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
They had one employer maybe who never used it?
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
We hired a guy 2 years ago and his company was still using MS Virtual SourceSafe. Dudes, that was released in 1994 and the last update was 2005. Just crazy.
Because a GUI makes everything a lot simpler. I only started understanding how git works the moment I dropped the GUI and had to resolves issues through CLI.
I typed hunt and peck for so long that I can hunt and peck with my eyes closed. Though technically I’m not hunting anymore, just pecking lol.
Hey! What did my two fingers ever do to you!
Hunt and peck, allegedly.
Feeling’ a bit peckish
Nielsen and Norman group know what’s up. I learned this at my first office job. Everyone thought I was a wizard hacker when I showed them inspect element. I got in trouble with my director who flagged IT Security when I showed my team lead an inspect element on some intranet page. I had changed a title to something else as a proposal and they had thought I had hacked their intranet and changed it myself. Triggered a whole security incident.
I thought everyone with a computer knew about this. I was wrong.
i used to worked for a public school district, and i once pointed out a guys laptop was infested with porn popups (~2000). the cops investigated me for reporting it.
That’s absolutely fucking bonkers. I’m hoping that this didn’t cause you any lasting consequences at work.
Need some more details here.
A “guys” laptop? Like a student or a faculty member?
Did you report it to the police or to the IT department or other faculty? Who were you in this school? Teacher?
What do you mean by the cops “investigating” you? Like asking a few questions to get it on record? Or getting into your computer? Were they accusing you of something? Who called them in the first place?
it was a volunteer in the building. his personal device… and he was like 80 years old. i reported it to the ‘room’ teacher, as im just an IT guy.
the next thing i know, 2 detectives have me in a room questioning my knowledge of ‘lolita’. they really didnt like the fact that i pointed out this 80 year old guy was the victim of a drive-by popup storm on his laptop… common for the era.
teacher->principal->cops->me for some reason
i got nothing to hide, so whatevs
the volunteer was told not to come back
Sounds like maybe they found more than popups when they investigated…
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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 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.
I feel like that’s more a boomer thing.
I was looking at a spec from another government contractor and of course it’s a scan because fuck me. While I am reading it I suddenly noticed that it was made by a typewriter.
Never a great sign.
The screenshot thing is PAINFUL and way too common by management in particular
Lol screenshot, pdf, what’s the difference really?
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?”
Yeah this is very much not that they don’t understand there’s a better way. It’s that they don’t care to look up how. It’s pretty common. People just go oh I don’t know computers and you get whatever random crap they could throw together with zero effort lol.
There’s no secret to screenshots. They all have a phone.
Remember my old bomer boss who insisted I use the office scanner to scan documents instead of my phone. Not because it was better but because he paid for a scanner and wanted to get his money’s worth.
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.
It’s possible to make a rasterized pdf - that would just be an image with specs for printing. I think teachers need to specify their expectations. Submit a plain text file? Submit a markdown document? Submit a Word doc? Is hand-written okay? What about a type-writer?
A pdf is just a digital version of paper, and since paper is obsolete, the pdf is probably a bit archaic for somebody who has no intention of printing it.
PDFs are searchable, zoomable (i.e. don’t look like shit on high-res displays), are often much smaller, have nicer software for handling them (image viewers are usually not designed for this task), and so on.
PDF scales when you zoom in on it.
You’re joking, right? Please tell me you’re joking.
I am joking
When I read “never used a computer with a keyboard and mouse” my first thought was “wow, they only ever used punched cards” until I realized you meant they only used touch screens.
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.
Most certainly.
My higher computer literacy stems solely from personal interest.
The IT education in school was basic office usage and other “normie” tasks. Not even typing classes…Still doing the 4,5 finger blind/hunt writing system.
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.
Oh I bet, and fwiw I think that’s a pretty good estimate of that bell curve – I’m just on the tail end of it, so I got to see an actual decline in tech literacy in the people literally in my immediate orbit. It was an interesting experience, for sure
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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.
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 themI 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.
The last sentence resonates with me. I too wore a robe and wizard hat back in the day.
I would put it up to 1999.
But the returns of 1995-1999 are very small indeed.:(
EDIT: Welp, I guess I just proved someone else’s point.
?
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 :)That is exactly what happened. I was trying to jokingly express anger at seeing my birth year being correlated with being tech-illiterate, so I typed a ‘>:(’ emoji, not realizing I needed an escape-character to avoid it looking like quote.
Hope you get the same laugh out of it as I did lol
No worries, figured as much :D
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.
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.
Google is buying the generation Apple is close to and Microsoft more or less failed to catch.
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…?
Yeah that’s fair… Bad example :p
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.
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.
Are the user levels an actual defined thing and are there more?
The article quotes extensively from the study about this and gives examples regarding what kinds of tasks qualify for those levels.
After actually reading the article I see they’re well-defined. Thanks for pointing me there ^^
They defined it for the study.
Obviously you’d find a level 3+ in many population groups but each would a fraction of the alrady small <10% level 3 population pool.
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.
That reminds me: i once searching for jobs in the usual local aggregators, it didn’t have a link to the original offer nowhere, so i used developer console’s picker to figure the URL out. My mother: did you just hack the job page?
Computers are magic and we are wizards because we understand more or less how it works.
I teach math to undergrads, and damn it’s sad. They don’t know how to send a PDF file from their phone to laptop, and upload it to Canvas. One guy ended up emailing it to me. They don’t even know what a folder/directory is.
Well, in his defense, I could save a file from 8 different applications and they end up in 8 different locations on my phone file system. You would think they would all go to Documents or Downloads…nope. apps dont let you pick locations, and if they do, you don’t get to pick anywhere you want
This sounds highly like an Apple FS issue.
Don’t experience it nearly as much on my Android (Pixel 7).Still salty about the google file explorer.
Apple has a default share option of “Save to Files” where you can navigate where you want it saved. The default location is definitely application specific though.
Managing digital information today is a horrible mess of silos and big business driven incompatibilities. It often drives people to use PDFs, as there is nothing appropriate. Blame the software/businesses, not the victims/users.
I mostly agree with you. But it only works because users give in. They deserve some of the blame.
They don’t know how to send a PDF file from their phone to laptop
With USB cable? Because outside of that it gets complicated and/or vendor-specific quickly.
That’s what KDEconnect is for. Oddly enough I think it even works in windows nowadays.
I wish I could downvote you more.
“Regular people having trouble with file management? Why don’t they just use this obscure, unintuitive program that they clearly won’t know how to use!”
“Share to <name of linked machine>”
Oh no, so unintuitive!
There’s a moment at which people have to accept that they just cannot use some things. Either they’re willing to learn how to use them, or they do without. It’s quite simple.
That should be a simple core os thing
After a while, there are no such “simple things” unless you expect a Star Trek type of interaction “computer, transfer this information” which completely abstracts everything.
Maybe that will happen some day, maybe not, but for now people still have to learn how to drive cars and what the fuck a directory is.
Desktop like file io is not a star trek ask.
With usb cable most of people doesn’t even know where to start. They have no idea of where the document is saved. Plugging the phone to the computer doesn’t show a “recent files” list but the whole directory hierarchy. Maybe they even used some proprietary note taking app that doesn’t create a file and they don’t realize that
If you have the luck that Android prompts you if you want to enable file transfer or just charge your device.
If i remember right, it’s long-press on the notification, no? Currently on toilet, can’t check.
Afaik last time I connected my phone via USB I needed to pull down zhe notifications and there was a silent option offered to switch the type of USB connections.
Bluetooth file sharing has worked for me on every device I own. Not sure if it works on Apple devices, but it probably does.
Sure, but they own their devices. They should know it. It’s a pretty regular thing to do, since most classes in my university use Canvas.
Also, many of them had both devices from Apple. I may dislike Apple, but Airdrop should work pretty well for this.
You’d be correct on that Airdrop assumption. I get most of Lemmy reflexively hates Apple, but Airdrop between two Apple devices you own is about as braindead simple as it’s possible to be.
Honestly I use discord or email for that >.>
Windows/iPhone doesn’t seem to have a great solution as far as I’ve checked.
There’s KDE Connect if they’re on the same network. You could also use Dropbox or something, but honestly Discord works fine
The only problem I see with KDE Connect is that you need to pair the devices. Works great if both are yours, but probably its not something you want leave with the default settings if its shared with someone else.
Miniserve is a program for computers. Though you can run it in termux. It just opens a tiny server instance for file sharing, you can download/upload files to a directory directory. Will also show QR for the link.
The recent integration Apple did in their newest update is peak usability.
Sadly it’s locked in the ecosystem.Dude, I love Apple hardware for phones but their locked in ecosystem and to an extent the OS is so fucking annoying.
My dream is the (earlier pre 2020s) openness of Android combined with the cohesion and design of Apple.
Android truly is a magnificent clusterfuck like Windows but I still prefer that over someone like Apple defining where I can go and where not.
For Android what is my main draw is that I can fuck around in the filesystem with apps like mixplorer and sideload apps at my own risk. The first part (this is all from the very limited time I had to fiddle with phones from clients) is impossible and the second has too many string attached as far as I am aware.
Oh and I obviously spend money on some apps I would need to find replacements for and most likely pay again. The other points would need to be a strong contender to make me move entirely.But it’s very tempting.
Best of both worlds is a jailbroken iPhone, but it’s becoming nigh impossible these days. Sure, if you have an older phone it’s still possible with some caveats, but long gone are the days of a new model being jailbroken in a year, never mind a week.
Same with rooting.
Sure it’s doable but outaide of special distros like lineageOS (community dev project to extend the longevity of phones and as an alternative to the OEMs flavor) and GrapheneOS (heavy privacy focus but pixel exclusive) I havent noticed or missed any major downsides I’d get from rooting my phone as I did in the past.Now all Google needa to do is glue the whope mess into a cohesive product without doing an Apple from A to Z.
Why would they need to know what a folder/directory is? It’s a remnant from meat space and was replaced by tagging and is being replaced by LLM search/AI.
Why wouldn’t they be able to upload it directly to canvas?
I really empathize with people that didn’t have to figure out how to rip a CD at 2x speed or take a class on card catalog systems. They skipped a lot of critical problem solving learning opportunities.
The directory remark is unrelated to the Canvas one. I guess they didn’t have the app set up on their phone in that case.
Anyway, have directories been replaced? I’m having a hard time remembering any filesystem without directories. And we don’t need to put AI in every fucking thing.
Gmail was the first to get mainstream support for a directory-less method of organizing.
Music, photo, video apps have no need for directories. Many phone apps have no need in general.
Even your documents folders. It’s easier for me to use search than to drill down through folders.
I actually use tags as directories in GMail. I can’t find shit otherwise. (Tangent: just how shitty is the search in Outlook? I can never find anything unless labeled in advance.)
I agree for the apps. But then they shouldn’t deal with files anyway. They should just access certain directories as permitted by the system, and those should also be exposed to the user.
Hard disagree on the documents (or anything else, really). One ends up emulating folders using tags anyway, and there’s no real way of doing it in a platform-independent way. Also, searching can be very annoying in many cases. For my research, I end up working with the same files for a few weeks straight. It’s much better if they’re in a folder, rather than searching them every time.
You do you, though.
Google docs doesn’t really use folders, and neither does o365. Especially when in a mobile device. Sure you can use folders but it’s limiting compared to tags.
Directory hierarchies are absolutely not a remnant from meatspace. The world “folder” is, but IRL folders are a totally different beast because they’re not nestable. Tags and searching serve useful purposes but they don’t replace directory trees.
Folders are absolutely nestable.
The problem with virtual folders is you can’t have one document in multiple folders without causing chaos because of how limiting that hierarchy is. This is why tagging is better.
How does tagging deal with file locations and permissions?
Location is irrelevant and a legacy method of thought. Why would a digital file need to be held down to a single location? Sure, you could symlink it but that’s a crutch.
Tags can have permissions.
It’s all metadata.
Yeah I grok it I just have no idea how you are going to solve all the issues this involves. Like memory mapped I/O or air gapped networks where the file is in a physical location etc. it feels like you will just have to reinvent directory structure inside tags.
Dunno know, maybe make your own *nix that works this way and try to get attention to it.
The internet already runs on it.
Tell me you’ve never used a filing cabinet…
For about a year I worked in a filing room. I saw a decent amount of filing methods.
I am by no means top at anything I do with a computer, but I do find it said that I tend to know more than almost anyone I interact with in real life when it comes to using computers.
For the most part the way I became proficient with a computer has come down to reading comprehension. I would like to see studies showing the overlap of computer proficiency, and reading comprehension.
In my experience, it’s not just a lack of reading comprehension, but often some combination of an utter lack of curiosity, laziness and defeatism. Many other things, like video games, have escaped the realm of being reserved only for nerds and gone mainstream, yet computers remain something people just constantly assume are hopelessly complicated.
I know for a fact my mother-in-law can read just fine, as she spends most of her day reading novels and will gladly spend the rest of it telling me about them if I happen to be there. Yet when it comes to her cell phone, if there’s any issue at all, she just shuts down. She would just rather not be able to access her online banking in the Citi bank app for weeks or months at a time, until one of us goes and updates it for her, rather than reading the banner that says “The version of this app is too old, please click here to update and continue using it.” and clicking the damn button. If anyone points this out to her, though, she just gets worked up in a huff and tells us “I’m too old to understand these things, you can figure it out because you’re still young.” She will eventually figure these things out and do them for herself if nobody does it for her for a while, but her default for any problem with her phone is to throw her hands up and declare it a lost cause first. I’ve seen a lot of people have the same sort of reactions, both young and old. No “Hey, let’s just see what it says,” just straight to deciding it’s impossible, so they don’t even bother to check what’s going on.
I know too many people like that and I hate them
“I’m no expert so I will dismiss this dialog without reading it” - “it gives me error but because I’m not expert I’m not going to read it” - “it says something but you need to come here to read it - no, I’m unable to read it because I’m not expert”
And at the same time believe in a million conspiracy theories in fields that they definitively are not experts in
I don’t hate them but I do hate the culture and systems that have created them.
My father-in-law got a Master’s Degree in Computer Science 30 years ago. IIRC, it was heavy in C programming and involved typical CS fare like algorithms, pointers, sorting, data structures, etc. He was a high school math teacher at the time (he’s now retired). He took the classes mostly because he enjoyed learning.
I did ok during the Dos/Windows 95 era, but as time went on, he seemed less and less able to solve his own computer problems. He can’t even Google a problem effectively (or even remember to try to Google his problem).
Most recently, I had to hold his hand while he bought a new computer at Best Buy and then further hold his hand as he went through, step by step, the Windows 11 installation/first time start up process.
<sigh>
It’s the retarded UIs, I think. I function the same way when having to use Windows, Android, typical applications and sites. It’s an undertaking to use any of them to some end.
Now why do these people give up and offload it to us “sufficiently young” - they think these UIs are retarded for them, but work for us. Like “you wanted such things, you help me with them”.
And they can’t accept that such things are aimed at them and not us.
You can critique UI design without using an ableist slur
OK
I don’t find this explanation remotely likely.
One can walled gardens, siloed services, lack of trust, oligopoly, widespread scams, legal pressure at everything good in the industry. It’s not the only factor surely.
Did you accidentally a word? Sorry, I don’t understand
add
Ah. I mean, those factors are bad for developers, power users, and/or normal users, but I don’t think they contribute to a lack of understanding of how computers work. It’s that people don’t ever have to interact with or understand the layer beneath the applications they use. That’s not a sign of bad UI, it’s actually a sign of good UI, but without proper education (the biggest factor imo) it does cause a lack of understanding. Ideally we’d live in a world where you don’t need to understand the underlying technology, but it is easy to do so.
I think it’s a mix of all of these things.
Being able to read isn’t quite equivalent to reading comprehension though. So between that, and lack of curiosity, laziness, defeatism, and more; it really does stunt the population when it comes to computer knowledge.
Dude, you’re on Lemmy. That means you’re probably in the top 1% of people with computer skills.
I appreciate the compliment. However, there are plenty of people who are more knowledgeable than I am when it comes to the grand topic of computers and technology.
I have been considering this for awhile. I’m also assuming this is the largest reason why lemmy’s growth hasn’t been what we all wanted lool
Not gonna lie, I love listening to the smart comments, I’m not THAT smart. And thanks to reddit being shit (comments suck) I refound lemmy
Yeah, probably a big sample bias in these comments
Yeah the biggest problem for people who can’t use a computer always seems to be that they just won’t ever read what it says on the screen. The solution to problems is often very obvious if you just actually read error messages or tooltips or anything
There’s an XKCD for that, of course.
I’ve discovered over the years that curiosity is maybe the most important aspect of being good with technology.
Technical skills, patience, problem solving, organization, all that is critical, obviously.
But more often than not, it all starts with just wanting to know what’s possible. I’m the kind of person that, after installing something for the first time, be It software or a game or whatever, the very first thing I do is open the settings, and look all the knobs and levers that are available.
I was genuinely stunned to find out that the vast majority of users never look at the settings ever. And maybe that’s why developers seem to be increasingly unwilling to even provide options for those of us that like tweaking settings.
curiosity (…) patience
Eh, I used to use those back in the day, but for the last decade or so I’ve been using mostly concentrated spite and it seems to work just fine (though I can’t wait for the AI bros to invent a computer that can feel pain… now that’ll make computer wrangling fun again!).
Single handedly that is how I have acquired any of the computer knowledge I have. So it is absolutely mind blowing that people just can’t seem to grasp the fact that most of the time what it takes to understand something, is reading. That being said, beyond that, breaking through to new discoveries; it makes me appreciate those with an inquisitive mind that tend to push the envelope beyond what is well understood and well documented.
From the article it does seem that the failure of ability isn’t strictly related to computers per SE, but to an over all inability to think about the word problems given in an abstract and mathematically coherent way. They seemed to ask participants to solve what are essentially database query, reading comprehension, critical thinking, and logic problems in the context of an email suite. Word problems can be hard for anyone that hasn’t studied and practiced how to decipher them. It’s just that using a computer kind of forces one to confront those gaps in what should be a fundamental part of highschool education. Math and science classes aren’t just solving problems by wrote memorization or memorizing the periodic table, they are about problem solving. Lots of people fall through the gaps and don’t get that one special teacher who understood this.
I would agree with you here. From my experience, schooling doesn’t aim to teach critical thinking, or reading comprehension ad much as it should. The way tests and work are handled is more closely inline with memorization. Memorization doesn’t help people break new ground, or help develop the tools to begin troubleshooting, and tackling new ideas and problems.
Memorization typically ally only helps with solving problems we already have answers to.
I’ve done support for sysadmins for almost a decade, and the ones that are the biggest pain in the ass to deal with are the ones who can’t or won’t read the error message and think a little about it. And my kids’ friends all have the same problem: They don’t read what’s on screen and if they do they make no attempt to understand it.
This is why the humanities are important. All those times you have to explain why the curtains are blue is practice for reading other things and determining meaning.
I have found in my years of experience in IT, the best way I can handle an issue/error that a user may face is to work through it with them, verbally tell them what I am doing to fix it while showing them. Another trick from my repertoire is to try to relate to their frustration, or their problem, so they don’t feel talked down to.
You are right, the humanities are important.
And it can be about how things are framed and communicated.
100% agree. Often I feel like I’m mostly a therapist who also knows computers.
That aspect of tech support often burns me out. However, put a complex computer related problem in front of me, and I could find myself at it for as many hours as I can be awake without burnout.
Same shit here. Now I know I have ADHD, back then I didn’t. I just couldn’t concentrate on any complete task. And still one day I started my Gentoo install and completed it simply by reading the handbook and the error messages etc. Ended up using Slackware after that, via reading too.
It’s mind-boggling that people who can concentrate on reading pages and pages of text with their content won’t read what’s put under their nose.
The worst part, is a good chunk of those people don’t retain or comprehend what they read either.
That’s another thing.
It is upsetting, yes, when a normie says “ha, you don’t even know in which year yadda yadda A has happened”, but then they can’t answer what is the meaning of that knowledge for them, how is it connected to other events and which, what is the value they’d extract from it, etc.
But it’s understandable that people with good memory get comfortable with using it instead of thinking. Sometimes thinking much faster is too an ADHD bonus, it’s not like I deserved it somehow before being born.
But getting back to computers - it’s rather that in their lives text is apparently mostly meaningless, and they expect that from the error messages. So they seemingly don’t read instructions or scientific\engineering\hobbyist literature. They don’t make things and find flaws in them. They don’t have that thing in their souls which in Ancient Greece was called “metis”.
You’re right. I get hit with the “you don’t know which year” phrases. But when I ask further probing questions as to why I should know those things, I get hit with the “well I learned this in X year of school.” and they fail to explain the importance. People often equate memorization with being intelligent and real world examples point to this absolutely not being the case.
I oddly find technical documentation of things and informational pieces to be far more interesting.
And might I add, well put!
Wow, this is bleak.
I read somewhere (I think the deloitte tech survey from a few years ago) that many people have replaced their pc with smartphones and use their phone as their primary tech device. Would be interesting to see if any of these low-level skill folks are actually high (or higher) on mobile skills.
From what I recall, particularly the younger generations that exclusively use mobile devices (though of course this is not limited to them) actually have terrible tech literacy across the board, primarily related to spending all of their time in apps that basically spoon-feed functionality in a closed ecosystem. In particular, these groups are particularly vulnerable to very basic scams and phishing attacks.
I work in tech at a credit union and we’ve hit a weird full circle point where the new folks entering the job market need a lot of training on using a computer for this reason. It’s been very bizarre being back at a point where I have to explain things like how to right click because a lot of people have grown up only using phone/tablets.
I’m in IT. There was a time when I was sure that the younger generations would be eclipsing my technical skills. I knew where I came from, and what I was exposed to and assumed that the younger generations would have everything I had, and even MORE technical exposure because of the continuing falling cost of technology. For about a decade that was true, and then it plateaued and then, as you experienced, I saw the younger generations regressing in technology skills.
There was a time when I was actually worried about job security due to an overabundance of young people wanting to enter the field. Nowadays, not so much.
On the other hand, I’m instead now worrying that younger generations might become even less able to understand the importance of digital rights if they don’t even understand the basics of the technology.
Think back to when we were kids. Remember that period of time when not everyone owned a computer? Or if they owned one, it wasn’t necessarily used much? There were people that were “computer people”, who used computers daily for entertainment or tinkering or socializing (once the consumer internet took off) and there were people that didn’t need or care about them outside of their workstation at the office.
Even after the Internet, this dynamic was there. You had the enthusiasts who really spent time on their computers and got to using them well, and you had people that simply owned them and checked email or browsed the Internet from time to time.
The enthusiast/non-enthusiast dynamic has always existed. There’s always a gap. It just takes different shapes.
Now, everyone owns a smartphone and uses for everything. They’re critical to life, enthusiast or no. That’s the baseline now. The gap is entirely in skill and usage, not so much hardware or time spent on it.
Before computers and the internet, no tech skill was needed to interact with our modern world.
After them, and for a few decades, the skill floor rose. You needed to learn technology to participate in the modern world.
Now technology has reached a point where the skill floor has dropped down to where it was before.
The mistake we made was in thinking that our generation learning to use technology was happening because they wanted to. It was incidental. Skill with technology comes from desire to obtain it, not simply using technology a lot.
The mistake we made was in thinking that our generation learning to use technology was happening because they wanted to. It was incidental. Skill with technology comes from desire to obtain it, not simply using technology a lot.
We learned the technology to accomplish specific mundane goals, and along the way learned the inner workings of the technology which became applicable to the working world. Now, to accomplish those same rather mundane tasks there is very little to learn, and very little ancillary learning benefit derived from doing those mundane things.
Yes, when you were learning those, you had a viewpoint from the outside. That you know there are things like discrete math, electricity, magnetism, transistors, ones and zeroes, etc, and level above level from these things a machine has been built. You wouldn’t know how exactly, but you would understand how complex it is and how important it is to approach it with logic.
Now these people don’t think. At all. Ads yell with music, pictures and colors at them, computers they use are about poking screens with fingers, and it takes a lot of courage to abandon that context.
Like in that experiment with a white ball being called black and a group of humans where some have been warned to call it black and some start doing it because others do.
I keep hearing this but it’s perplexing.
Students have been using laptops in school and college for a long time now, no matter how much time they spend on their phone.
What I encountered in IT isn’t people who have no idea how to use a computer, it’s people that have very little idea how to use Windows over Apple or occasionally Chromebook. But even then, they usually still know Windows from needing to use it at some point in school. It’s the settings and other little things they struggle with, not the basics.
I have to explain things like how to right click because a lot of people have grown up only using phone/tablets
Or they come from iMac or MacBooks where right clicking is less emphasized as it is on Windows.
Could be, could be. This is just anecdotal on my part where I’ve helped people get up to speed and they’ve told me they basically never used a computer growing up. Maybe they don’t count Chromebooks as part of that group, dunno.
Shit I am a pretty high level electrical engineer, and even I loathe having to use Windows these days. I actually used to be team Microsoft, but have been primarily Linux for more than a decade now, and vastly prefer MacOS as an ssh client, which is mostly what I need a laptop to do.
They’re also market-locked. If you have so little ability to function outside of an app, you become incredibly resistant to moving from one to another unless it’s identical, and you’re incapable of using marginally more complex things.
It also gives immense market control to the app stores, have been allowed to exist mostly unregulated. Thankfully that might be changing.
When everyone must be spoon-fed, that makes the only company selling the spoons insanely wealthy and powerful.
It’s also going to have a degrading effect on popular software overtime. When the only financially viable thing is to make apps for the masses, you are not incentivized to make something extraordinary.
Compare Apple Music to iTunes, just on a software level. Just on the sheet number of things you can do with iTunes, all the nobs and levers, all the abilities it grants a user willing to use it to its max potential. At some point, it no longer became viable to create an excellent piece of software, because most people have no skills or patience or desire to use it.
So you start making things that don’t empower the user, instead you make things that treat them like children, and your products get stupid.
Would be interesting to see if any of these low-level skill folks are actually high (or higher) on mobile skills.
“Mobile skills” are likely still lower skill. Tablets and phones are mostly content consumption devices instead of content creation (photos/videos excluded). Does anyone do serious software development on a phone? How often are mobile users writing papers or prose using only their touchscreen? How many people are doing complicated video edit on an iPhone? Can those tasks be done on a table/phone? Sure, but I don’t think its common.
The reason this is a problem is that it means there is a barrier between deeper computer skills and the devices/environment that people are using daily. The reason many of us became computer savvy on a desktop wasn’t because we wanted to, its because we had to to get the game running we wanted or we had to write the paper we were required to. So being familiar with other uses on a computer, it is only a very mild extension to writing a script if the need arises. The only “new” or “foreign” part is the script, not the environment or interaction of where you’re creating it.
With a tablet/phone as your primary device it means learning not just scripting, but learning all the skills necessary to use a computer. Its a high barrier.
However with their examples you don’t need to write a script, you can solve them that way but you really don’t need to for these examples. This is some basic search refinement skills (Outlook would even help you build this unlike say a Google search with refinement filters) and either a small spreadsheet or a calculator app to max out at their level 3.
Scripting this I would put at a level 4, but I would be interested where the authors of the paper would fit that in as its their research and what sort of percentage would fit into that skill set.
I think scripting is certainly a level 4 activity, since to even get started solving the problem you would need to navigate an IDE and have basic knowledge of a scripting language. Most people wouldn’t even know where to start.
I always wonder how it’s even possible. I can’t do half shit that I do on my computer on my phone. And even if I can, I need to spend like 3x-4x more time because how inefficient touch screen is.
Recently lived like that for a while - until a laptop replacement part arrived. And now I am skeptical. I refuse to believe someone would go mobile-only willingly and long-time. Maybe if they cannot afford a computer, at max.
What do you think all those “hacker” scarecrow movies and alarmist articles and laws were aimed at and caused by?
Modern computers allow one person to do the monthly work of the Soviet Genplan on their home machine in a day if they are smart, in a month if they are average, and Soviet Genplan employed more than one person.
Together with the Internet they make power over masses a much less certain thing.
Except if you poison both, you can not just neuter, but invert the effects.
We still have more and less powerful people in our world.
What I mean is that I don’t think it’s a coincidence that “user-friendly” computing, bloating of the Web and rise of authoritarianism happened with the same intensiveness in the same ~20 years.
I am primarily mobile only, but I am also a Linux user on desktop. I just don’t use the desktop very often because it’s less convenient to have to sit down in front of a desktop or laptop versus just pulling out your phone and checking something. It’s more a, it’s the device I have and it’s always on and I don’t have to go anywhere to get it. As I said though, I’m high in both mobile and desktop because I run Linux and know how to use the command line and I flash custom ROMs on my phone and use primarily open source software. I also submit bugs to many open source, desktop, and mobile applications.
I doubt that. Phones hide even more of the internal infrastructure than PCs do.
I use Arch btw. You should try Arch. Everyone in this post should stop what they’re doing and try Arch. I never go outside.
I need to try Arch sometime… My son says great things about it, If I ever feel like Debian can’t do something I’ll give it a try.
From the tasks described, it seems to me they were not measuring ‘Computer Skills’ as reasoning, patience, tenacity - people could have similar issues with similar tasks involving a pile of papers.
I’ve been reading the book “A Small Matter of Programming” which discusses a bit end users relationships with computers.
I think people who are into computers get surprised to know most people just don’t care about how computers work and they shouldn’t have to. They want software that is easy to use and allows them to complete their task. Ex: a spreadsheet is an incredibly powerful software that hides anything about how computers work but still allow users to create multiple different “apps” by effectively programming.
This is one reason Apple is so successful and a lot of tech users don’t understand it. Apple creates “abstractions” so that end users don’t have to deal with low level details — something they don’t want to. They want to see the machine as a black box that just provides them some service easily and smoothly.
Most of the “decaying” tech skills people say are actually stuff people don’t need to know nowadays. Everything is an abstraction anyway, and most people tinkering with desktop computers aren’t aware of how the graphics software is rendering the screen, for example.
A lot of the decaying skills are things like understanding your computer’s file system (i.e. how folders and files work, where they are, etc.) This kind of skill is definitely still needed if you work in an office environment. It may not be necessary if all you’re doing is being spoon-fed Instagram posts on your phone, but understanding where you saved your files is pretty damn important for most office workers’ day to day jobs (especially with how dogshit Windows’ search functionality is).
Not if Google Drive has anything to say about it. It absolutely grinds my gears how much effort they go to not to tell you where a document is located.
The problem is the software isn’t making it simpler to operate just by abstraction, much of it is by subtraction.
It’s not turning two buttons with individual functions into one, it’s removing a button all together, even for the people that knew how to use it.
The problem with the abstraction is, the more you rely on technology to replace certain skills, the more dependant on it you get, and the tech industry is getting less dependable and increasingly predatory when it comes to the users that are now dependent on them. That dependence also leads to more market entrenchment.
For example, if you don’t know how to manage files, you are trapped forever with iCloud or OneDrive until they create easy ways to transfer everything seamlessly between clouds (and they won’t). That’s bad for users and for the industry overall.
Basically, without the skills, you have to trust the tech companies to guide you by one hand and not stab you with the other, and they are increasingly unworthy of that trust.
I built my entire cloud storage strategy around Google drive because it had very simple integration with my previous seed box provider. Like, I could run Plex from the cloud through them directly off of my Google drive and then mirror that to local storage.
Super slick and easily usable setup. In a push to completely de-google my life the past 2 years I had to figure out an effective migration strategy off of that stack.
It was a total pain in the ass. Not to mention moving the rest of the people on my family plan off of Google as well. The majority of them are fairly tech savvy and even with that in mind we struggled.
I am now 100% self-hosted and learned a shit ton about docker along the way but, I couldn’t imagine trying to do the same thing with a group of entry level users.
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I guess Idiocracy was a documentary after all.
I’ve watched it (EDIT: recently) and frankly it seemed like a future where people stupid, but like me are the majority.
IRL people both stupid and the opposite of me are the majority. That sucks more.
I wonder why user tests aren’t even mentioned once in the article. If you design an interface you have to test it with your audience
It’s not the point of this article. NN group talks a lot about user testing in other articles, IIRC.
Why not? If the starting point of the article is that we can’t design interfaces based on our elitist 5 percenter knowledge then the remedy for that would be…?
Why are you asking me? I didn’t write the article.
Because you said that was not the point of the article and I asked you to clarify why you think it wasn’t. But never mind. This is going nowhere.
Bad phrasing. I read your previous comment as demanding an explanation from me for why the author wrote an article about simple design rather than about user testing.
Honestly, I don’t think the article would have been well-served by detouring into user testing. It’s long enough as it is, and again – NN group has written a LOT on the topic.
I’m not really sure why you brought it up in the first place. It seems like ‘beating a dead horse’ territory.
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.
If one’s made one’s software well, the easiest UI to make is one that’s easy to use
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.
If I’m buying a bus ticket, i shouldn’t have to troubleshoot imo
Hahaha, no way that it could be even worse than what I think. I think almost everyone is an idiot.
No, it definitely is worse than you think, no matter how bad you think it is.
That’s because it’s continually getting worse.
It can’t get worse than assuming everyone can hardly do the most basic shit.
