All the kids I’ve met are good at navigating UI, regardless of the platform. They know how to use websites well, but they don’t know how they work. This is a generalization, though.
I actually had a nightmare last night: my boss took me offline while I was making a script, and I think that’s even scarier for younger generations. This is coming from an older Gen Z.
I think centralization played a big role in this, at least for software. When messaging meant IRC, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Xfire, Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, or any number of PHP forums, you had to be able to pick up new software quickly and conceptualized the thing it’s doing separate from the application it’s accomplished with. When they all needed to be installed from different places in different ways you conceptualize the file system and what an executable is to an extent. When every game needs a bit of debugging to get working and a bit of savvy to know when certain computer parts are incompatible, you need a bit of knowledge to do the thing you want to do.
That said, fewer people did it. I was in highschool when Facebook took off, and the number of people who went from never online to perpetually online skyrocketed.
I teach computer science, I know it isn’t wholly generational, but I’ve watched the decline over the past decade for the basics. Highschool students were raised on Chromebooks and tablets/phones and a homogenous software scene. Concepts like files, installations, computer components, local storage, compression, settings, keyboard proficiency, toolbars, context menus - these are all barriers for incoming students.
The big difference, I think, is that way more people (nearly everyone) has some technical proficiency, whereas before it was considered a popular enough hobby but most people were completely inept, but most of students nowadays are not proficient with things past a cursory level. That said, the ones who are technically inclined are extremely technically inclined compared to my era, in larger numbers at least.
Higher minimum and maximum thresholds, but maybe lower on average.
Boomer here. As a lifelong software developer I’ve always known more about computers than most people in my age group generally, but I’ve always assumed younger people know more than I do because they’ve grown up with so much more tech. Maybe they tend to be more at user-level with it. I’ve never thought about that.
Among other things I am responsible for setting up our users with software, and the young folk are not really any more capable than average boomers with PCs. They don’t understand the file system, basic cables, or even the most basic Windows settings.
basic cables
Bless his heart but we had a new guy setting his dock station up a couple years ago now, he tried daisy chaining his monitors display input together to make a dual display set up. We were small talking about our PC setup a little bit before this interaction. This was my moment of “what happened?”
I get that sometimes people don’t know exactly how something works and they get confused, like ethernet splitters not allowing you to split the output of one cable to two PCs. Fair enough, people used to cable TV and phone lines might not expect that behaviour.
What could possibly make you think monitors can be daisy chained? Nothing else in that space works that way either… Though now you’ve got me wondering about USB-C monitors and what kind of unholy hell of client confusion we might be bringing to our doorstep with those.
Bold of you to claim most millennials understand how a computer works.
They don’t understand a lot, but when you say things like “browser to the D: drive and attach the document called ‘not porn.jpg’ to an email, and send it to me”, you will likely get that email.
You can’t say the same about other generations because they don’t interact with the technology in the same way, if at all.
