6 ms·

I swear I read the same article about my generation when I entered the workforce, about how millennials were expected to be magic tech wizards by growing with t

I swear I read the same article about my generation when I entered the workforce, about how millennials were expected to be magic tech wizards by growing with the internet through osmosis

commandlinefan 4y ago
This one is a thinly disguised "we need everybody to come back into the office" trojan horse, though.
moonchrome 4y ago
Well if you were on the internet 10-15 years ago you were at least somewhat familiar with computers. These days smartphones mean you can use the internet without ever using a PC. I think the dumbing down of devices will reduce the tinkering in younger generation. I got into programming because I was gifted an old pentium 1 with DOS and QBasic installed - trying to figure out how to play games on it. If someone just gave me a gaming console I'd just be glued to that.
hef19898 4y ago
It is less about being tech savy, it is the "tech" the Gen Z is savy at. And that tech has close to nothing to do with the tech they encounter in the workplace. Maybe in the field of social media ads, but even there the backend of social media might be different from the consumer front end. One problem I have, almost daily which tells me I am getting old, is some people assume they are tech savy because they can handle stuff like MS Teams and Jira or SharePoint, and assume stuff like ERP systems and so on are as easy to understand. And should be as easy to use as social media apps. And simce they either feel they are tech savy, or have serious cases of imposter syndrom because they think everyone expects them to be, refuse to listen to seasoned people. As a result, mistakes are repeated over and over again, e.g. realizing unit-of-measure is important when moving and consuming inventory. Some people seem to prefer to learn the hard way, if so, please do it o your own time, and not that of your employer or co-workers.
chrisco255 4y ago
On average though, we were. The previous generations were slower to use personal computers, cell phones, gaming systems, and the internet. If you had to sit in front of a PC and install 7 discs from DOS in the mid 90s, or navigate the early web before Google, or cracked some $1200 Adobe software that you couldn't afford, or punted someone from an AOL chat room, you got way more technical education than someone that grows up with sleek touch screen mobile devices that self update over wifi and back up everything to the cloud.
- Kon-Peki 4y ago
  > If you had to ..., you got way more technical education than someone that grows up with sleek touch screen mobile devices that self update over wifi and back up everything to the cloud. Maybe a little. But: Us older folks have more technical education because we actually had technical education in school. We had actually schooling where we learned to type, learned to use word processing, to do this and to do that. My grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley and used a computer every day. My father had to do programming on the university mainframe to solve his college psychology homework. We are now in the 4th or 5th generation of workers that are expected to be "tech savvy" at work. But this is the first in which we've completely abandoned the idea of teaching them how to be "tech savvy". And it's not going well. Who would have thought???
  - wink 4y ago
    I don't know how old you are or how close the generations run in your family but this is so far off my reality I've had to reread this. I'm close to 40 and my parents got the first computer just because they had a company and it was to replace an electric typewriter in 94/95. We knew like 3 other families who had a computer. Everything you call technical education was a complete joke when I was in school (mostly the 90s), but yes, my mom learned touch typing on a mechanical typewriter many years ago - but that's about it. (Also I think there was a single person in my parents' generation who had gone to university.) This also kinda matches my experience with my peers of the same age. We learned everything ourselves because computers were fancy and new and we had them in our teenage years.
  - 4y ago
wingely 4y ago
What is it that motivates older generations to diss younger generations? I’m a Millennial, and people love to shit on us, today still, but especially in the 2000s and early 2010s.
- fleddr 4y ago
  What motivates the opposite? It's true that there's always generational tensions, and the funny thing is that people now young are going to do exactly the same thing when they get older. In that sense, it's cyclic. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't discuss gaps or issues unique to a generation. In the interest of the new generation as well as the older ones. I'd say smartphone-addiction is a serious and impactful one. One of my friends owns a wood processing company. These youngsters simply abandon their station (a massive machine) and go take a dump for 30 mins, playing on their phone. Multiple times per day. Simply shutting down production altogether. Another friend owns a logistics company, order picking and such. He doesn't want to take away their phones, tried to solve it with warnings. Yet he keeps finding them hiding in shelves, on their phones. Like heroine addicts. My sister-in-law works in a large grocery store, and reports that this generation calls in sick 4 times more than anybody else. They very regularly simply can't be bothered to show up at all. Earlier young generations were not this broken, unproductive, disloyal, addicted and useless. It's a real and serious issue.
  - wingely 4y ago
    Why must we motivate the opposite when the answers to these conflicts are in front of us? When a younger generation lacks a skill, don’t complain and blame them for it—they’re the ones who are new here—figure out how to train them. When an expectation is violated then interrogate the expectation on both sides of the equation—-many people simply don’t know how to act in certain situations because there wasn’t clear communication from those in power. And if a large enough group exhibits a behavior habitually then don’t make them conform—your workforce has changed and you need to adapt to that for a thriving business. Another thing is that I disagree with the statement that Gen Z is broken. They are as much a product of their time as the generations preceding them. Individuals belonging to older generations need to remember that they had to grow into the person they are today.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> I swear I read the same article about my generation when I entered the workforce me too. But when I got in the tik tok of the time was called IRC and really cool people used Bitchx and double booted Linux and BeOS
- anthonygd 4y ago
  Thank you! I've never been called really cool before :)
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    I wish we really were :D tangentially, it's so strange that the "nerd culture" has only changed in people's perception, but the actual nerd culture of the 80s-90s is still considered something only people with no social skills would appreciate.
yucky 4y ago
It feels like the sweet spot of technical proficiency is younger Gen X + older Millennials who were there early enough before a lot of the underlying nuts and bolts of how things work got hidden away behind a pretty GUI, but also not too old to no longer want to learn how the new things worked.

I swear I read the same article about my generation when I entered the workforce, about how millennials were expected to be magic tech wizards by growing with the internet through osmosis

commandlinefan 4y ago

This one is a thinly disguised "we need everybody to come back into the office" trojan horse, though.

moonchrome 4y ago

Well if you were on the internet 10-15 years ago you were at least somewhat familiar with computers. These days smartphones mean you can use the internet without ever using a PC. I think the dumbing down of devices will reduce the tinkering in younger generation. I got into programming because I was gifted an old pentium 1 with DOS and QBasic installed - trying to figure out how to play games on it. If someone just gave me a gaming console I'd just be glued to that.

hef19898 4y ago

It is less about being tech savy, it is the "tech" the Gen Z is savy at. And that tech has close to nothing to do with the tech they encounter in the workplace. Maybe in the field of social media ads, but even there the backend of social media might be different from the consumer front end. One problem I have, almost daily which tells me I am getting old, is some people assume they are tech savy because they can handle stuff like MS Teams and Jira or SharePoint, and assume stuff like ERP systems and so on are as easy to understand. And should be as easy to use as social media apps. And simce they either feel they are tech savy, or have serious cases of imposter syndrom because they think everyone expects them to be, refuse to listen to seasoned people. As a result, mistakes are repeated over and over again, e.g. realizing unit-of-measure is important when moving and consuming inventory. Some people seem to prefer to learn the hard way, if so, please do it o your own time, and not that of your employer or co-workers.

chrisco255 4y ago

On average though, we were. The previous generations were slower to use personal computers, cell phones, gaming systems, and the internet. If you had to sit in front of a PC and install 7 discs from DOS in the mid 90s, or navigate the early web before Google, or cracked some $1200 Adobe software that you couldn't afford, or punted someone from an AOL chat room, you got way more technical education than someone that grows up with sleek touch screen mobile devices that self update over wifi and back up everything to the cloud.

Kon-Peki 4y ago
> If you had to ..., you got way more technical education than someone that grows up with sleek touch screen mobile devices that self update over wifi and back up everything to the cloud. Maybe a little. But: Us older folks have more technical education because we actually had technical education in school. We had actually schooling where we learned to type, learned to use word processing, to do this and to do that. My grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley and used a computer every day. My father had to do programming on the university mainframe to solve his college psychology homework. We are now in the 4th or 5th generation of workers that are expected to be "tech savvy" at work. But this is the first in which we've completely abandoned the idea of teaching them how to be "tech savvy". And it's not going well. Who would have thought???
- wink 4y ago
  I don't know how old you are or how close the generations run in your family but this is so far off my reality I've had to reread this. I'm close to 40 and my parents got the first computer just because they had a company and it was to replace an electric typewriter in 94/95. We knew like 3 other families who had a computer. Everything you call technical education was a complete joke when I was in school (mostly the 90s), but yes, my mom learned touch typing on a mechanical typewriter many years ago - but that's about it. (Also I think there was a single person in my parents' generation who had gone to university.) This also kinda matches my experience with my peers of the same age. We learned everything ourselves because computers were fancy and new and we had them in our teenage years.
- 4y ago

wingely 4y ago

What is it that motivates older generations to diss younger generations? I’m a Millennial, and people love to shit on us, today still, but especially in the 2000s and early 2010s.

fleddr 4y ago
What motivates the opposite? It's true that there's always generational tensions, and the funny thing is that people now young are going to do exactly the same thing when they get older. In that sense, it's cyclic. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't discuss gaps or issues unique to a generation. In the interest of the new generation as well as the older ones. I'd say smartphone-addiction is a serious and impactful one. One of my friends owns a wood processing company. These youngsters simply abandon their station (a massive machine) and go take a dump for 30 mins, playing on their phone. Multiple times per day. Simply shutting down production altogether. Another friend owns a logistics company, order picking and such. He doesn't want to take away their phones, tried to solve it with warnings. Yet he keeps finding them hiding in shelves, on their phones. Like heroine addicts. My sister-in-law works in a large grocery store, and reports that this generation calls in sick 4 times more than anybody else. They very regularly simply can't be bothered to show up at all. Earlier young generations were not this broken, unproductive, disloyal, addicted and useless. It's a real and serious issue.
- wingely 4y ago
  Why must we motivate the opposite when the answers to these conflicts are in front of us? When a younger generation lacks a skill, don’t complain and blame them for it—they’re the ones who are new here—figure out how to train them. When an expectation is violated then interrogate the expectation on both sides of the equation—-many people simply don’t know how to act in certain situations because there wasn’t clear communication from those in power. And if a large enough group exhibits a behavior habitually then don’t make them conform—your workforce has changed and you need to adapt to that for a thriving business. Another thing is that I disagree with the statement that Gen Z is broken. They are as much a product of their time as the generations preceding them. Individuals belonging to older generations need to remember that they had to grow into the person they are today.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

> I swear I read the same article about my generation when I entered the workforce me too. But when I got in the tik tok of the time was called IRC and really cool people used Bitchx and double booted Linux and BeOS

anthonygd 4y ago
Thank you! I've never been called really cool before :)
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  I wish we really were :D tangentially, it's so strange that the "nerd culture" has only changed in people's perception, but the actual nerd culture of the 80s-90s is still considered something only people with no social skills would appreciate.

yucky 4y ago

It feels like the sweet spot of technical proficiency is younger Gen X + older Millennials who were there early enough before a lot of the underlying nuts and bolts of how things work got hidden away behind a pretty GUI, but also not too old to no longer want to learn how the new things worked.