Something I’ve noticed as an elder millennial working in IT is that there’s an assumption by older generations that because zoomers have grown up with smartphones that they’ll be automatically be proficient with tech as a whole, but it’s not correct in my experience and I really think it’s doing them a disservice. They’re better than anyone else I’ve met at navigating apps/mobile UI and can be super efficient working that way but tend to struggle as much as boomers with more traditional computers, because it’s simply not what they grew up with and no one really sat them down to formally teach them.
There is another article I read where colleges had to teach Computer Science majors basic computer concepts like folders because the students relied on search for everything.
It would be like how almost everyone knew how to work on their own car in the 40’s and 50’s because you needed to in order to get the car to run. Nowadays, you don’t need that information to drive a car.
I think your car metaphor is even more apt than you meant it, as over time both car manufacturers and mobile platforms have gotten more and more hostile to users actually being able to do maintenance or self service.
That’s true, but there’s always a way. For instance clones of the John Deere factory service tool and pirated software is available on AliExpress for less than a thousand dollars. For more common manufacturers there’s tools for doing all kinds of stuff.
The more popular the platform, the more prevalent the problem, and the more expensive the OEM makes it are all determining factors as to the availability of aftermarket tools and repairs.
If something costs a million people one thousand dollars to fix then a third party can afford a couple of full time engineers to come up with a fix that costs five hundred.
I’ve personally made my own physical tools for working on cars when a factory special tool is called for.
Never underestimate a determined person with a welder and a grinder.
For sure, but it does make the barrier to entry significantly higher. A kid now is much less likely to stumble into how something works if they have to effectively break several locks when before the door was wide open.
To be fair modern cars won’t even let you. E.g. if you disconnect the battery of a modern car, there’s a high chance that it completely breaks (because some chips reset without power).
there’s an assumption by older generations that because zoomers have grown up with smartphones that they’ll automatically be proficient with tech as a whole
That’s like thinking someone knows how to cook because they can order at McDonalds.
It’s an absurd premise, but it’s true! I teach HS computer science and always take time to teach them basic skills about Excel — like what it’s even capable of.
That’s great. Teaching them what it is capable of opens new vistas (not that Vista) and that there are lots of possibilities with other software as well. Not a MS fan at all but Excel is powerful and the point comes through regardless of the platform.
I doubt that they are actually that skilled with mobile apps, since most things on a phone are “use them as they are or just don’t”. You can’t really customize things, or do things in your own ways. E.g. ask someone to send you an original, uncompressed photo on Whatsapp.
Scanners are basically (and most of the time literally) printers. And printers are of the devil.
I’m not Gen Z btw, I’m on the tail end of Gen X and an IT professional of twenty years.
It’s like they figured out printer firmware/GUI in 1981 and then have never touched it again. They’re competing with the TI-83 in terms of longevity at this point.
I mean yeah, printers really try to behave like somewhat sophisticated typewriters in a way. There are so many things that I suppose used to make sense early on but that really should have been refactored again and again over time. But since the technology is so insanely widespread and backward compatibility being a must-have… tech debt is a bitch.
And that’s why IT people hate printers.
The scanner part is the only reason why I haven’t smashed that damn printer yet… I hate printers so much, I’d rather almost pay for a print service that just ships the printed documents to me on the next day.
Yeah, I really like my 3D printers even though they can be pretty fiddly as well.
But paper printers man, not even once.
I just had to replace the heat cartridge and thermister on my hot end. The print I had going when they failed was 35/37 hours in.
I still have massive affection for my 3D printer, but the HP inkjet printer my wife bought during the early days of Covid is my mortal enemy.
Ouch, I feel you on this one. Both of the ones, really.
HP inkjet printer
Lol that’s like the dark overlord of evil printers. She really hit the jackpot there. 😛
Most printers are designed to be disposable. The companies make all their profits selling ink.
Zoomer IT professional here - I’ve configured many office printers in my short time in the workforce. Still have to go to Google for answers when people ask me basic questions about how to use the damn thing.
It seems 1990-2010 was the golden age for picking computers up “on the fly”.
Absolutely, people before that era didn’t grow up with computers for the most part. If they did, they knew BASIC, DOS, Unix, etc. from older command-line based machines, and that was pretty rare since computers were expensive and only used for niche applications.
In the 1990s, computers took over the home with multimedia, Windows 95, and the Internet. Growing up in the 90’s I had access to a computer from the age of 5. It wasn’t the dumbed-down mobile experience of today’s smartphones. Computers didn’t go to obscene lengths to hide settings and the underlying functionality (filesystem, registry, drivers, boot process, etc) from the user like modern smartphones do. Instead, it was often necessary to dig into these deep layers to set things up or customize your experience. We got good at computers by trial and error. Today’s smart devices try to make computing so accessible they don’t require (or allow, in many cases) the deep low level configuration access of desktop PCs, especially those of old. People who grew up just using smartphones didn’t need to learn how to configure the BIOS, how to install drivers, how to set up network shares, etc. Apple and Google will tell you that’s a good thing, but I don’t agree.
I’m glad we’re starting to see full control come back to the smart device space. Linux phones are getting to be a more and more viable option every day and these let you truly tinker and tweak your mobile experience the same as you would a desktop. I also think projects like Raspberry Pi have been great in getting actual computers into the hands of younger audiences where they can tinker and tweak and learn.
Counter point: Nobody knows how to operate printers and scanners because they are not build by people that are tech literate.
Give a printer or scanner a proper UI using the design principles that modern apps use and see how easy newer generations pick things up
Almost right. Printers and scanners were not built by people. They are an independent life form that just happens to emulate office equipment for their own benefit. They have enabled parasitic entities such as Canon and HP to thrive alongside them, but since there is no ‘design’ involved, they will never really develop the same kind of interfaces we expect from modern UX labs.
It’s also the reason any sane person keeps a loaded gun nearby whenever interacting with them, just in case they make any unusual noises.
I am convinced that printer companies make their products as esoteric and intimidating to the average person as possible on purpose so that they can sell expensive servicing packages to businesses.
Id wager that they dont put too much money into R&D and just pay one guy to port over the same code from their last last last generation printer to the new one. Over time its become an unrecognizable mess that is just hacked into working and no one ever takes a look under the hood. Their main market is the ink anyways, so making the printer good at what it does is an afterthought
Ah yes, the McDonald’s ice cream machine model
This. The core principle of intuitive UI is reusing ui elements that are familiar. That’s the reason every elevator has buttons, and that’s why you can intuitively operate every elevator you encounter.
The problem is that not everyone is familiar with the same things. Many people of older generations (those that have stopped keeping up with technology) are used to buttons, that’s why a blue text doesn’t immediately mean clickable to them.
On the other hand there’s no right click on phones so younger generations that are familiar with phone UIs may not immediately come to the conclusion that there’s more options when pressing the other mouse button on a desktop computer.
There are printer that has their own app or support apps implementing the protocols so you can print via bluetooth for example. The tricky part comes from 1. cost 2. when you do the scan©. The fancier printer that comes with a tablet attached to it doesn’t do “more” compare to the cheaper traditional layout version that can also connect to computer/apps.
Then when you do the scan and copy, it’s the knowledge which tray does the feed and which mode to set the machine to operate, which does require some manual reading or guidance. But it’s not hard to figure out as well.
This is a real issue, but scanners are the worst example because no generation can figure them out.
Hardly a Gen-z specific issue. Office printer/scanners have always been confusing.
as a old timer I feel that it’s not that “complex” if you are allowed to experiment without someone looking at you with disappointment. Like there was one time I was trying to figure out how to do double side copying on a machine I never used before, the HR come by and just say you do this print one side and then shuffle the paper into the feeder to print the other side. I tell her that the machine can do double side copying/scanning cause it’s similar tray layout I saw in prior company. She let me do my experiment and I figure out how to set the modes and it works as intended. This saved her lots of time having to stick with the machine where she could’ve just spend sometime to figure out as well. People’s pride usually gets in their way of learning.
side note: stick fresh printed paper back into printing machine can easily cause paper jam. That’s on top of the risk where you printed with wrong orientation/side if you didn’t follow the marking direction properly.
lastly, it’s paperless era, please encourage the folks that needs to do the papers to use docusign or something to accomplish the same task. we really don’t need to waste all those paper printing information that’s only needed for a 30mins meeting. when we can all see it on say, google doc.(or whatever sharing platform. )
Yeah, I’m not Gen Z and I’ve always found office printers unnecessarily complicated. Like, I’ve barely learned how to use a fax machine, do you have to make it even more confusing?
Printers feel like they’re still trying to use metaphors and analogies to pre-printer technology, which very few people even remember anymore. It’d be like if we still used the same training they used on the first cars comparing them to horse and buggy setups today. No one would get it.
To be fair to the thumbnail, and zoomers in general, scanners and printers are generally universally awful lol
We can put a man on the moon, but you want to print text on a piece of paper? ERROR: PC LOAD LETTER
but…why? Is it because interfacing between digital and analog representations of data, because of legacy systems, why are printers so annoying compared to screens and networks?
Because it’s legacy.
People/companies have been expecting printers to die for like 30 years, but they haven’t, so only the bare minimum was done to keep them in working order.
Only the industrial-scale one are “OK” because that’s the place where they’re expected to stay.
Does any place still use HP laserjet II-series printers that gave that error? Those things were workhorses but it’s been 25-30 years.
Besides, this error isn’t that bad: it means “I’ve been asked to print something on letter-size paper, but I don’t have letter-sized paper. Please load some.” Either give it some paper of the size it wants, or check that the paper tray it has is properly set to “this is letter-size paper” and not to “this is A4-size paper”.
That’s the real cause of why this error was so common: US letter paper and A4 paper are almost—but not exactly—the same size, and there was a switch on the paper tray you had to set to tell it what it was loaded with, and the printer refused to print on the wrong-sized paper. In other words, PC LOAD LETTER is just another entry in the list of things that are frustrating and annoying because the US never adopted metric.
You want something annoying try PAPER JAM IN AREA 3, where you have to open the thing up carefully and hope that the paper doesn’t rip as you remove it also be very careful not to touch that one spot that is super hot and will burn you. This was usually caused by someone somewhere deciding to save some money and order everyone the cheap, crappy paper that did this all the time instead of the good stuff.
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Honestly I expect, just like in the early days of personal computing, that Gen Z and beyond will suffer from PC illiteracy. The main issue is that phones and tablets are being used almost exclusively during school and on personal time, so they have no idea what Windows nor even Mac looks and feels like. What happens with Zoomer gets an office job for the first time? They have to figure out how to use Windows and Office for the first time. It’s crazy to think that your 70 yr old Grandma and your 17 yr old Nephew could potentially be on the same level of knowledge of how to use Windows, Office, etc…
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Just wanted to say that - young people don’t grok files and folders, it’s hard for me to understand how they manage
Indeed! I teach an introductory web design class for undergraduates and despite my best efforts it takes a lot of students the whole semester to figure out file paths. If I had more time in the term, I think I’d dedicate a unit to it, just to get everyone up to speed — and I may have to do it anyway. In fairness to the kids, even Mac and Windows machines these days do a lot to minimize users’ exposure to file structures in the name of usability. Meanwhile, the phones and school Chromebooks they’ve grown up using completely obfuscate this information.
I wish you luck with that class, and I expect the students get the other stuff - I have colleagues with masters degrees who aren’t really sure how stuff works outside of the downloads folder
Thanks! Yeah, students do pretty well in the course overall. It’s for non-devs and is oriented toward exposure to different technologies rather than mastery of them — basically demystifying how web apps work.
To their defense not everyone have a scanner these days.
that’s not a defense, there are countless scanning apps for phones and tablets which magically correct the perspective and distortion and remove the creases. In a way, these are even better than scanners because they have a very high resolution.
Adobe Scan is a free phone app for creating scans of docs. There are dozens of others like it.
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I’m a millennial and when I was in university I let people use my computer to send assignments to their lecturers rather than going to the labs a few times. More than once I had to stop them copying and pasting the contents of the word document into the body of the email and show them how to attach a file
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Perhaps PCs will become obsolete. Even programming languages.
The most useful skill set for Gen-whatevers of the future will be winning an hours long debate with their personal AI on why it should get out of its digital bed and be productive today.
Just yesterday I was watching an episode of Star Trek DS9 where Sisko and Bashir get transported in time back to San Francisco in 2024 and Bashir has to examine a patient without a tricorder or any other equipment. It made me wonder how these people are able to have so much ingenuity and rote knowledge when they have computers and AI to take care of literally everything for them in 99.9% of circumstances.
They get new knowledge placed in their heads while using the transporters.
There’s plenty of zoomers out there with office jobs already and the world hasn’t collapsed. They’ll learn just like the generations before them learned.
It’s insane how true this is. I’ve actually worked with some kids that have no idea how to use windows, let alone know how to type. It’s so odd, and almost disorienting at times, to experience this from both those older than me (parents, etc) and those younger than me.
I’ve taught a basic web programming class to 17/18 year old’s. Hardly anyone had ever heard of file extensions (windows by default doesn’t show them anymore), and most of them didn’t understand the concept of folders and files, at all. I was shocked.
I spent 4 hours with them before the whole class was able to create a “index.html” file inside a specific folder, it was like teaching old people. I now feel a lot safer in my programming job.
I’ve had conversations with young people who started work in an office environment that required a lot of text editing/text creation, and they didn’t know how to type on a keyboard.
Their opinion was that typing on a physical keyboard was an outdated skill that just wasn’t required any more.
I asked them if they used voice-to-text or some other input method instead, and they said no.
Are that point, I just talked away, because I didn’t have any polite follow-up questions, and we simply didn’t seem to speak the same language.
I wonder if in the future people will use their smartphone as an input decive for desktop PCs. If they really can’t be bothered to learn how to use a proper keyboard, that could maybe still be a lot faster than typing with your index fingers.
Yeah, I get that, and hypothetically you could just use a mobile device for text creation, using your preferred method of inputting text (e.g. a swipe keyboard, or a stylus with text recognition, etc.) on the mobile device and then send it all to the desktop.
I asked about that, and I didn’t get a definitive answer. The conversation was more like:
“You don’t get it, we grew up with touchscreen devices, physical keyboards are outdated.”
“So do you use voice to text or something?”
“No! You don’t get it. We grew up with mobile devices!”
“But… How do you enter text!?”
“Nobody cares about your typewriting skills!!”
They stared at me.
I stared back.
The generational gap felt like the Grand Canyon.
What’s astonishing to me is that there is software which allows you to use your phone’s keyboard as an input method for the PC. However, they didn’t even think about it because they never needed to connect two devices together without them magically finding each other. Send a file? Do it through WhatsApp, even though the person stands right next to you.
I was taught how to type on a keyboard. I much prefer using my phone to type things because I can do it in any position rather than sitting at a desk.
I think this can happen to any generation. I’m currently training someone at work who allegedly has a Bachelors degree in Computer Science who had to be reminded of the keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste.
I never read the manual to learn how to use one. Just trial and errored it.
We sure this isn’t a consequence of our intolerance for “failure” conditioning a generation to just stick to what they know instead of experimenting?
A whole generation has been raised with tech that just works and if on the rare occasion it goes wrong, it goes very wrong and either needs IT/Customer Service/etc to fix it for you because the problem is very technical, or it’s just broken and you get a new one. This means they have no problem-solving skills because none of the problems they’ve faced were solvable, and they’re scared to get it wrong because getting it wrong breaks things in ways that are bad and expensive. Coming into an environment where trial and error is now not just ok, but expected, is a reversal of some deeply ingrained habits for them. That doesn’t mean they can’t learn, but it does make it a bit of a culture shock for them.
More than just works, modern apps and phones are explicitly not designed to be fixed by the end user. Why would they have those skills when iPhones and iPads are anti-repair? When software is lucky to have 3 different settings?
I personally blame apple for a lot of the tech illiteracy in the younger generations.
This is why Right To Repair is a big deal. Not just because it reduces waste by fixing what might have been thrown away, not just because it allows you to do what you want with the device that you supposedly own, and not just because it breaks the monopoly and requires pricing of repair services to actually be competitive - although all those things are important. It’s also because if a device can be repaired, some people will be encouraged to learn how to repair it, and in doing so they’ll learn a valuable problem-solving mindset. We need to be mindful of how we first introduce young people to technology to avoid this learned helplessness and instil the attitudes that will allow them to function when they’re adults and it’s now their job to look under the hood and make it all work.
And to add, making problems unsolvable often means another purchase for that manufacturer so there is big incentive to get especially younger people used to that.
It comes down to good interface engineering. There was a time engineers were really good at making complex systems simple to operate. Now it seems they’re good at making simple systems complex to operate. It seems to coincide with most companies outsourcing design to cheap labor markets.
On another trend in interface engineering, I think a lot of “apps” are easy to use because they simply don’t provide options. This is how you will use our software and that’s all there is to it. The plus side is simplicity, the down side is inflexibility.
I’m pretty good at dealing with systems of all kinds myself. I get really infuriated at times by the lack of flexibility for the sake of simplicity in systems now. You can always read a manual, but you can’t easily change programming or design.
I get really infuriated at times by the lack of flexibility for the sake of simplicity in systems now.
Me too. I especially hate this trend of implying that your computer is a box full of esoteric black magic that you could never understand. I work in IT, I’m reasonably good with these things, error messages don’t scare me. Telling me “something went wrong uwu” doesn’t help me or the users I support at all. Stop insulting my intelligence and tell me what went wrong, or at least give me an error code that I can search for dammit!
Yes that’s another problem, assumed intelligence on the part of the designer. If they assume the average user is not going to be able to deal with the most simple factors, they’re not going to design a mechanism to deal with them.
Though I don’t know, maybe designers are right about that. I’ve always been able to RTFM for any problem I’ve run into and deal with it. Maybe that’s too much to ask of the average consumer. Still it baffles me how we can have people designing things like breakthrough AI on one hand and others getting stumped by a printer interface on the other.
Maybe the main problem is that they don’t have the concept of trial and error. Yeah sure a printer has weird UX, but just press buttons and see what happens 😁.
To be fair, printers are full of ghosts and demons. Even if you get to know how a printer works for years it’ll still randomly just do some crazy shit you weren’t expecting.
People always wonder at my skill in picking up unfamiliar UIs, and its always just that I explore the interface thoroughly and press every likely-looking button
When I was in my early teens I got my hands on a copy of Photoshop 7 from my granddad and spent so much time on tutorial websites and Worth1000, messing around with the tools and making fake digital post-its and stuff like that. I think Photoshop is definitely up there in terms of complex UIs, so having that hands-on experience was crucial in learning how to learn other UIs.
It also helped that a lot of the tutorials by that point were for CS3, which had warp features that 7 didn’t have, and I had to experiment to find workarounds for the missing tools.
The only device where that has failed me was a washing maschine with a mixed analog and digital UI.
With the old ones you could just turn the knobs. With the new ones you basically have a full touchscreen App interface. But for that period where things started to get more digital but not completely, it’s absolutely awful.
This is something we see with our students at school. I think we do them a disservice assuming they have skills we had to acquire as technology progressed. Even something as fundamental as typing is not being actively taught.
You took the words out of my mouth! I am grading reports and one of the students had to resubmit because they were missing page numbers.
It was resubmitted in time and…well, they technically got those page numbers on there. By manually adding them on each page. No, not in the footer; by just adding some line breaks and typing a number.
Another had the same issue and apparently printed their report and added numbers by hand and then took pictures with their phone and submitted their report as 25 .png files.
It’s all good though. They’re business students who go on to work with some of the biggest companies and have starting salaries over €50k minimum.
Even something as fundamental as typing is not being actively taught.
To be fair, you can’t really teach that. We had classes at school which helped a little, but most of my skill came from Chatting on MSN with my school friends…
You can, 10 finger tying / touch typing at least. Someone can’t really figure that out for themselves without spending tons of time thinking on an efficient way to type.
… huh?
Non-universal experience, but I’m a zoomer (24) and I’m basically my family’s IT department, my apparent specialty being the wrangling of our unruly printer-scanner. My millennial older brother (who will be 28 this summer) never even thinks to ask google basic troubleshooting stuff when he has a problem. I think it’s less about generation and more about individual inclination to read instructions and look through settings menus, that sort of thing.
Absolutely. I’m a Z, worked help desk for a little while. It’s entirely more individual interest and inclination, generational divides don’t necessarily make everyone suddenly tech wizards. It usually just means they don’t struggle with their phone much and feel comfortable on the internet.
Yeah, also printers and scanners are fucking horrible devil machines no matter your generation. I’m about to be 29 and have worked in tech for years but I’d rather lie on the floor and cry than fix a printer
I’ve seen this with my Zoomer sister-in-law. She just recently learned how to use Microsoft - their home and school system was entirely Apple. She’s still not great at troubleshooting.
It’s happening a lot, and I see a lot of boomers using the “haw haw kids stupid” behind it, but it’s not them, it’s the parents fault, and it’s really sad honestly.
I learned typing in 6th grade, we had computer classes where we learned Microsoft and Mac, we learned how to do word and excel. A lot of that got me ready for office life.
Now parents and schools just expect that it’s easy, but as we’re seeing they may pick it up faster, but unless they have a need to learn it they won’t. I feel empathy for these kids who are going to be entering the workforce who were failed.
She’s still not great at troubleshooting.
I’m sure that’s at least partly because Microsoft products are proprietary and many of their inner workings are undocumented, which is a really bad combination if you’ve got an obscure problem you need to troubleshoot.
One of the many reasons I like Linux is that there’s nothing mysterious about it. Most of the system is reasonably documented, and all of its source code is publicly available. If something is broken, it can be fixed. Nor are there any special restricted uncopyable files; if I need to move the operating system to a different storage device, all I have to do is boot from a USB flash drive, partition the new storage, format the partitions, and copy all the files. (This used to not be the case before UEFI, but now the boot loader lives in a regular file on a plain old FAT32 file system, so it can be copied just like everything else. It can even be RAIDed!)
Generally those systems shouldn’t be too different. If you know one you should get the grasp of the other after using it for a bit. Maybe special settings and stuff can be a bit confusing…
Not surprising, and not entirely their fault. In my experience, software for operating a scanner or printer is almost invariably terrible. In the case of printers, this is intentional; printers are designed, first and foremost, to extract money from you.
For what it’s worth, the Document Scanner app from the Gnome project (the Debian package for it is named
simple-scan) is pretty good.However…
Every morning when he turned it on, he would be greeted by a pop-up from the storage service Dropbox, which he always accepted without reading.
This is not acceptable. If there is a message on your screen, you are expected to read it, so read it. You don’t have to re-read it if you see the same message again, but you do have to read it the first time you see it. No excuses. If you get messages that are annoying and unnecessary (note: that’s an “and”, not an “or”), then you’re using bad software; replace it with something better.
And yes, it’s normal to have to replace software with better software. Sturgeon’s law is in full force and effect here.
Younger people seem more willing to learn, and can quickly adapt to new skills
Absolutely. The older you get, the harder it is to learn new skills. That’s why children are sent to school: they’re at exactly the right age to learn all that stuff.
“Gen Z is very comfortable navigating software they’ve never used before, because they’ve been doing it their whole lives,” Bench said.
This is also true of Gen Y (Millennials), including myself, for the same reason.
And yes, it’s normal to have to replace software with better software. Sturgeon’s law is in full force and effect here.
How often do young people get to choose what software their work computers use?
They don’t, really, but they could mention the repeated, annoying message pop-up to someone who can make a difference and get it sorted out.
In what world would that work?
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