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All the kids I've met are good at navigating UI, regardless of the platform. They know how to use websites well, but they don't know how they work. This is a generalization, though.

I actually had a nightmare last night: my boss took me offline while I was making a script, and I think that's even scarier for younger generations. This is coming from an older Gen Z.

We are the bridge generation.

We know and saw a world without the internet and we experienced it when it first came to be.

We saw the first mass produced computers and computer devices which broke often, didn't work the way we wanted them to, they weren't fast and they didn't have much memory in any way. We were the first generation to see all this. Our parents were too old and busy to figure it out but we were young enough to be curious about it all. We also kept wanting to have the newest fastest hardware and software so we had no choice but to either buy, beg or steal these things to get them. We learned to swap parts, add parts, remove parts, install an OS, uninstall the OS, run backups, store data and learn it all on our own because there was no easy internet social media community to help you. Software was constantly changing and we had to keep up by either buying expensive titles or we learned about Linux and open source software or we became digital pirates or both.

Now the digital landscape has changed. Younger generations prefer handheld devices so to them everything is solid state ... they never can imagine changing the RAM, HDD, SSD, CPU, GPU or the PSU or even bothering to learn what those things are. Because everything is built in and no one (or very few) people bother with fixing or tinkering with anything. There are fewer people who learn about software and about how or where to find it, install it, configure it and run it. To new generations who only know the digital world through locked devices, there was less incentive to learn or even have access to know how these things worked.

We are the bridge generation. We got to see the world without the internet and the world with one. No one before us got to see what we saw, no one after us will experience what we went through. Our civilization dramatically changed during our lifetime and we got a front row seat.

Yes. We are.

We are young with to have learned tech at an early age, but old enough that the tech wasn't user friendly when we were kids, so we needed to understand it better than people do in the smartphone generation.

Installing a new game on my PC in high school was a multi-hour, sometimes multi-day ordeal.

Plugging in a secondary hard drive involved putting jumpers on pins to keep the system from trying to boot off it.

Assigning ports on peripherals involved understanding how to count in binary so you could assign addresses on dip switches.

Installing a printer involved unholy alliances with formless beings.

Every 2-3 years, I still wake up wearing black robes in a strange room in Romania, blood on my hands and a lingering scent of cordite in the air. I'm fairly certain that's related to the Canon BJC driver issues I had upgrading my AST to Windows 95.

I work in tech.

My dad was a teacher, his subject was computers, at that time "computers" class was heavily programming. Basic stuff.

It seems that kids from gen x, and the millennial generation had the timing to learn the tech before it "just works", so we're used to figuring it out as we go, because there was no way to look it up on the internet, so we had to.

The zoomers and younger generations are largely "it just works" users, where all the basics of getting things to just plug and play was a thing. If it didn't work it was either "incompatible" or broken. So don't try to make it work, or you'll be sued for DMCA related violations.

IMO, there's a sweet spot, somewhere in the late 70's or early 80's to about the early-mid 2000's when people had to know something about tech to operate it. Anyone with the aptitude for tech, who was born during this time is generally working in tech.

People born before that are generally the old school pen and paper types, and anyone younger is generally the plug and play digital era.

If course, everyone is different, so the dates are probably liable to be different depending on the area, and each person may have different motivations, etc.

My generation (early millennials) are generally known for being the "tech" person to friends/family, and ADHD; at least, as far as I can see, from my little bubble of friends who mostly work in/with tech.

Kids don't even understand file structures because modern OSs obfuscate that stuff.

As a millenial nurse watching gen z new grads hunt and peck with their index fingers to write a shift note, 100%. I don't think my parents really appreciated how much constantly being on AIM with my friends as a tween actually really benefited my typing skills in a way that's been much more valuable to my career than algebra.

All the math you need to be a nurse is ratio / proportion and kitchen measurements to track I/O. With a modern EMR system (electronic medical record) that does most of the math for you you don't even need that. The rest is latin and greek root words for various body parts and fluids and a vague understanding of how they're all related (hyper-tension in the cerebral is bad because the cerebral is surrounded by a bone case and bones no stretch. That means the cerebral pops out of the bone holes and once it's done that it does NOT go back in correctly like a squeezy ball toy). That gets you through the board exams.

After a year or two in practice you've just seen the same shit with a millimeter of difference over and over and over that you either know what to do about it or who to call to do something about it. And when shit is about to go REALLY wrong that's also happened enough times that you get a weird feeling and just start calling everybody because your psych patient has been trying to kill you for the past week and an hour ago they suddenly stopped trying to kill you and now you have to explain to an RRT nurse (rental ICU nurse) why you're upset that the patient isn't trying to kill you.

My dad can write DOS commands better than most people my age can and I work in Tech. beyond that? he's clueless. Younger generations can either type with their thumbs or their index fingers and know absolutely nothing about how things work. If it's an app they can open on their phones or tablet devices then perfect, they're all over it. Beyond that? no way.

People my age and from my generation can type well, can figure things out and fix issues on computers, and know our way around tech. Why? cause we were raised in an age where things were essentially "kicking off". I was taught typing in high school. Beyond that most of us used AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, mIRC, etc so if we weren't taught it in high school we learned it that way.

We learned html, php, javascript, etc via Geocities, setting up PHP messageboards, hell even just customizing our Myspace page. younger generations don't have anything like that so they don't know it. We learned it in our free time to customize our online experience. We had daily consistent shows like The ScreenSavers or Call for Help to teach us how to use Windows or even introduce us to Linux. I learned to build my first PC thanks to Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton. countless magazines and books to pick up to read how to do stuff. And in those days if you wanted to game on PC you pretty much had to build your own PC. No one made prebuilt custom gaming pcs. So you had to learn that stuff.

Today things are all prebuilt for you. gaming pcs, phones and tablet apps, etc. People today just want things to "just work" and if there's anything needed beyond opening an app and logining in then they're not interested. Finding and signing up for instances? forget it.

iOS is literally designed for toddlers to be able to use it. "iPad kids" aren't especially gifted, "iPad adults" are especially stupid.

But on the bright side, those same groups think they "know computers" because they can press large, brightly colored buttons - so they walk around with unearned confidence in their abilities and impatience/lack of appreciation for the people that actually have to fix things.

It's also why a large swatch of these same fucking idiot, drains on humanity loudly challenge the validity of voting tech infrastructure without any factual basis to their argument - they just "feel" like they get it.

I think centralization played a big role in this, at least for software. When messaging meant IRC, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Xfire, Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, or any number of PHP forums, you had to be able to pick up new software quickly and conceptualized the thing it's doing separate from the application it's accomplished with. When they all needed to be installed from different places in different ways you conceptualize the file system and what an executable is to an extent. When every game needs a bit of debugging to get working and a bit of savvy to know when certain computer parts are incompatible, you need a bit of knowledge to do the thing you want to do.

That said, fewer people did it. I was in highschool when Facebook took off, and the number of people who went from never online to perpetually online skyrocketed.

I teach computer science, I know it isn't wholly generational, but I've watched the decline over the past decade for the basics. Highschool students were raised on Chromebooks and tablets/phones and a homogenous software scene. Concepts like files, installations, computer components, local storage, compression, settings, keyboard proficiency, toolbars, context menus - these are all barriers for incoming students.

The big difference, I think, is that way more people (nearly everyone) has some technical proficiency, whereas before it was considered a popular enough hobby but most people were completely inept, but most of students nowadays are not proficient with things past a cursory level. That said, the ones who are technically inclined are extremely technically inclined compared to my era, in larger numbers at least.

Higher minimum and maximum thresholds, but maybe lower on average.

It's worse than that: we're a small subset of the only generations that know how computers work. The vast majority of my peers would balk at using a command line, much less anything deeper.

I say generations because it's obviously not limited to one, but, it sure as fuck isn't many.

I suspect that back in the day there was a generation that were "the only ones who knew how cars worked" (in that it had a far higher number of people who could do their own car repairs).

It's the product of having grown up in a time when that technology was going from niche to widespread - a time when its still clunky, fickle and needs a lot of babysitting and before it was mainly made "so simple that any idiot can use it" - so if you were one of those people who got into it back then, you were forced to understand it more in depth merely to keep it going. Those who grew up before that simply never became familiar with it, whilst those who grew up later only ever had to understand how to the mature-stage user interfaces of that Tech, which are designed for maximum accessibility with minimum learning curve (which amongst other things means minimizing the need for deep understanding of what's going on) and did not need to know how to maintain it since "maintenance" had by then become "get a new one and click this button to migrate your info".

You can see a similar thing going on with 3D printers: earlier models are fickle and need all sorts of tweaks and understanding of what's going on to get decent prints out of them plus required frequent maintenance (amongst other things, you quite literally have to periodically retighten the screws of whatever kit FDM printer you got otherwise print quality worsens over time) whilst the later consumer-oriented products make everything simpler.

It’s funny because we always thought that the next generation’s technical knowledge would utterly eclipse ours, but instead they only know how to edit a short video to seem to loop infinitely.

When I was six years old, my dad brought a computer home from work. It had Windows 3.1 on it. I had to learn how to use the DOS command prompt in order to play my favorite game, Q-bert. When I was a teenager, a new computer of middling quality could run north of $3000 from the Best Buy. But my friends introduced me to a catalog where I could buy the parts to assemble one from scratch. They let me borrow their copy of Windows 95 to install. Then we all had to learn how to use dial-up in order to connect to the internet, or how to build out a LAN network to play games together in person. We took classes in touch-typing at school, using the computer lab. I went to computer camp during the summer. I went to college and took more advanced classes on programing.

I have spent tens of thousands of hours learning to use the computer, practically from the inception of the PC to the modern day.

Now my friends have kids, and I talk about how they use the computer. Everything is out-of-the-box. Installing something is as simply as clicking an icon. You can buy a mini-computer off the shelf for under $200 and it runs better than anything I could have built thirty years ago. Periodically, they will come to me with a more advanced computer program, which has to do with a very particular OS configuration or some weird networking bug that only someone with 10+ years of experience would think to look for. I typically find the answer online, because I don't remember it off the top of my head. I teach the kid and the kid learns, and then the kid knows as much as I do on that particular subject.

In twenty years, I'm sure they'll know more than me, just because I'll be retired and they'll be in the thick of it.

Also, please nobody ask me how a car works. That was something my parents' generation learned. I'm clueless.

Boomer here. As a lifelong software developer I've always known more about computers than most people in my age group generally, but I've always assumed younger people know more than I do because they've grown up with so much more tech. Maybe they tend to be more at user-level with it. I've never thought about that.

Hey remember when computers become essential to day to day life and schools started making it part of their curriculum? Yeah me neither.

For gen x and millennials, they got those skills for free cause their toys incentivized them. As in we got that for free.

It was never guaranteed for that to keep being true. And giving you basic knowledge for the world is usually what schools should do but they never did cause there is money to be made with dumbed down tools.

I fix my parents’ computers. I fix the computers of the super old people in the neighborhood. I fix my kid’s computer. I fix my friends’ computers.

I don’t think it’s generational.

When your car breaks down, do you fix it? At what point do you take it to a mechanic?

At what point do you call an electrician or plumber? Who biopsies their own cysts?

It’s all the same shit. We live in a society of specialists because there’s simply too much potential knowledge for everyone to be able to do everything.

And if we start arguing about what things people “ought to be able to do themselves”, we turn into a bunch of old farts lamenting about the good old days.

Yes. We are.

Yes

Gen X ! Raised on hose water, neglect, and flaky tech.

I feel this meme so much, TPM. I had to look up how to reinstall Windows 10 for my kid's computer because it was all messed up. I don't know my way around Windows anymore, but she's apparently unable to just look this shit up and do it herself.

Wait, sort of like my parents and in-laws...

Our parents didn't think it was important. Our kids don't think it is necessary.

Imagine how horse farmers felt about engine maintenance on the first automobiles. Early adopters probably knew everything about how to fix tractors and cars. But today, how many people know how to change their own brakes or flush the coolant?

Life evolves, and transitions come faster with every generation. It's good that nobody knows how to use a sextant or a fax machine.

The next generation doesn't know how to use a mouse because they do everything on the phone. And yes, I have met people like that.