An unfortunate consequence of developers playing to the lowest common denominator of users for the last twenty years. Everything has been designed to be as easy and intuitive as possible for mobile, and troubleshooting skills have suffered as a result.
Not to mention that phones are crazy powerful and can do virtually everything these days, so fewer and fewer people are buying PCs.
If the general population is indeed “going backwards” in regards to tech literacy, it seems like demand for IT services is going to spike in the coming years. Good thing to keep in mind for young people choosing a career path!
I would point out that while general computer use has gotten easier, doing anything advanced has gotten much harder.
I’m glad my grandma can send memes, but I can’t figure out where an app is saving my files because everything is a walled garden!
I almost added this as a point in my original comment, but you’re absolutely right, and its happening in other industries too (auto, for example). Its really tough to troubleshoot things you lack the permissions to fix.
Lifelong Android user here. I don’t know where an app saves its files (not to personal folders, but app-private folder) even it’s rooted. I’m glad this protects me from malwares but it also forbids me to put my device in full control.
Developers don’t decide that. Blame UX folk for making things simple.
As a UX person often my job is to implement somebody else’s vision rather than being able to design something that makes sense.
As long as you treat yourself as a pixel pusher, this is a side effect. When you understand that you are a mirror for ideas, you will empower yourself.
I meant it a more general sense as anyone involved with the software development life cycle, but I see your point, good catch
i think its more complex than this.
people wont know what to do/wont bother if a simple google search doesnt inmediatly has what they want in the first link.
just want to add, it’s not the zoomer’s fault. they were intentionally raised in ignorance because its apparently profitable
fuck the corporations who’ve deliberately turned our living computers into soulless commercial brainwashing surveillance machines
deleted by creator
It’s their parents fault for not using GNU/Linux
True, and Alpha are even worst, most of them never touched a real keyboard, only use 2 thumbs on a phone. Don’t tell them about windows (or/mac/linux) or what is a UI or how to use a mouse and navigate in a OS, they don’t get double click or right click, resize a window, minimize a window (OMG THE WINDOW IS GONE!!!) it’s impressive.
I have seen a lot of late Z/early Alpha who cannot make some special characters on a keyboard like " or $ or even worst using AltCar. Using Word to write a letter, using keyboard shortcuts, etc. they are completely clueless with computers.
A good way to get a feel for how these Alpha kids probably feel is to use something un-Windowsy like RiscOS. I felt similarly helpless
Oh, you mean characters that are actually on the keyboard. I thought you meant stuff like ‘Δ’ or ‘°’
I still remember looking up alt codes on the character map.
I haven’t had to represent degrees in decades, but for some reason I remembered the code being 0961. According to this page it was 0176. What a classic blunder!
Xennials are fascinating to watch navigate through tech hurdles. They have a custom built toolbox built purely through trial and error.
I think you misspelled experience.
ouch.
Messing around with your old WinXP/95 computer and then fixing that mess before your parents come home and scold you does wonders to one’s troubleshooting skills. People of this generation never got to hear that scary XP error sound, and it shows.
Fun fact: Windows XP had cool day 0 loophole that saved my my ass. Once I decided to explore new options and I stumbled upon new and cool feature: setting a password. The only issue with it was that I’ve forgotten it half an hour later. I already knew ‘admin’ word so I used it in hackerman style and I logged in and I was able to reverse old password. This loophole was patched with first service pack but I still giggle when I remind myself of that.
Damn! This is some real hackerman shit.
Windows XP’s error sound wasn’t scary. Windows 95 and 98’s were. That natural alarming chime, combined with the angry faces when our parents find out the non-functioning operating system…
Turns out the one I was thinking of was the critical stop sound and the error sound was less threatening. Learnt something new…
Training some younger people at work: “click the cog in the corner to pull up the settings”. “What’s a ‘cog’?” Some things people miss out on life when you’ve never seen a Jetsons episode.
I just described a cog as a circle with teeth and my son thought it was funny to call the sticky out bits as teeth.
I’m just hoping he doesn’t ask about crenellations next.
Cogs are gear teeth.
I always call it a gear.
Cogs are typically square tooth, gears have involute teeth.
The definition online says that the teeth of the gears are cogs, which I’d never heard of before.
Me neither. We were taught cogs were those janky gears for certain tasks, while a true gear had geometry for smooth engagment
That’s not a cog, it’s a sprocket! George Jetson works for Spacely Sprockets.
I was thinking of the competitor: Cogswell’s Cogs!
I know what a cog is but not what a Jetsons is
Ripoff of The Flintstones, except the family is from the future rather than the past.
Both are from Hanna-Barbera. There is also a cartoon called The Roman Holidays, which is The Flintstones, but set in Rome.
Yes, Hanna-Barbera ripped off itself. Never heard of the Roman one!
I’ve never seen an icon of a single cog. Multiple cogs on a hub forming a gear, sure, but never just a cog.
Huh? The single cog is the standard for settings menus. Just looking at three random apps on my phone, they all had single cog icons.
cog
noun
ˈkäg
1 : a tooth on the rim of a wheel or gearCan you share an image of what you describe as a single cog?
My bad, I was using gear and cog interchangeably. Didn’t realize it could also mean just a tooth.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Look up cog in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
A cog is a tooth of a gear or cogwheel or the gear itself.
It can also be used to mean a singular cogged wheel
It’s splitting hairs, but that would technically be a cogwheel. The actual cogs would be the teeth around the wheel.
If you have a cogwheel with a broken cog, it would be accurate to say “the cogwheel is missing a cog.” That doesn’t mean the entire wheel is missing from the system; The system is only missing a single tooth.
Not according to the dictionary, or my masterful command of English
If you have an android phone, the settings icon is a cog.
Edit: 🙄
To be precise, that’s a cogwheel. There are six cogs around the cogwheel in your image. The word “cog” refers specifically to the teeth around the wheel, not the wheel itself. The cogwheel may be colloquially called a cog, but it’s technically inaccurate; If you told a watchmaker that their watch was missing a single cog, it would have a very different meaning than if you told them it was missing a single cogwheel.
That’s a gear with six cogs.
Zoomer in computer science here: I’ve noticed that there are two types of people in my age range, you have the people who are really passionate about technology for the sake of being technology and want to know how things work under the hood (like me) and people who see technology only as a means to accomlish a goal like writing a document, maintaining a social media presence, playing a game, etc, and can’t care less about how it actually works.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with the latter, but there can be conflict between the two groups because their priorities are completely different.
This is not unique to technology and you see this in other fields too. For example, you have the car enthusiasts who do their own oil changes and are constantly tuning up their cars, installing aftermarket mods, etc, and then you have everyone else who see cars as just a way of getting to where they need to go, have never even opened the engine compartment, and bring it into the shop when the scary lights on the dashboard appear.
To use your car metaphor, there was a time when you basically needed to know how a car worked in order to own/operate one. I’m talking like the 1910s-1920s. They were unreliable, simply made, manual transmission, hand crank start, and needed a lot of maintenance.
Millennials grew up at a time when you needed to have some understanding of how a computer worked in order to do basically anything.
I suppose the issue is that the car metaphor breaks down because a vehicle really only does one thing. Push pedal and go. Maybe worry about snow conditions if that affects you.
Meanwhile, computers can still be used to do thousands of different tasks and the only thread tying all of those tasks together is that they’re done by the same machine. So knowing fundamentals about the machine gives you access to a lot of capability vs. just memorizing how to do a few tasks.
the problem is that there’s people out there who in the analogy don’t know how to drive a car, defend it by saying ‘I’m just not a car person’, and constantly ask to be driven around when a major part of their job is driving a car. somehow when it comes to computers employers tolerate this
I work on a help desk. We hired multiple Zoomers and they literally don’t understand how computers work. They don’t know what the registry is. Or what POST means. Or how to properly back up a user’s data without using automated software.
They’re fucking dumb. Nice. But dumb.
To be fair, I’m a millenial who’s fairly tech savvy and I barely know what POST means. Then again, I don’t work in IT.
I got used to looking for registry tweaks, but I don’t even know what to call it exactly.
The closest I’ve got is: A place for accessing hidden settings in Windows. I’ve made a couple typos in there and nuked an install or two of XP, but I never really changed much personally. Just kinda looked up various ways people would use it to accomplish x, y, or z, out of curiosity.
I don’t have to deal with it anymore at least.
Lot of boomer-like fist shaking in these comments.
Newer generations are going to find different things to excel at, and they’ll inevitably give up on some of the old ways.
My favorite:
“Where did you save the file?”
“I saved it in Excel”
We are all working class.
The working class should hold the bulk of the wealth.
'Should" is doing all the work in that sentence
More work than the 1% will ever do.
Last night I offered to help my Zoomer classmate torrent Kamen Rider and he told me he was afraid of going to jail.
Back when computers were a novelty, we had schools dedicated to teaching people how to use them in my country.
The classes ranged from the most basic stuff, such as how to use a mouse, to more advanced topics, such as how to use the Windows registry.
We might need to bring these schools back in the near future.
I had to teach my zoomer intern how to use alt+tab and that you can just keep ctrl pressed and then just press the other key, they didn’t need to be pressed on the exact instant to work.
I remember learning latter in 4th grade. Thats sad
The key concept they’re missing a lot of the time is that software sits within the file system and not the other way around.
This is largely because apps hide this and data is generally stored in one place on your phone (the downloads folder).
Best way to fix it - have 1–2 lessons entirely devoted to finding shit on their computer. My favourite activity is “ok, save your word file, close word, you now have 10 mins to find that file without opening word”.
I’d at least start them with something simple like Paint or Notepad. Once they have that down, then you can throw the disaster that is the MS Office file save dialog at them.
