As frustrating as this may be, it’s even more frustrating when I see exactly the same thing among PROFESSIONAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS!
directory structure and basic text editing are foreign concepts to them. If it’s not in their IDE, they really don’t understand it.
Also, 90% of them are hunt-and-peck two finger typists.
I’m honestly blown away by how many developers don’t even know the basics of git
Yeah, some companies are very slow to adapt. One company I worked for was still using SVN. It was a nightmare lol, and when they did finally migrate to git, some of my coworkers were completely lost.
But there’s also something to be said among developers I’ve worked with on hobbyist projects. Plenty of people who just shared files over and over, or just had it on Google drive or Dropbox
It has always been this way. Part of my “age-driven degradation” is that I can see the same patterns repeating themselves often at odds with the age of the people in question. The average competency age always shift younger as any skilled profession does. I however am constantly having to show people that should have a newer skillset than me basic problem solving skills and somehow we can both read the same documentation and they not see the solution.
There was a post here a while back about how younger generations often don’t understand concepts like file system structures because concepts like that (which are still relevant in a lot of contexts) have been largely stripped out of modern user interfaces. If your primary computing device is a cell phone, a task like “make a nested directory structure and move this file to the deepest part of it” is a foreign concept.
I guess my point here is that I agree with yours about this being cyclical in a sense. I feel crippled on a cell phone, but I’m also in my comfort zone on a Linux terminal. Using web apps like MS Teams is often difficult for me because their UIs are not things I’m comfortable with. I don’t tend to like default layouts and also tend to use advanced features which are usually hidden away behind a few menus. Tools built to meet my needs specifically would largely not meet the needs of most users. A Level 1 user would probably have a better experience there than a Level 3 like me. It’s hard (maybe impossible) to do UX design that satisfies everyone.
The article quotes extensively from the study about this and gives examples regarding what kinds of tasks qualify for those levels.
I have a large chunk of my colleagues who have little to no experience using CLI tools, and totally have found the last part to be true. In fairness, documentation is all over the place quality wise (I generally find Microsoft’s useful but I’ve totally had issues in the past with undocumented or vaguely documented features/dependencies). People will google their issues, and increasingly I’ve found it doesnt point you at the documentation directly, instead stack overflow or medium pages.
I feel like there’s definitely some conceptual… Stuff for lack of a better word that’s an issue, I’ve seen a number of people focus on the execution instead of trying to understand what’s the issue and define it logically, when pressed they struggle to explain.
I started noticing this 10 years ago. To me, this isn’t some new phenomenon. However, it feels even worse now than it did back then.
The number one thing that makes me go JackieChanWTF.jpg is when people don’t even know how to navigate through directories.
It’s like a vicious cycle:
- People are tech illiterate
- Tech companies design things for the lowest common denominator.
- People don’t need to learn anything new and become even more tech illiterate
AI is going to make it so much worse. You’ll soon be in the top 5% if you have a keyboard app installed on your phone.
You’ll soon be in the top 5% if you have a keyboard app installed on your phone
…Those won’t go away, right? People aren’t going to start talking on the bus for their phones to auto-type the text messages they want to send through chat, right…?
You mean the twenty to thirty somethings that have come along. They have one folder with all their stuff in it and sometimes spend quite some time just looking for a file because they are unwilling to organize it or even sort it by file type.
I’m a 20-30 something (26) and, generally, I think it’s younger people who are starting to struggle with this (<21 maybe?). All of my classmates seemed to be OK at handling files. From what I saw in highschool and college it was more to do with computer hygiene than incapability.
I am 22 and yeah I have some friends and some younger relatives that don’t know how to do that. It’s because they grew up with smartphones. I think we were one of the last generations (at least where I live) that smartphones only became prevalent after we were teenagers so using a computer for most things was still something we learned.
I post this a lot but it’s true. Younger people definitely have problems with this.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
My aunt is a teacher and I remember when she started talking about how her school was getting Chromebooks I thought that wasn’t going to be good for learning how to use “real” computers. Same with phones and tablets. Everything is too abstracted away from the user so they never have to know what a directory is.
I believe the most computer proficient people were born between 1975 and 1995. Before that and they were too old to figure it out without a lot of effort. After that they grew up with touch screens and it’s all just magic. Right in the middle we were able to grow along with advancements in computing.
I was teaching a class with mostly students born after 2000. One of them had never used a computer with a keyboard and mouse. Never used folders and files. Kind of blew me away.
I would put it up to 1999.
But the returns of 1995-1999 are very small indeed.
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Btw the “>” at the beginning starts a quote.
To prevent that put a \ before something like a * or . Like this: \\>. Hope I could help you :)
we had typing class in elementary school circa 1995. that’s how I got to typing 150 wpm. almost useless now because of OCR, but still… sad to see computer skills lost these days.
I see ppl typing with 3 fingers and you have 10 of them
I learned to type from instant messaging: ICQ and AIM. I know I did Mavis Beacon too but that was the practice that solidified it.
Yeah they tried to teach me to touch type in middle school, but it was MSN messenger and using an internet-connected computer as a tool for socializing that got me to actually practice typing.
A lot of those typing things start you off with “here’s the home row. Now type several strings of meaningless text. Okay, now we’ll let you type g and h in addition.” and then add one or two letters at a time to slowly build up typing skills. I’m the third fastest touch typist I know and I got that way hitting on coeds.
Born in that time frame. Windows XP was just finicky as hell, no matter how much praise it got later. If you wanted your Internet to work you just had to flush the DNS cache or just disable and re-enable the interface occasionally. Hell, same for my mouse - occasionally had to use the keyboard to disable and re-enable the mouse drivers.
Now shit just works. Only reason I’ve had to fiddle around so much in recent years is that I used Gentoo for a couple of years. Though by the time I was bored with it, it worked better than Windows XP ever did.
I was born in 98, my brother was born in 2000. The level of computer literacy just between the two of us is astounding. While a lot of my aptitude with computers stems from a personal interest, even growing up many of my peers were relatively tech savvy – as far as laypeople go. But people in my brother’s grade in school, people just two years younger than me, i noticed a meaningful difference in how they interact with computers vs how people I spent the formative years of my life around do. It’s insane.
I think for those of us that were born 2000 and later the amount of tech experience we have probably has a strong correlation with who was into PC gaming/modding as kids.
Hopefully my rough estimate of 1995 was not too exclusive. I’m sure there’s not a hard cutoff, and the same goes for pre-1975. But being right in the middle of that range, it was pretty cool to use the full spectrum of PCs, and all the game consoles, and see the internet bloom and explode and decay.
I saw middle school students preferring to type a report on a fucking touchscreen rather than a pc with keyboard “because in this way is faster”. Then for some reason they share a fucking screenshot of the document instead of just attaching that to the email
I have seen worse. Normie’s around me use their phone to capture photo of the laptop screen and send the low pixel photo with less than half part in it including the actual document.
When I ask for a screenshot I get a Word document with a picture in it about 10% of the time.
Really?
The PDF contains the information. The screenshot contains a picture of the information.
It’s a tree vs. a picture of a tree. A recording vs. a live performance.
I hate them so much when they do that. “I don’t know how to export pdf” - yet you know how to make screenshots which is a “secret” key combination that’s written NOWHERE on the ui.
How it’s possible that they think that’s ok to send four separate emails (separate emails because they click on the screenshot preview on the bottom of the screen and share that) with a screenshot of each page instead of just the file? How they don’t think “wait, is it possible that there isn’t a better way?”
Lot’s of software is just shit/hard to use
In my experience, it’s often users who just want everything spoon fed to them like infants that think it’s hard.
That is the reason for degrading proficiency. Not, that the tools are bad but the attitude, they have to be easy to use.
That almost everything “just works” is nice as a consumer but it won’t make you troubleshoot and you will not gain technical expertise by using such devices.
