How about instead of ragging on kids these days we see that there is a very serious problem brewing, regarding how we’re expecting to maintain this high tech society we’ve built going forwards. I would posit that it was the planning done by generations prior that has left society in a state where youth are not gaining skills that will be needed simply to maintain the status quo, let alone improve anything.
When did Millennials get Boomer Brain anyway? If you took Boomers at their word thirty years ago, nobody under the age of 70 would know how to fix a car today .
Now these “Young people don’t understand technology” memes are spreading like a nasty STD. Just endless posts of the most heinous ignorant horseshit.
Meanwhile, I’ve got kids flying homemade drones down at the park. I’ve got to fight through gaggles of teenagers on the way to robotics competitions and hack a thons when I’m downtown for lunch. My local Microprose is stuffed full of people under 30. All the active Linux geeks are practically in diapers, while millennials cling to Microsoft and fucking Apple.
But nobody is using the shitty VR that Zuckerberg is shilling, so Zoomers can’t code? FFS, it’s GenX that’s forcing AI down all our throats.
Don’t give me that “young people can’t use computers” shit.
I mean, most people don’t know how to fix a car these days other than boomers. Sure there are the few which made it their career to do so but I would the majority of millenials and boomers would not know how to fix their car. Let alone a newer car with all the electronics. No one knows how to fix that shit it’s built to be disposable now.
Boomers don’t know how to fix cars these days either. In Ye Olde days, cars were designed to be fixed. These days they are riddled with unnecessary electronics, and those electronics are riddled with just enough DRM that reverse engineering anything in your car is a crime.
A Boomer can fix a “classic” car, but nobody other than a mechanic can fix a modern car because of all the DRM-riddled electronics.
I work with college students all day. They are computer illiterate. It’s like working with the old. Generalizations are sometimes kinda true.
Cool, I ALSO work with college age kids all day and they navigate/troubleshoot our software fine.
I guess our two completely useless anecdotes will now cancel out into irrelevance.
I work with new hires all day and they’re doing great.
I have multiple people at my job who claim to be tech savvy but don’t know how to type on a keyboard and constantly have tech issues when the rest of us don’t. …they’re older than the rest of us though. They just lied on their resumes so it’s okay.
The youngest workers at my org have no issues.
claim to be tech savvy but don’t know how to type on a keyboard
Okay, sure dude. And I know people who claim to be race car drivers but they don’t know how to turn the steering wheel.
I’m not sure why you find it controversial to observe that older people, who grew up without computers, and younger people, who’re also not using computers, are two groups that tend to suck at using computers. This is not surprising.
This kind of generalization matters. For instance, when designing education policy.
why you find it controversial
It’s not controversial, just inaccurate.
Again, like doggedly insisting nobody born after 1980 knows how to fix a car.
You’ve bought into a dogmatic piece of online propaganda. You’re not living in the real world.
Perhaps you’re right and the widespread use of iPads and smartphones isn’t interfering with computer literacy. My impression as someone who works in education is that it’s interfering with computer literacy.
I also want to point out that my generation, millennials, were indeed much less inclined to fix their own cars (understandably).
widespread use of iPads and smartphones isn’t interfering with computer literacy.
I see that hypothesis, but it glazes over the more glaring transition - widespread adoption of cheap electronics, generally speaking.
The iPhone premiered in 2007 at something like $300-500. Most people couldn’t afford that. It was another five years before you started seeing rudimentary budget brand smartphones.
We’ve got far more tech literates today thanks to the abundance of cheap hardware. The expectation for tech literacy has risen with this proliferation.
my generation, millennials, were indeed much less inclined to fix their own cars
And that’s why auto shops no longer exist or are run exclusively by geriatrics? :-p
Quite a few millennial age auto mechanics exist today. Quite a few GenZ/Alpha aspiring mechanics exist.
You just don’t find them in the upper class suburbs or state university campuses.
They really are terrible. They grew up in the age of apps and don’t know how to actually use or maintain tech.
What blew my mind was when I had a teacher telling me about their experiences with Zoomers and indicated that they seem to have a near universal inability to grasp the concept of a file structure. They just apparently can’t wrap their heads around the fact that when you save something that it has to actually go somewhere on their device.
To be fair, it’s not an obvious concept.
If I pick up a notebook and scribble something in it, the next time I pick up the notebook whatever I scribbled will still be there. It’s very unusual that when a computer shuts down the RAM is cleared. Making it worse for intuitive understanding, a lot of apps are constantly saving and restoring state without any user intervention, making it seem like a notebook that just keeps state whenever you use it.
The implementation detail that RAM is very fast but doesn’t store state but flash is slightly slower but does store state is something that you have to learn. To actually understand why RAM doesn’t store state you need to understand how it’s built, and how capacitors can store charge for a short time but need to be refreshed. Why flash / electrically erasable memory works the way it does is yet another university-level class.
Add to that that the concept of a “file” and a “filesystem” are not obvious at all. The concept got its name from actual paper documents being strung together with wire. The name was used in early computer work as a skeuomorph to make understanding computer storage easier. This data on disk is grouped together in a “file” just like you’d group together pages of text into a “file”.
If we were designing things from scratch today, the concept of a “file” or “filesystem” would probably not exist. We’d probably just go with a key-value store on top of some kind of B-tree stuff directly on the flash memory.
The only reason older people learned these things is that they dealt with computers that were not as user friendly. If someone is young enough, they probably experienced turning off a computer and losing all their stuff because they hadn’t saved. And, saving was cumbersome for a long time. You had to actually decide what filename to use and where on the filesystem to store something. One of the biggest pushes in computing in the last couple of decades is to make all that easier, to make it so that files are saved automatically and you never have to see a file browser or a filename. Sure, the underlying system is still all files, directories, etc. But, that’s just not something that people encounter anymore.
I mean… entirely seriously:
A large percentage of them are also functionally illiterate.
https://www.newsweek.com/gen-z-parents-children-reading-literacy-crisis-2081875
The % of kids that ‘read for fun everyday’ has dropped from 35% in 1984 to 14% in 2023.
Functionally illiterate reading levels of the whole US population?
19% in 2017.
28% in 2023.
Again, for emphasis: 28% of all Americans are functionally illiterate.
They can’t read beyond a ‘Hop on Pop’ level.
Nearly a third of the US population is at a 2nd grade reading level.
And that near 10% increase in 6 years… thats 6 years of Zoomers graduating high school and becoming adults.
… Only gonna be worse for Gen Alpha.
Do you have to read for fun for it to be functional literacy?
It seems to me that kids are perfectly literate. They start texting, instant messaging, commenting on things, etc. from a very young age. That’s all reading and writing, which is all literacy. Do you have a source for this 2nd grade reading level? Because, although the slang used by the youngs is annoying, it certainly doesn’t seem 2nd grade level to me.
Read the link I provided.
That is the source, that is why I provided it.
Kind of amazing that I have to tell you that in a discussion about literacy.
The ‘reads for fun’ and ‘lowest category of reading/writing ability’ are seperate statistics, they are not dependent on or derived from each other, they were measured separately… they are just the two the article focused on, out of a larger report, which is linked in the article, which you can read in its entirety if you want to.
I am astounded that, in a discussion about literacy, I provided the source, and you somehow did not read it or investigate it at all, and am now asking me for the source.
Fact-checking and basic research skills are part of intermediate literacy levels, which you apparently do not possess, so I suppose that is why everything seems fine to you.
