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Skipped gen z, but I know my gen z folk are barely a step above alpha but and below millennials
At least us earlier gen z grew up without smartphones being the thing. If I wanted anything done I had to use a computer. Smartphones only became as prevalent as they are now when I was about 12-14 (at least that’s what it feels like).
Late GenX (really, between X and Millennial): we expected everyone after us to understand tech. Nope.
I love that Gen Alpha won’t even get this reference because the movie came out 30 years before they were born.
Not part of Gen A (I think this whole generation thing is a bit pointless anyway), but what is the movie?
Ow, my age
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (also had a decent tie-in point and click adventure game in 1989)
Fate of Atlantis slapped when I was a kid. Probably worth a ScummVM revisit.
The entire trilogy are some of the greatest movies ever made.
Do not speak of the others. For they are shit and probably a money laundering scheme.
Is it? Lost Ark and Crusade are great, but Temple of Doom? I remember not liking it that much.
It launched the career of Quan Kế Huy, and gave young me my first ripping someone’s heart out scene.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Sean Connery being seen is the giveaway. Pretty sure that was the only one he was in.
An absolute classic.
The original star trek released 40 years before I was born yet I still absolutely love it :3
Shame they never invented anything to store such treasures on for later generations. Nobody but people alive in the 80s will ever see this classic gem.
Charlie Chaplain was dead long before I was born but yet I’ve still seen The Great Dictator.
How is Chaplin related to Trump?
I said the great dictator. Trump is far from great. :P
…yet! 😄 I bet it’s not that far away until he describes himself as so
Yeah because we had limited entertainment options growing up.
If we had endless short videos and memes on glass rectangle, we wouldn’t know about Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton either.
Bullshit. I only know about how awesome Buster Keaton is because of memes. Memes are how I even came to know about the Great Dictator. Before that, I thought Chaplain was only in silent movies.
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.
Gen Z/A are good at using tech, but they don’t really know anything about how it works.
Millennials don’t, either. A tiny fraction of a fraction for technical literacy 20 years ago and now they think they’re top shit because they can write simple CMD commands.
All this jerking one another off is crazy. I work in the industry and I’m surrounded by people my own age who don’t know what Active Directory is much less Linux.
Same as it ever was. The only thing that has changed is accessibility. All these discussions seem to miss that. Most people have not, do not, and will not ever care.
People don’t need to know how to write a program from scratch to have useful tech knowledge. Knowing basic keyboard shortcuts puts a person above the vast majority of other people in terms of tech literacy.
For real. I’ve taught people copy paste shortcuts and they act like I’m an alien.
I guess I’m one of the fractions of a fraction. I remember back in the late 90s when that catastrophe of an OS called Windows ME was plaguing our society. Having to manually change registry keys just to make the damn thing recognize a sound card.
It makes me sound old but, kids these days have no idea the kind of hell we went through. If/when I have kids I’m going to start them off with DOS 6 and gradually move them up to current OSes. They need to know the pain we went through.
In sorry but this really sounds like boomer-esque mindset
Why should the younger generation have to go through the struggles of the older generation when those struggles are not relevant today
I’m gen z myself and I’ve changed Windows registry settings to disable stuff like caudiolimiter and change a few other things but I only learned to do that out of necessity
Things should not be forced on people unless they want to learn them, people will only learn things they are interested in
Force them to learn something and they won’t bother actually learning it because they aren’t interested and it won’t stick
This mindset is the same thing as passing down generational trauma to a a younger generation
t makes me sound old but, kids these days have no idea the kind of hell we went through
I mean, whose motherboard still needs a sound card in this day and age? But then I could tell you about fiddling with the settings of an old dot matrix printer. I don’t think that qualifies me to set up a Kubernetes cluster or administer a data lake.
The “you kids today” rants seen to miss how hyper specialized computer hardware and software has become. No, Gen A is going to magically intuit an Azure DevOps Pipeline from first principles. Setting that up feels like I’m working through a Master’s Thesis on arcane file types. People need to stop pretending that knowing a bit of Regex from middle school entitled them to talk shit to a guy ten years their junior struggling with a customized .yaml file.
It’s honestly a toss up whether sysadmins know what the fuck they’re doing. I’m working on a deal now that’s hampered by the fact that a Linux sysadmin for a huge finserv company doesn’t know how to administer a Linux system.
This is why the humanities are important: So you learn how to think about a problem and not just rely on someone writing down every goddamn keystroke for you.
humanities?
You spelt Math incorrectly.
humanities?
You spelt Math incorrectly.
People who think like you make my job a lot harder.
How are you supposed to understand instructions when you read at a third grade level?
How are you supposed to do research to understand an error message if you’ve never looked anything up before?
Mathematicians can usually read.
Except we’re not dealing with mathematicians. We’re dealing with sysadmins who must read well and quickly to do their job effectively.
They need to comprehend complex technical documents. They need to break things down into principles so they can apply them in novel contexts. They need to understand what the words “could not connect on port 4242” means.
Except they don’t. They get me on the phone, throw their hands up in frustration, and have me push the buttons for them.
Because they didn’t pay attention in their humanities classes.
My confusion is that a degree in humanities doesn’t guarantee that someone can create clear instructions or follow then. (Nor does a degree in mathematics but at least there is some logic involved)
Being able to express yourself clearly and also read and interpret text is a big part of the humanities. Far too many folks in tech think these are worthless skills to develop and become a pain in my ass.
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.
Gen Z are good at using tech, gen A are still learning how to use tech
You in NYC area? I’m hiring.
I’m 2-3 hours from NYC depending on traffic, so… kinda? But I’m pretty happy with my job honestly. I support a niche cloud product that my organization is almost entirely dependent on. Its a union position with good pay and benefits. It can be stressful sometimes and my boss can sometimes be… overbearing, but on the whole it feels like I’ve found a unicorn.
Out of curiosity though, do you have a job posting you’re willing to share? I like to keep my ear to the ground.
NYC = new york city
This is a translation provided for free by me because this user has defualted to american defaultism
To the person I’m replying to, THIS IS THE INTERNET, NOT america
NYC is one of a number of world cities known by acronyms or nicknames:
- Rio For Rio de Janeiro
- HK For Hong Kong
- TJ For Tijuana
- KL For Kuala Lumpur
- TO For Toronto
- Joburg For Johannesburg
There’s even a whole country that goes by its initials: UK.
So, stop thinking this is some American thing, it’s just a way that people shorten the names of common cities that have a few too many syllables to be convenient.
My dude, he’s from America lol
If he’s from NYC, he knows what NYC means. If he’s not from there, it doesn’t matter anyway
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?
“Going to be …”?
I feel like I’ve been that graybeard for at least 10 lifetimes. No beginning. No end. Only servitude.
Only the 10% or so that paid attention to “nerd stuff”.
All the rest are, at best boomer level, at worst smug about being at boomer level.
Going to be? We already are, along with older millenials.
More like Millennials. Gen X may have been around for the duration of the silicon boom, but it was largely niche “nerd shit” when they were kids, and only became widely accessible/acceptable to them with the same changes that have left Gen A lacking basic computer skills. Millennials, though, grew up through the full development of PCs and the Internet and had to learn how to navigate them at their early stages, as well as keep up with the rapid changes. It of course still isn’t universal knowledge there, either, but anyone that used a computer regularly through the early 2000s is going to be levels above most people getting into it now.
Tsss, calling me an old nerd on lemmy. You’re a nerd! You’re on Lemmy!
But yes, i wildly, loudly concur woth most of this thread: my kids can’t be bothered with HOW something works. It just has to work. No interest at all in tcp, udp, whats a bit, byte why is everything in multiples of 8: that’s all nerd shit. And, indeed: my shit. Dad! You’re the nerd: fix this!
Gen X is gonna be the tech equivalent of my grandma who knows everything there is to know about sewing and cooking
Yes.
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.
So I’ve been in the DOS/Windows world for at least 30 years. I have never used Linux, but I can configure a Cisco server or switch and stack a rack. Yet I fail your test?
You were working with computers since before smartphones existed, that’s a pass of course.
Look up the term “outlier.”
Go back to Reddit asshole.
You first. You’re far more hostile, so that’s where you belong.
Now I know I am relatively young (just making the cut off to be considered a Millennial). But my parents were very against allowing kids access to the internet but not ani-technology. As a result I was using a 1996 Toshiba satellite when I was 4yr for Scholastic Reader Rabbit preschool games, but didn’t have regular internet access until I was 15. So I am familiar with the eccentricities of Windows 95, this did help me at work once when we had to use some legacy software from the 90’s that would only run on Win 98. But anyway I only recently have started using Linux in Docker containers for testing environments.
Based on how often I have to explain very obvious error messages to ostensibly qualified system admins: Yes.
(Though I insist I’m the oldest millennial and not Gen x)
Xennial!
True, late stage millenials are the same kind as Gen Y/A.
They get handed locked down chromebooks or iPads at schools. They’re only really exposed to a walled garden, and they also aren’t explicitly taught a lot of concepts that need to be taught (almost all MS/HS I’ve met have passwords which are just sliding their finger across the keyboard - it’s bewildering. I teach “correct horse battery staple.”)
You can’t learn much if you can’t install your own software. Learning is breaking things though, and most schools seem allergic to hiring competent tech teams/setting up sandboxed computer labs. Security concerns are huge - eg, if your kids school uses PowerSchool they probably got hacked this year - but when your teaching physics and can’t install MathLab or whatever…
There are still the little geeks that figure out how to get video game emulators going - Pokémon Emerald is probably more popular among middle schoolers today than it was in 2005.
92 here. My boys 10 and 8 have their own machines, they are told to Google it first before I come help.
“I’m not raising end users…get your shit together kid.”
Love,
SysEngineer Dad.
You’re 92 and your kids are 10 and 8? Damn, and I thought I started late.
Old dusty balls still knockin around by my knees but you better be god damn sure I’m fuckin.
“I’m not raising end users…get your shit together kid.”
Quite an important thing. That’s also important if you help your parents/grandparents with something. Guide the through it so you hopefully dont have to help them next time.
I’m starting to get to a point in my career where I have to turn down helping my family.
I strongly encourage the elderly to “just get an iPad” if they have an iPhone and just drop x86 devices all together. It’s way less headache.
Luckily my mom’s still young and proficient enough with computers and phones.
Not really. It takes a lot of experience to sort the legit from the not legit.
“Having problem X? Download the system32.dll fix here!”
That’s true. What I meant was like basic stuff like navigating through the settings of your phone or so.
Even then. My mother followed a YouTube video on this including the part where the helpful Indian guy had her download an app and set up a very sketchy VPN.
Yea…
you should encourage them to use something that’s not google. Startpage, SearxNG, DuckDuckGo are good alternatives.
Ive heard about qwant and ecosia too
They are good options too.
I agree but bing.com is really what they are using because it has the parental controls that coincide with their signed in account.
When they get older and are more “free” on the Internet I’ll migrate them to Linux, I’ll let them choose the DE and then they can do what ever they want.
My kid spends a lot of time helping their friends do basic computer stuff and we have the same rants about users.
I’m so proud.
Raising them right. I have a 28 year old college grad sys admin that I work with…I had to show him where windows updates were.
He uses windows search to open settings…bachelors degree in IT.
I spent so much time troubleshooting together with my dad. I found it way more educational than just googling it and owe my current level of knowledge to it. When I was living with my parents part of me was sad when I got to the point where I was able to solve any issues I had faster alone than with my dad’s help. No judgement just thought you might want to know. I totally get not wanting to cross over your work life and your family life though.
I wouldn’t be in the mood to start raising a child st 84
I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought of a 92 YO on Lemmy.
Most parents done feel like raising theirs either. They just stuff them on a tablet and do their thing.
fellow tech dad here. how did you strike the balance between “look up shit online” and “hiding the terrors and lies of the internet from my kids”?
Mine’s still little, but knowing sooner is better.
I have the Microsoft safety shit on, and I made every site they can go to a web app. My router blocks nsfw/nonkid traffic. My phone gets notifications when they do anything at all.
And I have extensions blocking all nsfw sites just in case. And I’ve nuked the entry for any web browser on their start menu and task bars. Can’t even scroll to find it. If you open it, it requires my admin PW, which is 14char #$@-123-ABC so good luck turds.
Steam is locked down in kid mode - also they just play Roblox or cool math games anyways lol. Steam has browser disabled.
Only things they have access to is Bing.com with their signed in kid account. And coolmathgames.com.
It took about a week on and off to setup and I just did the two laptops in tandem. Windows 11.
The family thing can be a pain, Microsoft has a lot of half baked ideas https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/how-to-set-up-parental-controls-on-a-windows-11-pc
My parents and school administrators’ attempts at blocking unsanctioned activities is what taught me computer literacy
There was nothing quite as satisfying as getting caught opening addictinggames on a web browser through a proxy when the teacher was convinced they had blocked it completely.
I remember when proxies were easy to find and you could get to the most ridiculous stuff. We had college intern system admins for IT at our HS so it was easier to get by alot of things most of the time.
My son’s group in middle school hosted their own proxy overseas. They then pirated a whole bunch of educational videos that the teachers liked to use and made nice clean interface. The games pages had no direct links on the educational videos screens. They had to type in the the page directly in the URL.
So the teachers all loved the site and gave the official “approved for all students” bypass on the districts Chromebooks. The kids had uninterrupted access to all their games.
The kids were smart enough to keep the location of the games to students with a B or higher GPA. Most of the teachers turned a blind eye to them playing games when they did get caught. The games pages also had a home button that sent the students screens to a random educational video. I was truly impressed with their clever approach.
The IT department either never caught on or enjoyed the games themselves because its still up and they are all in highschool now.
A friend and I became unofficial TAs for a high school computers class when we defeated the remote-viewing software and any web blockers, we knew more than the poor teacher and it was easier to let us do what we wanted if we promised to help other kids do the actual lessons.
That network had terrible security. So many important files stored as unprotected text in the intranet.
Yeah, I found Microsoft family to be a pretty half-assed experience. The thing that seems to work best is the screen time management. I had planned to try and set up YouTube access via allow listing channels in a home Linux server, but it turns out that YouTube doesn’t identify their videos by channel in the URL and I’d have to allowlist every single video for a given channel.
You could theoretically host a Piped API instance, and use it to get channel info. I guess you are already using your own SSL certificates, judging by what you are trying to accomplish.
This is the Piped org btw: https://github.com/TeamPiped
It is a YouTube frontend/proxy.
Edit: I made a post on Piped’s community, so we can discuss it there: https://discuss.online/post/16448014
I’m not a sysadmin, I’m a backend dev with enough network knowledge to be dangerous. I’ve set up exactly one super basic website, so I know some of this stuff, I just have to (and can and will) stumblefuck my way through it. This seems like a really great idea, I had no idea Piped could potentially handle that. I’m going to keep an eye on this, thanks!
I’m planning on building a server that rips channels videos and they can have the app for that.
We are a no YouTube without our explicit permission on the video kinda household. Too much actual brainrot. And as much as I don’t like Television, at least my kids are mentally protected from bullshit with the Children’s Television Protection Act.
I’m guessing my kids are younger than yours, but I’ve taken the approach of simply keeping a loose eye and ear on what they’re watching to make sure they’re not on too bad of content and of course limiting how much time they can spend on brainrot content. They spend most of their TV time watching PBS kids or some ripped DVDs on my Jellyfin
That’s awesome. I would’ve hated dealing with this as a kid. Will definitely steal this when I have kids.
I would’ve hated dealing with this as a kid.
same, except i would love to bypass this as an adult
You turn your 8 year old loose on google, explicitly and intentionally unsupervised, and hold it up as an example of good parenting.
You assumed absolutely wayyy to much based on a single sentence and virtue signal your superiority based on your own fantasy of what’s going on with inconclusive data. Move along.
Gen Z: Where is my file and what is a directory?
I would say that this is not just to blame on the Generation, but to large extents of how stuff is designed these days. It has been becoming harder and harder to control where stuff is stored, and to find it outside of the intended app, and this, IMHO is by design, to wrestle the control of your own device from your hands. Just look at how aggressively Microsoft is pushing one drive in its office suite, they want control over those documents so they can lock you into a subscription model.
They’re about as well prepared to deal with computers as people who had a teddy bear when they were children are prepared to be a veterinary.
I introduced my kids to video games (the “good ones” 😁) and they have always had a PC+old consoles, so now they know at least the basics, and mods gta5 and minecraft, etc and are generally at ease with things.
Still prefers mobile apps to photoshop though 😔 you can only bring the horse to the water, you can’t make him drink.
I’m a xennial. I was so excited by computers, and later the internet. It completely absorbed me to the point that I would get up an hour early for school so I could mess around with the computer before catching the bus. A beautiful (ugly) Compaq with a 200n megabyte hard drive, 2 megs of ram. 86 architecture. I was about 11 years old.
I played a few games, but I spent much more time messing around the system in DOS. Making batch files, then working with qbasic. Of course I played Nintendo games as well. After we got internet I used a 28.8kbps modem to upload my own webpage via FTP.
I remember thinking, even as a child/teenager, that the kids of the future were going to be incredible, being born into the digital internet age. I was so wrong. My classmates struggled with computers because they weren’t amazed by them like I was. Touch typing class had nothing on ICQ.
I think there are a lot of xennials on Lemmy. It was crushing to see that the generations before and after us can’t comprehend the basics of computers. Then smartphones happened and everything got so much worse.
Gen Z here and I can agree. I used to mess with computers, especially when I got older, so I could play games. Later I kind of slipped into the open source and tech bubbles. If there is a problem that annoys me enough to overcome my laziness I will fix it. I have no problems with writing scripts so I don’t have to do stuff manually each time. And then I look left and right and realise that most people in my age dont even have a computer and only use iPads and such stuff. They have zero fucking clue what happens behind the scenes.
I think the real cross-generational parallel here going back is Boomers and cars. Their parents before WWII had the equivalent of bare bones stuff, but Boomer era cars were more complicated, but also meant status and were a hobby.
Looking forward, the Gen Z and A kids are just utterly abused by the social media that we xennials/millennial told them was a safe new requirement for life. It wasn’t. It was our leaded gasoline and secondhand smoke. However, their opportunity environment is that they don’t behave like we did as consumers. Their expectation that all media should be free and immediately available is where the world needs to bend to them. As Boomers loose their grip on the economy, open source everything is going to be the world they created for us.
We don’t need to expect everyone to learn like we did because it was a unique moment in time where tinkering got us somewhere in that specific area. But can you fix a carburetor float? No, and Boomers see your lack of awareness there the same as you see deficiencies in others.
I can fix a carb float and also use a computer
Can also fix a carb and write code too. Skills are useful!
Specialization is for insects
People who can do both certainly exist, but they exist within a sliver of purple in the Venn diagram.
You were a nerd interested in computers. They still exist in younger generations. Just became way less common because the necessity disappeared for most people. Most prefer computers (or any device or tech really) that “just works”. Some are interested in how things work. 90% of Lemmy is the latter, from all generations but many in their 30s and 40s because that was peak computer learning age: rather cheap hardware, software still needed to be hacked together somewhat, clear rewards when doing so (for example messing with game settings IRQ etc to get it running).
I’ve met people born late 90s early 00s doing PhD in computer science who barely seem to know basic general computer stuff… All they know is that one extremely niche thingy they’re into. They never needed to learn general basics that much, stuff just worked out of the box.
Yeah it’s wild. I don’t think it’s good but I’m not doing a great job teaching. One of my gen Z nephews expressed an interest so I gave him my old PC, took it apart with him and put it back together, explained everything.
He rearranged his room and told me when he hooked everything back up his games were super slow. Every time I touch his PC I clean it up from scam shit spyware etc. I pretend not to notice where all this stuff came from.
But this time was different. He’d plugged his monitor into the motherboard instead of the graphics card. He recently redid his room again and got it right this time! Small victories.
Every time I touch his PC I clean it up from scam shit spyware etc. I pretend not to notice where all this stuff came from.
Let they that never borked the family PC with “boobs.exe” from limewire castle the first stone!
Carving an entire castle from one stone would be incredibly impressive engineering. Or a very small castle.
Fucking Autoassume…I’m leaving it because it’s fucking funny 🤣
At first I had assumed you’d look at my profile and were making a topical joke. I’m a Stone Mason, and I work in Conservation. So, this is incredibly fun/funny and I’m absolutely here for it!
I completely blame schools adopting ChromeOS for this generational failure.
At least give them a functional OS god damn. People out here not knowing you can do more than access like 5 websites and apps with literally anything that has a microprocessor in it.
My municipality also bought all students Chromebooks. Then they proceeded to block Google Drive on all government and school WiFi, because for some reason they thought OneDrive was the only safe and therefore allowed cloud storage. Fucking hilarious.
I can’t find the photo I took, which is annoying, but I was working in schools a couple of years back and in the IT room there was a huge display on the wall with the title “Amazing Things We Can Do With Computers” and the list was, literally, this:
- YouTube
- TikTok
- Amazon
- Spotify
- FaceTime
FWIW, Chromebooks can be used as more than just web browser devices. The real problem is who is setting - and teaching - the curriculum. Some other schools had amazing curriculums but they usually had one, single, solitary, clued-up teacher.
As if the average schoolteacher knows how to properly teach how to use a full OS to kids. Many millennials lack basic IT skills as well.
My school actually had Linux mint set up for everything. It even resetted every time you boot it, so you couldn’t do any real damage. The only reason we had this was, because one of our CS teachers was very good and actually cared. He is also the one who managed the entire IT infrastructure.
Thats awesome. Was Mrchromebox your teacher?
I dont know who that is, so i guess no.
Mrchromebox made a replacement firmware for chromebooks so you can install other operating systems on them.
Nice! Hadn’t heard of this project. The old chromebooks are easy to find in e-waste lots, mostly from schools. Hardware’s not ancient. Presumably optimized for web services. Just a lot of broken screens and keyboards.
But if you stack ‘em like server blades in a beowulf cluster you might have a decently power-efficient and scalable host for microservices, web apps, lemmy instances, whatever. With UPS for each node lol. Basically free.
I dunno, could be a fun class project for the kids to learn on with a minimal budget?
https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/getting-started.html
I like your ideas, even though I don’t understand it all. :)
Tell the kids I am counting on them!!!
Intersting. He devinetively wasnt him. We also didnt had chromebooks. We had thinkpads and normal office PCs (all with the same configuration)
This. The fundamentals of things computers do is so heavily abstracted now days, all kids know how to do is work with those abstractions.
I had a meeting with a young person who had to have the concept of a directory structure explained to them for a half hour…and they’re in charge of designing a file browser. 🤦♂️
I don’t think the exercise was even successful.
how do people with no skills even get hired? I cant even get interview for job I fit perfectly for every thing they are asking for.
I’m pretty sure the people who do interviews are not the ones who have to train them. Also, if you use chat gpt for writing your cover letter, structuring your CV, running interview prep etc etc. You don’t even really need to be literate to come across as pretty put together.
Interviewers look for excess confidence, not skill
i guess i’m not getting hired for any work ever then… i just want to work and do my work well, not play their sick mindgames or pretend to be someone i’m not. I dont have any motivation to force myself to do work on fields outside my education either anymore.
Yeah, smartphones don’t teach kids file structure at all.
Wasn’t Indy knowingly bluffing in this scene?
Fuck them kids, it’s job security as far as I’m concerned.
