going to create a new world so fast and develop new technologies

Reality: if tik tok doenst work they don’t know what else to do with their 1000+ euro smartphones

There are TWO generations between Boomers and Zoomers.

It's funny how Bs and Zs kind of horseshoe into being ignorant about how computers work. Boomers never had them growing up, while Zoomers were born with phones in their hands using corporate apps and never learned how computers actually work. Those of us in between had to learn how they worked to use them.

It'll depend on their hobbies. PC gamers will know this stuff, or at least how to figure it out.

As a boomer, reading this thread/discussion has been so amusing in many ways while enjoying my cuppa tea this morning. A classic "the younger generations are stupid."

The older generations looking down the ones that follow. And the following generations looking down on those that precede them. And no one understanding ain't none of us are all that bright.

Ever has it been, and so ever shall it be.

We grew up in an analog childhood, but digital adulthood.

We've been at the cusp of all the changes, we probably had to boot into Ms DOS and navigate to the A:// drive to play whatever was on the floppy disk with a whopping 1.44mb.

Now you download almost instantly to your phone/tablet. The internet as we knew it is mostly dead, everywhere is a walled garden of shit.

Would love some older internet gen input here: is this a "gen [whatever] is so [negative trait here] because they are [generation group]" or "younger ppl be stupid"?

Context: Am a millennial. At my first "real job" (as in, in the industry I got my degree in) I worked with ONE (1) other person, who was an early Gen-Xer. After developing a report with each other and becoming friendly, he lamented to me about how it seems like "millennials (not you, of course)" seem so helpless - like they can't figure things out on their own. Always asking "where is-" or "how do i-" before even examining the problem at hand and/or the resources available.

This dude was a self-proclaimed "blue fish in a red sea," and we worked with a wide age-range of sales ppl. I mention this, bc in the two years I worked with this nerd (and he was a fucking nerd, taking into account modern day and late 80s-early 90s standards of the term), his complaints about millennials never sounded like media parrot-speech. He was literally befuddled about the operational differences between generations.

It 100% seemed like an ageist thing. This was the late 2010's, pre-covid.

I'm in my 30s now and am equally baffled when my teenaged niece (weird familial age gap - not relevant here) doesn't know how to make the tap water hot when there's only one knob instead of two. She asked outloud but I refused to acknowledge or answer her. Niece figured it out shortly on her own, as expected.

So-... maybe younger people are just, yknow, dumb? Or recognize that, when surrounded by more experienced others, it takes less effort to ask for guidance than to waste energy through trial and error-?

Not trying to prove a point here. Just legit curious if anyone older has had similar experiences and can offer insight into whether this is a "zoomers are-" or "younger people are-" observation.

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.

My gen z son is like a computer wizard to me a fairly proficient millennial so I don’t think it’s a generational thing

I used to know everything there was on 95 to windows 7 but things keep changing so I just stopped caring.

I remember watching an interview with the CEO of SUN microsystems in the 90's argue that you didn't need to know how to run a nuclear power plant to use a light switch, and you shouldn't have to know how a computer works to use one.

I guess his vision came true, and we're mad about it?

I was born in 83, and grew up in the time where being a computer need required real work and knowledge of computers.

The things got easier and easier, and then the smartphones came.

These new kids literally don't know how to search a file directory because they are used to the apps magicing stuff where it needs to be.