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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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."

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.

Your question reminded me of an interesting article I read a while back: Gen Z Is Apparently Baffled by Basic Technology.

It's kind of a click bait title, but I think it's still interesting. Technology is definitely generational, and I'm sure there are some things millennials will be better prepared to use in old age, but there will likely be lots of new tech that will be a struggle to learn.

i think everyone can learn how to use new tech, its more a question if you still want to.

For example i dont feel the need to get into tiktok.....but if tiktok existed 15 years ago i would have.

Here are still old people using CLI text based browsers on a dialup connettion who never felt the need to upgrade to a more visual way to browse the web...even if they could learn it.

At a certain age u just stop giving fucks about new things maybe.

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.

Most of the basic tech issues and dumb questions I deal with at work are for people over 50 or under 25. Younger GenX and Millennials generally pick things up quickly and have no problem with basic troubleshooting.

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.

The vast majority will be, yes. We may have grown up with technology being janky but it has been years since that has been the case. People are comfortable with the current tech. Even me as a techie will often reach for the thing that I know how to use rather than going through the process of learning something new. I largely just want shit to work.

Maybe?

I mean theres boomers who were engineers in their youth who are complete idiots with modern technology, especially computers.

But as an elder millenial myself, I can kind of see it happening to me too. While I do enjoy technology and gadgets, I just dont have a need for all of it, nor the time to tinker like I did in my youth. Like I havent bothered at all with apple devices, so Im kinda clueless with how to navigate those things. Last time I used an apple product was around 2008 when I was using MacOS in college.

Lots of interesting comments! I really enjoyed this thread. Two things I'd add:

1. I think "technology" should really be referred to as "a technology". For instance, judging Gen Z against a technology (like a photocopier) that predates their birth seems a bit unfair. As a Gen X, I don't think it was fair to be judged for growing up with calculators instead of slide-rulers. I love old tech, but I'm not kidding myself, it's old tech not the only tech.

2. Also shouldn't the organisation adapt instead? If new hires are more comfortable watching videos for training vs reading procedures, or taking photos of things with their phone instead of the photocopier, isn't that just fine. It's not my preference, but isn't it best for me to adapt rather than them.

It's not that I don't have generational pride. I like my generation, we were and are adaptable. I just can't imagine that the subsequent generations won't be as adaptable to things I can't even imagine yet.

That depends on the UX/UI developers. When the app tries to be smart and make every interaction a conversation, I immediately want to abandon it. Linux is spoiling me with its user-friendly "do what I tell you" philosophy.

I'm an elder millennial. While I'm good on my computer use, cars are starting to get too advanced for me to repair myself. Eventually, I'll have an electric car and be entirely dependent on a mechanic to repair the vehicle.

Maybe kids have a leg up on the boomers that only had slide rules growing up, but I believe that tech literacy is much lower than people realize. Beyond the bare minimum of using email and browsing the web, most people generally just don’t aren’t using computers in a deep way, including kids that just grow up consuming content on tablets. Touch screens actively obscure the complexity of computers to make them more intuitive.

This research was published nearly 10 years ago but I it’s relevant today: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

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.

Honestly, I doubt it. We got in on this sort of stuff early in life, so I don't think we'll struggle.

Absolutely, and I'm looking forward to it. I'll be the fossil holding up the entire self-checkout lane because the retinal scan can't see past my cataracts, and not one of these kids can stop me!

My wife and I regularly joke that one day we'll harass our kids to help us with our neural interfaces but I don't think that sort of thing will happen any time soon.

When I was a kid in the 80's a lot of people could already afford computers. They weren't so cheap that everyone had them but they were affordable to a fair number of people if they really wanted one. A C64 cost $595 at launch, that's under $2,000 in today's dollars.

The biggest barrier to computers were that they weren't "user friendly". If you wanted to play a simple video game you needed to know some basic command line instructions. When I wanted to set up my first mouse for my 8086 it involved installing drivers and editing config.sys and autoexec.bat. You couldn't really do anything with a computer those days unless you were willing to nerd out.

At the same time, nerding out on a computer could easily get you deep into the guts of your computer in a functional way. I learned that the only way I could play video games at night was if I opened up the computer and disconnected the speaker wire so it wouldn't alert my parents. I also learned that I could "hack" Bards Tale by opening up the main file with debug and editing it so that the store would sell an infinite number of "Crystal Swords".

Today there are 2 cell phones for every human on earth. Kids walk around with supercomputers in their pockets. But they've become so "user friendly" that you barely even need to be literate to operate one. That's generally a good thing but it removes an incentive to figuring out how the stuff works. Most people only bother with that if they're having some trouble getting it working in the first place.

At the same time it's gotten much harder to make changes to your computer. The first Apple was a pile of circuits you needed to solder together. You can't even remove the battery on a modern one (without jumping through a lot of hoops). If you edit some of your games it's more likely to trigger some piracy or cheat protection than to let you actually change it.

There are still large communities of computer nerds but your average person today basically treats computers like magic boxes.

I'd expect that kind of gap in other areas. I'd take 3d printing as an example. You can get one now for a few hundred bucks. They're already used in industry but, at this point, they're still very fiddly. The people who have them at home are comfortable doing stuff like troubleshooting, flashing ROMs, wading through bad documentation and even printing custom upgrades for their printer.

The way some of my older millenial and x-er friends are reacting to AI I sort of wonder if that'll be the dividing line between generations. Someone in their 40-50s can probably afford to ignore AI in the coming years but a zoomer ignores it at their own peril. I bet there'll be millenials in a couple decades complaining about how it's crazy the youths have 'AI friends'.

I'm 40 and I've never scanned a qr code in my life. So yes, absolutely.