My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.
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 😅
I swear I saw a study that basically came to the conclusion that there is a distinct curve in technological literacy where younger generations are used to tech “just working” and not knowing how to navigate anything outside of app-based interface. Take all of this with a handful of salt bc I don’t have source on hand.
This is a very interesting point and I can see it throughout zoomer culture when it comes to the down and dirty technical stuff, but I think there’s a distinction to be made between being technically apt and being able to grok whatever the hot shit consumer-grade tech paradigm is right now.
In the former context, a lot of zoomers have already “failed” but that context is the territory of people who reach out to learn it - in other words, the nitty gritty tech stuff will always be for the technical types. In the latter context, I imagine millennials will probably mostly be fine and zoomers will, too. I say “mostly” because we’re already seeing millennials start to kind of skip the latest trends (TikTok comes to mind immediately). Zoomers are already coming to grips with not being able to understand Alphas sense of humor via memes. Whatever the next social media platform is, I imagine it’ll be primarily a home for Alphas, leaving zoomers and millennials where they are.
Will there be spillover across the board, with members of different generations populating the other platforms? Sure, there are always exceptions.
As far as physical tech goes, like how millennials got the smartphone and zoomers grew up with it? It’s highly dependent on how ingrained it becomes in society. Hard to exist without a smartphone these days, so everybody has to know how to use one. Boomers have more trouble because they got it later, but there are plenty of them who are just fine with current phone tech precisely because they need to be for professional AND personal use.
As a instructor of IT I can absolutely confirm. A lot of Gen Z have not grown up with computers as a tool. I have a class of around 20 students, and maybe 4-5 have any knowledge of the various compression archives. I have to give primers on the proper way to save various file types otherwise they’ll just create default.config.txt (6) and wonder why an install isn’t working.
I thought you said zoomer parents and was about to get really mad and sad at the time.
I mean older Gen Z are 20-24. I’m a millennial and I was a dad at 23 haha. It’s early, but not unreasonably so.
To 26 actually. Gen Z starts in 1997.
Eh the borderline years are all subjective.
But yes. Mid twenties is a reasonable time to start having kids
Heh heh heh, I thought he said Boomer parents and I was wondering where the heck they got iPads
My brother is gen Z and is having a kid this year
Yeah, this is a thing. I know a lot of younger folks who don’t really have a clue about how to do something if they don’t have iOS version whatever or some other bespoke interface. (And no, I’m not a boomer)
CLI ultimately runs the world, and the younger folks who understand CLI are probably at a ratio roughly even to the other generations.
What’s a computer?
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 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.
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I think every generation has things they’re good and bad at. I also think every generation forgets how bad they were at certain things at a younger age. So I believe they’ll be fine.
I’ve never really thought of it from that perspective before… but I think you’re 100% right
It’s funny because it’s true
To be fair if App A doesn’t work there also isn’t much that you can do about it. Trying another app is the troubleshooting.
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’m GenX and I also hate the ribbon. 🤬
Consider switching over to Linux so you can customize your OS however you want 😀
Exactly, we grew up constantly learning new tech!
I was learning to use computer during the transition to the ribbon in Office 2007, but I actually preferred the ribbon to the old interface and these days I don’t mind it. Out of curiosity, what about the Ribbon annoys you guys?
I just want to add that OP goes straight from Boomers to Millenials, ignoring Gen X as usual.
Not at all. I’m a late Gen Xer, almost a millennial. I thrive on learning new technology. I live for it.
I am sure some gen Xers do fail to adapt, but at the end of the day, I don’t even think it’s a generational thing: Some people adapt and keep moving, some people get stuck.
Yeah I know boomers that are more tech savvy than some millennial. Really if you are curious and have an interest, you would keep up even at Biden age
I know a few people who are and do. Even 20+ years ago, I can recall old people who taught very young me all sorts of “cutting edge” tech shit. I had a greybeard teach me about IRQ addresses in the 90s, I’ve since forgotten it all but that’s not really the point.
“Gotta change those jumpers, man!”
In my experience, if anything, late iterations of Gex X tend to be slightly better with new tech than Milennials, because we grew up having to know how it works in order to use it.
In the days of constant blue screen of death.
There seem to be a lot of us GenX /“Xenials” here in the fediverse already and I think that’s why. We don’t need everything handed to us in its final form.
The people that were near that X/Millennial transition are the best at adapting to new tech in my experience. Enough access to have a computer in their formative years but not far enough along for that computer to actually worked well.
Same. Except when teleporters come around. You’ll only teleport me over my dead body.
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Me too
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.
Millennials had to learn how to handle technology from the ground up, recognizing file extensions to avoid viruses from the wild jungle that were Limewire/eMule for exemple. Troubleshooting software and hardware, navigating an untethered web. As technology and intuitive tools arose, the need to develop this knowledge disappeared mostly, that is the bad side of progress.
Even more so when millennials had to help their parents for that, whereas the following generation didn’t have to, except for specific cases.
I think there are different aspects. I know how to use that, I’m an IT professional, but people are always asking me “how to do X in Y app” and I have NFI, I don’t use most of the apps and have no plan to.
I get that one a lot and I always ask if I can have a look at it for them but then they turn around and tell me they can’t be bothered. It’s fucking weird. I’m here ready to solve your problem, all you have to do is log in, and you can’t be bothered.
They don’t want you to figure out something that they couldn’t. I can admit I’ve been there.
This is 100% it. Worked in IT 15+ years, started with building desktops, servers, virtual machines, building networks, troubleshooting in-depth kernel issues, tracing TCP/IP chatter, which built a really broad platform for my current job as principal cloud architect. I and peers of my vintage understand how to troubleshoot down to a low level, and we understand the implications, benefits risks and constraints of putting certain cloud technologies together even through the multiple levels of abstraction.
We’ve had the benefit of experiencing these technologies grow and develop first hand, we understand how they fit together and where to look when something isn’t working. Recent graduates have not had the benefit of that journey, are so used to operating at the top layer of the abstraction that works most of the time, that I find they really struggle to decompose a problem, simplify and troubleshoot one logical component step at a time. Problem solving is a learned skill and multiple layers of abstraction make knowing where to start very difficult if the error message isn’t crystal clear.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
