Generational IT Differences

[Deleted User 234324]

Bit older than you op and having worked in IT for most of my career tech has never been an issue except social media that just confused the heel or off me.

Yet if I ask my nephews or nieces they can fly through that stuff with ease. Of course if I ask them anything to do with pc or even basic tech repair or how to change a light bulb they will look at me like I'm talking a foreign language.

 

[Feek]

Also older than @Adam_151, I started off using a Commodore PET at school, bought and built an Acorn Atom then went through various other home computers. When I started in the industry, the PC/AT had just been introduced and I think MS-DOS (perhaps called PC-DOS then) was on version 3.0. I remember seeing early versions of Windows and being unimpressed. For multi-tasking of DOS programs, we used Desq and then DESQview.

I have no problem with modern tech, even though I've had no interest in building PCs for about fifteen years. I can use pretty much everything you'll care to throw at me without any real problem. In my younger days, I could program video recorders with ease and we never ended up watching Open University instead of ToTP. I struggle a bit with Android phones because I find some aspects of the user interface to be confusing and inconsistent but that's only because I'm primarily an Apple user.

What surprises me is how some people these days have no idea when it comes to using a PC. I know there's always been some people who struggle but it's the basics. Finding applications, opening them, actually working within relatively simple programs like MS-Word and simple file management. I saw something a couple of months ago which gave some statistics and a few years ago, a huge percentage of homes had 'a computer' of some sort, very often a laptop where they would be exposed to Windows/OS X/whatever and so got the hang of using a desktop environment. With the advent of tablets, that percentage has dropped massively. It's far more common now to have an iPad than a laptop so those basic IT literacy skills are being lost.

 

[malachi]

Bit older than you op and having worked in IT for most of my career tech has never been an issue except social media that just confused the heel or off me.

Yet if I ask my nephews or nieces they can fly through that stuff with ease. Of course if I ask them anything to do with pc or even basic tech repair or how to change a light bulb they will look at me like I'm talking a foreign language.

Thats the same with every generation. As time goes on manufactures lock things away so you cant even open them so the knowledge isnt needed, therefore lost.

Ask any of the younger generation to do pc repair......they cant because most people are using phones, tablets or laptops. Now, ask them to do a repair on those same devices. You cant because they are locked under glue, thin plastic and abnormal screws. An big example is Apple, Some Dell laptop their RAM is soldered to the board. So you cant or dont need to know how to do memory upgrades. Telsa.......well, good luck trying to repair any of their cars!

Companies want to make everything easy as possible for the end user because of course, the easier something is, the more money people will throw at it. Again, Apple. The days of people knowing how to fix things are numbered unless its in an locked down and controlled environment.

 

[Martini1991]

Maybe I am not old enough to experience this yet, as I do just fine with old computers and just fine with newer tablets and phones (90s kid). My problem is modern apps trying to streamline everything to the point that it is regressive. Kids today can fly around these interfaces easily; however, as soon as an app does something unexpected, or needs troubleshooting, they are completely and utterly clueless at anything beyond surface level.

I feel like the newer generations are actually regressing in technical capability due to it.

Yeah the newer generation can barely use an actual PC. I work in FE and notice how poor their basic IT skills are beyond using their phone for Snapchat

 

[SexyGreyFox]

I'm nearly 65 and never had a problem with technology but from an early age I was delving into all sorts.
1980 (!) saw my first Spectrum and I was definitely the first at a massive factory to have a video recorder around 81.
At the factory I had the nickname PC World as the person to go to if you were having any technical problems with anything.
Being the Quality Technician of the factory I could also use all the products and knew them inside out.
Last night while gigging live I was programming a new digital mixing desk I've had and even jumped off stage to listen from teh audience and jumped back to make adjustments and then hit the save button.
My Dad was 85 and he was quite proficient at Photoshop, Corel Draw, Sonar Production Studio, Sound Forge and other software and could use his Andrid tablet with ease however no matter how many times I told him he couldn't get his head around ZIP files.
Even my Mum at 85 could easily programme her PVR and use her iPad.

 

[Deleted User 234324]

Thats the same with every generation. As time goes on manufactures lock things away so you cant even open them so the knowledge isnt needed, therefore lost.

Ask any of the younger generation to do pc repair......they cant because most people are using phones, tablets or laptops. Now, ask them to do a repair on those same devices. You cant because they are locked under glue, thin plastic and abnormal screws. An big example is Apple, Some Dell laptop their RAM is soldered to the board. So you cant or dont need to know how to do memory upgrades. Telsa.......well, good luck trying to repair any of their cars!

Companies want to make everything easy as possible for the end user because of course, the easier something is, the more money people will throw at it. Again, Apple. The days of people knowing how to fix things are numbered unless its in an locked down and controlled environment

I've yet to come across a device I can't repair, when ever the kids or grown ups break a phone, laptop or tablet they will be on the phone to me.

As for telsas I suspect most of the car is no different to any other, like changing the brake pads or replacing an led bulb. I would assume the motor and battery are not user serviceable due to the high voltage nature of EVs although I suspect anyone with decent electrical and automotive knowledge would be fine doing work on them.

 

[Pho]

Yes

My biggest annoyance is just how much doesn't really work properly in the modern world. Everything seems half baked and half finished...likely because it is.

It mostly is.

I think it's the corporate company mindset of profit, profit, profit. Commercial/senior management people only really care about getting things out the door as fast as possible and once it's out they expect the dev teams to move onto the next project. They don't understand just how complex software can be, and how modern software is never really complete.

Most modern software isn't built in isolation; it's built by leveraging lots and lots of other people's things. E.g., cloud services like Azure or AWS for databases and hosting your frontend/backend, or huge amounts of third-party software libraries that you need to make your software function. These things are constantly being upgraded and modernised to fix bugs, add new features, whatever, and therefore if your software is using those things you likely also want to be constantly updating it to keep it up to date.

But none of these tasks make the company money, and no one apart from developers really understand the need, so they always get de-prioritised over the commercial tasks e.g., shoehorning in new features to sell to customers as fast as possible. And as a result software gets messier and messier and more out of date and before you know it, it becomes unmaintainable.

I'm a dev for a ~£50m turnover company. We're now down to around five devs and one tester looking after 10s of projects, all of which are for critical infrastructure. We're incredibly understaffed .

 

[malachi]

I've yet to come across a device I can't repair, when ever the kids or grown ups break a phone, laptop or tablet they will be on the phone to me.

As for telsas I suspect most of the car is no different to any other, like changing the brake pads or replacing an led bulb. I would assume the motor and battery are not user serviceable due to the high voltage nature of EVs although I suspect anyone with decent electrical and automotive knowledge would be fine doing work on them.

Then you must be trying to repair old tech from mid 2015 and below Have someone drop you an MacBook Air M1 with an failed logic board or Surface Book with RAM issues.

Im not a car person but my friend who is a car maniac said you cant just pop open the hood and do simple work on an electric car like you can do with an motorised car. There is a reason when a Tesla breaks down you, cant just call the AAA or RAC to take a look.

 

[Hades]

I just had a great example of this while out with my daughter. We stopped at a sushi takeout fast food place. They had a McDonalds style ordering screen. After choosing food I couldn't work out how to click finish and pay. There was no pay button, no basket, nothing.

My daughter clicked on the current price in the top right corner and that worked. There was no indication that clicking on the price would take you to the pay screen. What an awful UX.

 

[malachi]

I just had a great example of this while out with my daughter. We stopped at a sushi takeout fast food place. They had a McDonalds style ordering screen. After choosing food I couldn't work out how to click finish and pay. There was no pay button, no basket, nothing.

My daughter clicked on the current price in the top right corner and that worked. There was no indication that clicking on the price would take you to the pay screen. What an awful UX.

Yeah that’s bad GUI design.

 

[Pawnless Endgame]

Born 1978, so probably a late Gen-X.

I grew up with the BBC Micro. Secondary school in the 1990s still had a lab full of Beebs and another lab full of Windows 3.1 PCs, plus many more Beebs/PCs dotted throughout the school. The music department had an Atari ST with Cubase - a damn good computer for its time. My first PC was in 1999, aged 20, so a bit late on the bandwagon but I got used to it fairly quickly. First mobile was in 2000, aged 22, so again fairly late for someone of that age in 2000.

I studied B(Eng.) Electronic Engineering which included programming in C++ and assembly, and knowing my way around command-line Linux and VAX terminals. The latter not being user friendly!

I own 3 Raspberry Pi's which is keeping my Linux knowledge semi-fresh.

I jumped onto Samsung Android mobiles starting in 2010 and been Samsung ever since.

With the above statements, I like to think myself as IT-literate and a tinker.

The problem that I have is Facebook. I lose track of where my posts go and have been told by Mum to remove a few posts because they ended up somewhere unexpected due to someone else interacting with it. Unlike a forum, there doesn't seem to be any structure to it. It can't be tinkered with in the sense that it has control over the user.

Firefox is a great example of the opposite in that it has its own registry editor (about:config), custom user input including CSS plus user scripts in the form of page-inserts that other browsers can also use e.g. Greasemonkey.

 

[OspreyO]

This article popped up on my home screen this morning: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/27/gen-z-tech-shame-office-technology-printers and it clicked with something that has been in my head for a long time now (perhaps even inspired by a reply to something on here, or it could have been somewhere else)

I was born at the end of '86, that I think makes me a Millennial I think, and in a way that will liklely be typical for most users on here, I was brought up using computers, I remember using windows 3.11 on a 486DX, and later windows 95. I remember Risc Os onn acorn machines at school (BBC micros were kind of on the way out by them, but there were still some around) While I've never been one to keep up with the absolute leading edge, I have always through the years built and upgraded PCs myself, and normally managed to understand enough about them to sort issues out by myself, could navigate MS DOS, I have a rapberry pi, I've written code (albeit probably pretty bad code!) in vb.net and php. So all in all, I'd like to think I'm quite good with computers.

Heres my confession, I struggle with phones, stuff doesn't seem intruative, each app seems to abide by completely different UI rules, nothing seems to behave in a standard-ised way. The other thing is, that it seems to be like to hide a lot of what its doing away from you... ok, this apopplication has stuffed up, how do I stop it, doesn't seem easy, how do I uninstall it?, again not straightfordward, where is it installed , arguably probably don't need to know, but thats just as well, because you can't! As for serious work, a Laptop is a minimu, ideally if I am doing anything more than a word document, I need a desk and a machine with at least two screens, I had a similar conversion with a colleague and he told me his daughter came to him having trouble getting a CV she had created properly to print, she had done it on a phone (the concept of that is just so bizzare to me)

So I feel about twenty years older when I'm struggling to make my phone work for me (which is about what my colleague has on me), and I am guessing, as the article alludes to, more and more younger workers are the otherway around, they can navigate the strange environment of phones, but a proper PC and general office equipment is difficult for them. The worst thing is, that I feel other things going the same way, The app store in windows for instance, you download something in there, ok where has it installed it, oh it hasn't as such, there is no exe, its like a runtime environment that half baked apps run in, it took me half an hour to put a shortcut to the new whatsapp desktop client on my desktop (it had created one in my start menu but I use program called fences that creates groups on my desktop I can put shortcuts to) and applications that run inside a brower, SAS type things, with all the processing done in the cloud, we again have unstandardised UIs with elements not behaving as you'd expect they ought to)

Anyone else the same?

Adam

You're exactly right.

People don't design things with standards anymore. Look at windows, look at Office365, OneDrive, about 10 ways to do something and none consistent with each other. How many control panel/setting location does windows have for setting things.
Even where I work something they are just renaming things and moving things around constantly. The departments rename themselves or their projects constantly.
Look at USB C it has a 50 different versions. My laptop has 6 USB ports. No more than two are the exactly the same.

I don't think kids and younger people are better at it. They just never seen anything other than this chaos. Most "tech savvy" kids I know have very little idea how stuff works. Most iPhone users have 1 million unread messages, no idea why their phone is constantly full, no idea where their photos are if they lose their phone, no idea why it takes 10hrs to charge their phone on their £1 cable or charger, or wireless charger, no idea what fast charging is, PD or any of that.

 

[OspreyO]

Born 1978, so probably a late Gen-X.

I grew up with the BBC Micro. Secondary school in the 1990s still had a lab full of Beebs and another lab full of Windows 3.1 PCs, plus many more Beebs/PCs dotted throughout the school. The music department had an Atari ST with Cubase - a damn good computer for its time. My first PC was in 1999, aged 20, so a bit late on the bandwagon but I got used to it fairly quickly. First mobile was in 2000, aged 22, so again fairly late for someone of that age in 2000.

I studied B(Eng.) Electronic Engineering which included programming in C++ and assembly, and knowing my way around command-line Linux and VAX terminals. The latter not being user friendly!

I own 3 Raspberry Pi's which is keeping my Linux knowledge semi-fresh.

I jumped onto Samsung Android mobiles starting in 2010 and been Samsung ever since.

With the above statements, I like to think myself as IT-literate and a tinker.

The problem that I have is Facebook. I lose track of where my posts go and have been told by Mum to remove a few posts because they ended up somewhere unexpected due to someone else interacting with it. Unlike a forum, there doesn't seem to be any structure to it. It can't be tinkered with in the sense that it has control over the user.

Firefox is a great example of the opposite in that it has its own registry editor (about:config), custom user input including CSS plus user scripts in the form of page-inserts that other browsers can also use e.g. Greasemonkey.

Facebook does that deliberately. Its constantly changing itself so it can trick users into sharing more data. If you manage to keep it under control. They'll buy another company that has more of your data and collate the information. Google, Microsoft the same.

Look at YouTube. Interface is brutal. Funnels everyone to the same 10 videos like a FM radio station then hides smaller channels from the algorithm.

 

[HangTime]

I'm a Xennial and am generally OK with both old and new tech, although I'm not going to pretend I'm 'down with the kids' when it comes to the latest trends on social apps etc. I'm not complacent though and can forsee a time when my son will roll his eyes at me in the same way I do when speaking with my dad.
I do kind of resonate with the idea that you can't really troubleshoot modern tech as easily if you are technically minded, although on the flipside the internet means there's a lot more resources available to research whatever random fix you need for a given problem.

As for office equipment, 20 years ago people were no better with printers. My first job after uni was Print Technician, amongst other things my responsibilities included going to fix whatever random printer issue people had with the random printers on random floors of the building. No training other than my co-worker showing me some basics. Sometimes it was as simple as opening the hatch and pulling out a sheet of paper, or making sure there was paper in the appropriate trays - literally basic stuff they could have fixed themselves. Gen-X were not much cop with printers, trust me. Moreover I think there's a misconception that people were ok with 'normal computers' back in the day, there's always been geeks like those of us on this forum that are comfortable with it but the general public has never been that good - it's not a Gen-Z problem it's a people problem.

1980 (!) saw my first Spectrum

The Speccy didn't even get released until 1982, are you sure you don't mean a ZX80?

 

[Malevolence]

Also older than @Adam_151, I started off using a Commodore PET at school, bought and built an Acorn Atom then went through various other home computers. When I started in the industry, the PC/AT had just been introduced and I think MS-DOS (perhaps called PC-DOS then) was on version 3.0. I remember seeing early versions of Windows and being unimpressed. For multi-tasking of DOS programs, we used Desq and then DESQview.

I have no problem with modern tech, even though I've had no interest in building PCs for about fifteen years. I can use pretty much everything you'll care to throw at me without any real problem. In my younger days, I could program video recorders with ease and we never ended up watching Open University instead of ToTP. I struggle a bit with Android phones because I find some aspects of the user interface to be confusing and inconsistent but that's only because I'm primarily an Apple user.

What surprises me is how some people these days have no idea when it comes to using a PC. I know there's always been some people who struggle but it's the basics. Finding applications, opening them, actually working within relatively simple programs like MS-Word and simple file management. I saw something a couple of months ago which gave some statistics and a few years ago, a huge percentage of homes had 'a computer' of some sort, very often a laptop where they would be exposed to Windows/OS X/whatever and so got the hang of using a desktop environment. With the advent of tablets, that percentage has dropped massively. It's far more common now to have an iPad than a laptop so those basic IT literacy skills are being lost.

Exactly my situation. Although I started off on Link 380Z and then 480Z at school, so I guess I'm a few years younger than thou. That said, we did still use punch cards on occasion.

 

[Hades]

Also older than @Adam_151, I started off using a Commodore PET at school, bought and built an Acorn Atom then went through various other home computers. When I started in the industry, the PC/AT had just been introduced and I think MS-DOS (perhaps called PC-DOS then) was on version 3.0. I remember seeing early versions of Windows and being unimpressed. For multi-tasking of DOS programs, we used Desq and then DESQview.

I have no problem with modern tech, even though I've had no interest in building PCs for about fifteen years. I can use pretty much everything you'll care to throw at me without any real problem. In my younger days, I could program video recorders with ease and we never ended up watching Open University instead of ToTP. I struggle a bit with Android phones because I find some aspects of the user interface to be confusing and inconsistent but that's only because I'm primarily an Apple user.

What surprises me is how some people these days have no idea when it comes to using a PC. I know there's always been some people who struggle but it's the basics. Finding applications, opening them, actually working within relatively simple programs like MS-Word and simple file management. I saw something a couple of months ago which gave some statistics and a few years ago, a huge percentage of homes had 'a computer' of some sort, very often a laptop where they would be exposed to Windows/OS X/whatever and so got the hang of using a desktop environment. With the advent of tablets, that percentage has dropped massively. It's far more common now to have an iPad than a laptop so those basic IT literacy skills are being lost.

Similar to me. The first computer I owned was a VIC20 although I remember we had a ZX81 for a few weeks (no idea where we got this but it was only temporary so I assume it must have been borrowed from a family friend). The old cliche about needing to put an elastic band around the expansion pack on the back was definitely true. At school we had PET's which I was quite familiar with because of my VIC20 at home. Later I upgraded to a C64 before an Amiga 500 and then 1200. Eventually I gave in to the lure of Doom and got a 486DX2 based PC.

 

[naefeart]

Born 1978, so probably a late Gen-X.

I grew up with the BBC Micro. Secondary school in the 1990s still had a lab full of Beebs and another lab full of Windows 3.1 PCs, plus many more Beebs/PCs dotted throughout the school. The music department had an Atari ST with Cubase - a damn good computer for its time. My first PC was in 1999, aged 20, so a bit late on the bandwagon but I got used to it fairly quickly. First mobile was in 2000, aged 22, so again fairly late for someone of that age in 2000.

I studied B(Eng.) Electronic Engineering which included programming in C++ and assembly, and knowing my way around command-line Linux and VAX terminals. The latter not being user friendly!

I own 3 Raspberry Pi's which is keeping my Linux knowledge semi-fresh.

I jumped onto Samsung Android mobiles starting in 2010 and been Samsung ever since.

With the above statements, I like to think myself as IT-literate and a tinker.

The problem that I have is Facebook. I lose track of where my posts go and have been told by Mum to remove a few posts because they ended up somewhere unexpected due to someone else interacting with it. Unlike a forum, there doesn't seem to be any structure to it. It can't be tinkered with in the sense that it has control over the user.

Firefox is a great example of the opposite in that it has its own registry editor (about:config), custom user input including CSS plus user scripts in the form of page-inserts that other browsers can also use e.g. Greasemonkey.

My dad was(is) an electrical engineer and was big into technology when I was growning up - I had a BBC Micro at 6 yrs old, an Acorn Archimedes at 10 and my first PC at 12. Btw I still think the OS on the Archimedes was waaaay ahead of anything the PC had years into using Windows

So I’m not clueless when it comes the modern tech. however we’re a similar age and I can’t fathom FB. I don’t use it (as I like to live my life rather than share it), but when I have tried interacting with it in the past - trying keep in touch with some friends - I simply couldn’t grasp trying to navigate it. A CS degree and many years coding and working in technology hasn’t helped at all

 

[Jono8]

It mostly is.

I think it's the corporate company mindset of profit, profit, profit. Commercial/senior management people only really care about getting things out the door as fast as possible and once it's out they expect the dev teams to move onto the next project. They don't understand just how complex software can be, and how modern software is never really complete.

Most modern software isn't built in isolation; it's built by leveraging lots and lots of other people's things. E.g., cloud services like Azure or AWS for databases and hosting your frontend/backend, or huge amounts of third-party software libraries that you need to make your software function. These things are constantly being upgraded and modernised to fix bugs, add new features, whatever, and therefore if your software is using those things you likely also want to be constantly updating it to keep it up to date.

But none of these tasks make the company money, and no one apart from developers really understand the need, so they always get de-prioritised over the commercial tasks e.g., shoehorning in new features to sell to customers as fast as possible. And as a result software gets messier and messier and more out of date and before you know it, it becomes unmaintainable.

I'm a dev for a ~£50m turnover company. We're now down to around five devs and one tester looking after 10s of projects, all of which are for critical infrastructure. We're incredibly understaffed .

Yep, you are totally right. This extends beyond just computer software as well. Almost everything is so poorly managed and staffed (as you say, due to profit, profit, profit).

Imagine if the driving force in business was to deliver excellent, efficient service and well made working products to the benefit of everyone's mental health....

 

[Dano]

Yep, it's an issue and only gets worse for the older generations, I regularly help people in their 70's and up who really do try but it's just so foreign to them and just as they get used to doing something the developer will update the app or webpage and shift the UI around with zero f's given to an age group that is rapidly being forced into using them or go without.

 

[Terminal_Boy]

Yep, it's an issue and only gets worse for the older generations, I regularly help people in their 70's and up who really do try but it's just so foreign to them and just as they get used to doing something the developer will update the app or webpage and shift the UI around with zero f's given to an age group that is rapidly being forced into using them or go without.

Same here. People’s smartphones reaching their EOL and apps being updated beyond what their iOS version will support is a regular issue and explaining that to someone who has zero idea about how any of that works can be painful.

I’m not looking forward to Windows 10 ending as no-one I’ve helped with PC issues is running anything modern enough to run Windows 11.