Ask Lemmy

I am an older millennial born in 83 and I’ve been in IT for about 21 years now and grew up building and fixing PCs for everyone. I think the newer generation is going to be the ones that need the most help. Might be anecdotal but in my years in IT at first it was the older folks with all the problems taking on and using tech. Now it’s the younger kids coming in. In my opinion it’s the way we consume tech now. All tech in the 80’s - early 2000’s required a lot of tinkering and figuring out I always figured the older folks were just set in their ways and didn’t want to learn anything new. My first 15 years in IT I always heard people say “I’m not a computer person” as an excuse to not knowing how to change a signature in outlook, an app they’ve been using for a while, or some other basic business app everyone should know how to use.

Now consumer tech just works. Out of the box you don’t need to tinker or do shit to the stuff. Younger gen is coming us used to shit just working and when anything goes wrong they don’t do well with troubleshooting also companies make anything beyond basic troubleshooting nearly impossible without them so most just don’t try to figure shit out. This type of behavior is getting worse now people get tech that can do a few hundred things and they only use it for two of the few hundred and now you are stuck trying to explain how to do basic tech tasks to an end user who is just going to forget it an hour or so later.

I’ve noticed this with IT employees and the rest of the business. Maybe I’m just a salty IT guy but I do cyber security now and the tech skill levels are just bad and it causes me grief on a regular basis.

You should see my zoomer partner and friend try to work a computer. They all grew up on iPads 😅

Work tech retail, a lot of young people don't know shit about any tech tbh

No, I think we'll be fine. It's Gen Z and Gen Alpha that are acting like boomers in regards to technology. My eldest niece and eldest nephew are tech-illiterate even though they grew up with PCs, tablets, and smartphones in their daily lives.

My eldest nephew can't figure out how to use Libby, or how to install unlock origin on his mobile Firefox browser, and my eldest niece has no idea how to troubleshoot or look up solutions to any tech problems at all.

It's frustrating and I had ban them from asking me anything tech related because I got tired of being the free, family tech support. Now I tell them "well, what did the sources say after you researched the solution?" And that always shuts them both up because I know they didn't even try looking up the solution on their own.

They also have the bad habit of believing everything they read online. I tried telling them both that they should look at more than one source when researching important information (nephew was doing a paper on the American Civil War) and they stared at me like I was nuts.

They are the living, breathing examples of Intelligence VS Wisdom.

I think us Millennials will, for the most part, have an easy time keeping up with new tech, even as we get older.

There's actually a regression where millennial who grew up with pc are still the best at it gen z is as bad as boomers. If it's not an app or website they are lost at even the smallest issue.

I love new tech and I’m gen X. I’ve learned new tech all my life. What will fuck me going forward is bad UI. At some point graphic designers decided a dark gray font was better than black. All the keyboard shortcuts I used were changed by Microsoft and I’m still butt hurt about it. Still use MS office but grumpy with the Ribbon.

I think most millennials and and gen-x folks will be totally fine.

I don't want to sound like one of those "kids these days" people, but kids these days have it rough.

I work in tech and old folks, mainly boomers, are usually ok to work with when it comes to tech, because they know they don't understand it. They grew up without it, avoided it when possible, embraced it when necessary, but they know that requires effort, and they're just generally not interested. I get that. They just need some reps and to feel comfortable, and they get it.

Most gen-z folks have grown up in a world where you just click things and they work. As a general rule, gen-x grew up in an era where you had to tinker with the hardware and software yourself if you wanted to do something. As a millennial, I had it easier. Most of the hardware was sorted, but some of the software was not, so you still had to do some configuration yourself if you wanted something to work.

Gen-z hasn't had that. If app A doesn't work, download app B. They're so used to things just working, they have no idea how to troubleshoot anything. In that way, they're usually worse than boomers. Generally a boomer will make an effort to try to fix something, understanding it's outside their wheelhouse. The zoomer won't and just stops in their tracks.

For example, a boomer will mangle the displayport connection on their computer trying to plug their HDMI cable into it. It looked like it would fit. The zoomer doesn't understand they need to plug in the computer to the monitor. The computer is already plugged in to the wall. Why plug it in again? Both things I have seen in the last 3 months. If someone thinks their computer is broken but it just needs the monitor turned on, they're more often under 25 than over 55.

Again, these are generalizations. There are individuals who don't fit into these trends. This is just my experience.

Not at all. I'm a late Gen Xer, almost a millennial. I thrive on learning new technology. I live for it.

It seems like my generation (Gen Z) is a lot worst with technology than millenials. Most of my generation don't know simple stuff like how filesystems and directories work or how extract a zipped folder. I blame the usage of phones as the primary computer and really dumbed down software that dosen't allow any sort of self troubleshooting or configuring.

I actually think the opposite. Millennials grew up during the boom of technology and many had to rapidly adjust to all of that in a short amount of time. That's why so many are so good at it. Gen Z on the other hand has trouble managing folders and files. This is largely due to tech getting easier... too easy almost. The direction of tech right now is AR/VR and my grandma was able to quickly grasp it because the controls are so natural.

I don't think that millennials will be behind in the tech field, but trends? Yes.

No. If anything technological illiteracy seems to be increasing again with the younger generations. They've grown up on locked down systems that don't encourage learning and exploration. It's not their fault. It's the tech companies and the schools who have made deals with the likes of Google.

That's why I'm a big advocate for Linux and open-source software, because it's computing with actual freedom. It's good for people to realize that computers are basically just abstractions layered upon abstractions, but at the core of it is the simplicity of a switch being on or off (assuming binary for now). It's not "magic" like some companies are fond of saying. It's not even particularly complex in itself. It's just a lot of simple parts working together. If you starts to understand those parts, then technology becomes demystified and you can often imagine how the underlying parts of any given system might work.

It's my hypothesis that this generation that is most tech savvy. This was a time when you had to know how to use a computer in order to ... use a computer. Today's generation has grown up with the app operating systems. They don't need to know the first thing about file manager or even ctrl-alt-del.

No I don't think so. I think millennials were in a sweet spot where more of us had access to cheaper computers so more of us had the opportunity to use them compared to Gen x and boomers. The strange thing is Gen z are becoming pretty incompetent with computers in general these days because of how much easier computers have become overall. If anything goes wrong they have no troubleshooting skills unlike millennials who had the misfortune of growing up with OS's like Windows ME. Source? I work in a high school and I see how bad the teenagers are all the time with general computer issues. They would much rather use their phone.

Speaking as a millennial I'm not bad at new technology but I really fucking hate how dumbed down and the planned obsolescence in everything nowadays. So that leads me to avoid using new shit a lot of the time. My phone for instance is 6 years old because there's nothing currently available that wouldn't be a downgrade in functionality. I'm also dreading getting a new car because all the newer ones I've been in have really shittily designed infotainment systems and a bunch of extra crap I don't need. I really feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I look at where technology seems to be going these days compared to how optimistic I was a decade ago.

My daughter turns 4 soon and I already have an old PC for her birthday painted purple. She will learn the old ways, the ways of our people.

I agree with people here saying that younger people are just not very computer literate anymore. I bought my daughter a starter desktop computer so she would get more computer literate, but it sits on a desk while she uses her iPad. The schools have Chromebooks, which is the push-here-dummy of operating systems, especially when the school restricts it. Apps on phones and tablets just work. There's no learning curve.

Unless they're specifically interested in computers, they don't need to be computer literate anymore.

That said, I think future technology will reflect this. They won't need to be for most jobs.

Technology for new generations is really dumbed down, unless you want to learn and get into the weeds deliberately. Millennials know how to work around multiple operating systems and generally also learned how to troubleshoot (of course, there are a lot of millennials who aren't interested in tech as well). Zoomers will definitely have their own generation specific stuff they will know much better than any other generation.

I like to think every generation has it own knowledge and speciality, and bringing those together is when we as a species grow and advance.

My friend works with a lot of Zoomers and he says that they grew up with working tech while we grew up having to debug shit all the time. So Zoomers are as helpless as boomers but millennials had to learn how shit worked.

I actually heard zoomers are worse with computers in general because they just use their phones instead. So I guess it depends on the tech.

Speaking as an elder Millennial, probably. As I get older, I get lazier and desire convenience over shiny and new. I recently got back into rebuilding my music collection and the high seas have changed since last I sailed. That being said, my desire for music drove me to learn the new ways, even though I didn't really want to. The bigest things that stop people from keeping up with technology is desire and ease of access. Most people could give a fuck less, so they don't bother with it, and the older we get, the less fucks we give. Those of us with a desire, for whatever reason, will choose to learn.

My family got its first PCs in the mid-80s.

My mother was a huge part of training people how to use PCs. She would drive a night computer lab (RV with 7 PCs) to business and train all the employees in his to use them as they began adopting the technology, and as the moved on she became a leader in information technology and project automation in the engineering world.

Her long, successful career was all very technical. She was an inspiring person who adopted new technology a decade ahead of time and never feared the future.

Now she can't operate the TV remote or her cell phone without cussing about all this damn confusing technology.

Yes. Because I already take tech support calls/chats from them while working at an ISP. There was a very limited sweet spot where SOME kids became computer literate. Then smartphones happened. It's all been dumbed down again. People call the Internet "WiFi" and have little to no understanding of how anything works.

"I'm working from home on my MacBook Air!"

Absolute madness. Trust me. They're mostly very dumb already.

I'm a primary school teacher, not related to computers, but every year kids are getting measurably worse with coins and money. I can give quite a few 9 year olds a few coins, and they would have a seriously hard time quantifying the amount. It's funny the parents come to me saying their kid needs to be extended, but I'm just here saying "bro, your kid can't even buy himself an ice-cream."

The discussions here about how "today's tech is so dumbed down" kinda makes me laugh, because it's what I was saying when Windows 95 released.

I'm an "Oregon Trail" older millennial, whose first computer was a Tandy 286 running DOS (and Tandy Deskmate GUI shell). My parents bought me the thing but had no idea how to use it themselves, so six?-year-old me had to figure it out entirely on my own. I had to understand things like IRQ conflicts, "high memory", the difference between CGA, EGA and VGA, and (to some extent) how to use the DOS command line just in order to get my games to work.

Without that formative experience, I would not have become the Linux-using, self-hosting, software engineer I am today.

Frankly, I fear for the zoomers. I'm currently trying to figure out how to give my own kids at least a taste of a similar experience, because the last thing I want is for them to be slaves to whatever "easy"-but-exploitative technology the FAANGs of the world are constantly trying to shove down the throats of everybody who doesn't know better.

Counter argument: people have grown up with cars for over a century. Still, no one knows shit about cars where many have no clue about even filling it up by themselves let alone check things like radiator fluid, oil, etc.

People will be more accustomed to using tech, but that doesn’t mean the masses will know how it works.

Boomers are not bad with technology, at least not boomers working in tech... It's the younger guys with ipads that have no clue how anything works. :)

One teenager I met wanted to be a data scientist and had a running jupyter notebook but couldn't write a simple python loop on his own.

I asked him why, and he said he wasn't interested in learning that, he just wanted to do AI easily and get quick results. It was all about getting to the end result as quickly as possible and skipping the foundations.

This is the YouTube generation. Very impatient people. And you actually need patience to learn more difficult things...and you have to be OK with feeling stupid too.

I was just thinking about this. I'm really not sure. I think technological progress is not the core issue but rather a sudden paradigm shift in how you interact with what you use on a daily basis.

For instance, there was a generation that grew up without cars and never learned to drive even after they became commonplace. Just too big a jump from previous methods of transportation. But their children who grew up with cars didn't have any issues as the technology matured and new features were added.

So the question is will there be another significant paradigm shift in our lifetime that isn't just an evolution of current interfaces and tools, but rather a sudden change in how we interact with technology?

Who knows...

Millenial here: No because we're used to change and I'll never be old!

Edit: Fuck, I'm old :( How the hell did this happen???

Absolutely. I work in IT. Some millennial are just as bad, if not worse than the boomers. If things aren't EXACTLY what they expect or they are used to their brains short circuit and they can't do anything. Like the button just moved to another menu dropdown Deborah, put in 20 seconds of effort and you would find it.

The porn tech pendulum:

Boomers: So your telling me that if I know the right people and go to the right theaters, I get to see porn? (Boomers become good at networking)

Gen X: So your telling me if I buy a TV I get to see porn? (Gen Xs don't get any cool knowledge, so they restrict porn on TV)

Millennials: So your telling me that if I get really good at computers and internet, I get to see porn? (Millennials get really good at using computer technology)

Zoomers: So your telling me if I own a phone, I get to see porn? (Zoomers don't get any cool knowledge, move to restrict porn on the internet)

Gen Alpha: So your telling me if I install these image AIs and VR programs, I get to see porn? (Gen Alpha gets really good and working with AI and VR 'interactions')

Kinda feel the sample on here may skew the answer to this question as Lemmy is 95% Linux nerds.

First: It's been the boomers who invented computers, the internet etc. Second: The average millennial knows little about tech. Give them an Android phone instead of an iPhone or a PC with MacOS or Linux and they'll start looking confused at you. And tell you the way it was before was better. Try to explain to people why something is or isn't necessary or about privacy and how our personal data gets handled and used. Most people are ignorant. Many people also have other hobbies than computers.

People in here talking about how future generations might be less tech savvy due to growing up with locked down devices and phones. I am worried things might go a different way. If tech companies manage to push open systems out, forcing us all onto locked down computing appliances, I could easily see myself being left behind as I try to cling to the glory days of being able to actually code my own solutions and configure an OS to my liking, etc.

I work in tech and it's honestly exhausting trying to keep up. I already feel this way tbh, it's a non stop procession into the future.