I work with college students all day. They are computer illiterate. It’s like working with the old. Generalizations are sometimes kinda true.

The divide is that zoomers don't NEED to understand technology. They instead default to learning the fluffy user interfaces. Older users were required to know the basics of file systems, and even touch on command line operations just to get by.

Modern kids aren't required to learn that. They are perfectly able to, but no longer required to. We currently have a lot of newer "mechanics" that are perfectly good at driving, but didn't really notice there as an engine thing up front to look at.

It creates a binomial split. Many don't notice the youngsters quietly getting good. They do notice the increase in idiots out of their depth due to overconfidence.

Oh, they can use them alright, limited to the ways they've seen. That's short version, here is a longer one:

Well, I don't have kids flying homemade drones at the park, and highly doubt that, say, devs behind Lutris are in diapers. But what I do have is this: https://lemmy.world/comment/17328375 (browse down to @Lightor comment). That goes along with continuously degrading UI (hello, the marginal user tyranny https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user), the fact that Microsoft and Apple are still not sued to the ground with all the bullshit they pull off. These wildly unrelated points all fall in line with my personal feeling and general sentiment that percentage of people who know some very basic things about computers is going down. Don't give me that "I don't see it in my surroundings, so that's not happening" shit

Us millenials are going to become the next boomers. The other generations around us like genX, zoomers and genA are comparatively smaller than the millenial generation, substantially so in the UK where I live.

Can't wait until my peers and I capture the legislators and start redirecting all of society's resources into our interests.

Edit: Already drafting comments to leave on the comments section of major newspaper articles about how genA need to pull themselves up by their bootraps, stop enjoying avocados, and cultivate some "stick-tuitiveness" (sub in other made-up phrase here).

I mean if you work in the industry you would absolutely see a rise, a significant one, in people generally inept at the technical requirements of their jobs that’s factual not “ignorant horseshit” - it’s not that young people can’t learn this stuff it’s that young people grew up in, and are still in, an environment that doesn’t foster learning of these skills or independence at a more personal level so those learning through traditional education are being failed by the system while simultaneously being given tools to make self sabotage easier than ever before and the values that tell people to seek out and do things on your own are quickly going extinct. If someone can’t do something, especially at a wide scale not like one individual who didn’t pick up a skill or something, this is a system problem and yes there are significant systemic problems young people are being faced with in their personal and professional/student lives acting like “that’s ignorant horseshit” is just denying something is wrong, it’s advocating for the status quo, something is wrong, young people are being failed and unless we acknowledge this problem we can’t address it

My local Microprose

https://www.microprose.com/

?

What blew my mind was when I had a teacher telling me about their experiences with Zoomers and indicated that they seem to have a near universal inability to grasp the concept of a file structure. They just apparently can't wrap their heads around the fact that when you save something that it has to actually go somewhere on their device.

It’s crazy how GenX/Millennials developed the app culture to make computers and phones easier to sell to boomers, but then it was when GenZ was coming up, so they didn’t learn the ways of yore.

This is me now, except the clouds are aws, azure, and gcloud.

They told me I'm at an age where people have to ask their kids how to rotate a PDF.

I told them if none of the tools I would use for that were available, I could just write my own. In a number of different programming languages.

Congratulations. You've reached the point.

your arbitrary age based discrimination bracket got removed. you will be reassigned according to the following criteria.

not tech savvy: boomer

tech savvy: honorary millennial

tech savvy and poor: millennial++

greed fueled hate goblin: boomer

Best I've heard it said, we straddled the digital divide. We went from 0-100, fast. And if you wanted to do anything with a computer, you had to have a good deal of understanding. I'd add early millennials to our group, maybe most?

Also, the boomers aren't as dumb as they're made out. While we kids were figuring shit out, they had new tech to figure out in the workplace.

Zoomers? Hopeless. My kids are Alpha, they're even worse.

Every serious psych journal has had at least one published review on the damage that short attention span media causes

But it's always ignored in favor of corporate profit streams and complacence.

A YouTube video is absolutely the worst possible way to deliver information. It's fine for entertainment, whatever. But if I'm troubleshooting something, the last fucking thing I want to do is stop what I'm doing and watch ZzZl0rp89 blather on for 8 minutes about his merch, patreon, his other channel, read an ad for Factor, and spend 3 minutes with pointless set up before he gets to the actual problem.

Even IF your specific problem has been blessed by somebody who's made a simple 2 minute video tutorial, it would still be faster and easier to digest that information in text. I can scroll to the point where I'm already at and start from there, rather than watch this guy open 2 dozen windows first. I can search within the tech to see if my problem is actually addressed here in about 2 seconds.

It's infuriating that YouTube has become the primary method for delivering troubleshooting information when you end up searching for it.

To be fair, a lot of them seem to have been taught to hyper-specialize into their given niche, and they will actively refuse to learn. The attitude of "that is not explicitly my job, and therefore I will actively refuse to learn anything else" is far too common from what I've seen, and is the actual problem.