Gen Z/A are good at using tech, but they don’t really know anything about how it works. I work in IT support and it can honestly be a tossup sometimes if the person who doesnt know how to clear their cache is a boomer or not.
if a 3 year old can use a smart phone it’s not because that child is a genius it’s because the phones designer was.
Oh no, does this mean Gen X are going to be the wisened graybeards that holds arcane knowledge and seemly executes feats of magic when related to technology?
X and the millennials both had to deal with computers that were computers, it’s the people that grew up in the smart phone/tablet era that have no idea what to do in front of an actual computer…
My litmus test is: “Have you tried Linux?”
Even if they just used a live cd for curiosity, it means they know enough about computers to grasp the concepts that make them versatile, and were exploring around the net enough to read about it.
I used to teach math in the local school. The kids had a great interest in 3D printing because I had a few fun items in my classroom that I had 3D printed. I decided to spend a couple of weeks teaching a bit of CAD through having the kids spend it designing a personalized key chain to print.
It took me 3 days of class time to teach them how to use a mouse…They couldn’t grasp the idea that a touch screen and CAD don’t go together, you need that mouse to make it work. It quickly became apparent that things quickly became difficult for them if it doesn’t have a touch screen.
And while some classes are always a bit better than others, there was always a noticeable number of them that struggled with using a mouse.
To be fair: I switched to Linux 6 years ago. I’m using a tiling windowmanager, a lot of custom scripts, a different keyboardlayout with six instead of two layers (great for writing greek math, and other symbols) and an enthusiastic emacs user. I know the my System in and out. As a CS end math student, I know a fair bit about a Computer. But when A sit in front of an ordinary windows PC, I am a little bit upset. I stumble a lot of times over the thought: “You don’t have a keyboard shortcut for this! You have to use the Mouse, to switch Windows or you have to click yourself trough a menu to change this setting. There are no man pages you can search with regex” I hate it!
Some of the legacy keyboard shortcuts still survive to this day.
I live by Windows+R for the run dialogue.
If you populate %userprofile% with shortcuts named after keywords to your commonly used apps (eg fire.lnk for Firefox) then you can just slap Windows+R, type fire, Enter.
Win+X is also great. Especially since the Start Menu doesn’t allow for quick shutdown commands since Win 8.
Yup! That’s what I use for all restarts and shutdowns
It’s gonna be really funny when all us millenials die and the tech infrastructure evaporates.
What age do we think they’ll be set back to? Pre industrial? Bronze?
My prediction seems extreme but don’t forget that while books continue to exist, the average adult born after 2000 would rather die than read one.
It won’t evaporate, there are plenty of IT folks among youth.
It doesn’t make sense to characterize users by age brackets - it’s not that millenials are predominantly well-versed.
