7 ms·

Gen Z Also Doesn't Understand Desktops

21 points by MarcellusDrum 4y ago

sposeray 4y ago
[dead]
capableweb 4y ago
> “Things like scanners and copy machines are complicated,” says Bemiller, who works as a publicist. The first time he had to copy something in the office didn’t exactly go well. “It kept coming out as a blank page, and took me a couple times to realize that I had to place the paper upside-down in the machine for it to work.” Sounds like every experience every human has at least once with a printer or a scanner. Nothing unique for the generation. My experience is that most people who haven't had a IT or Office job since before are relatively clueless the first weeks in their new position, and I've seen that in people from all generations, again nothing unique for "Gen Z".
- gus_massa 4y ago
  I agree. https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ Printers are even more difficult. I have to print sometimes in paper with a nice preprinted frame, and each time I have to make a few test until I find which one of the 4 orientation is the correct one.
  - pluijzer 4y ago
    After some practise I need no more than 5 attempts to nowadays.
  - tomjen3 4y ago
    I print a page on a sheet with the 4 corners marked, then I know how to turn the paper to ensure it gets done right. No more printing on the reverse side of labels.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- flashgordon 4y ago
  Ha hilarious. This took me back to a couple weeks ago, and again a year ago and again another year ago.. as I had to print on my home printer and load paper. I had mentally deconstruct all the printer parts to visualize how the paper would move and turn through it all. Obviously sounds a lot less clumsier than it actually was!
  - ASalazarMX 4y ago
    I was terrified of faxes when I got my first job, and actually managed to avoid faxing something for a couple of years.
h2odragon 4y ago
The offset press and the mimeograph were both document duplication technologies that had long, successful, broad usage. Both died of lack of operators, not lack of machines to operate. The desktop computer has been surpassed by other less flexible data terminals as those older printing technologies were. Similarly, there will be people for whom the fit of capabilities (and lack of need for new investment) will keep the older technologies extant if not vibrant for a long time past their actual economic death. We now live in the world that Sun wanted: a small market for massively expensive "worksations", more market for bigger "servers" with no UI; and commodity, disposable, mostly read only terminals for the masses.
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  Well, the Sun vision was that everyone could remote to a workstation in the cloud using a very cheap almost brainless terminal that understood card based SSO, but that workstation you saw was using the standard UNIX desktop environment with filing systems, clipboards, command lines etc. What we've got now is almost the reverse: we pay for quite expensive machines that have those things and then remote the app UI backwards. The server spends relatively little resources on our requests and doesn't think in terms of pixels at all, whilst our machines spend a lot of resources doing graphical heavy lifting. And instead of all the user's data being brought together in one place (the file system) it's all scattered in different databases the users don't have access to.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    [flagged]
rsynnott 4y ago
I mean, it's not particularly shocking that even young people don't have innate familiarity with the care and feeding of a photocopier.
- capableweb 4y ago
  It would be more shocking if old/young/baby/middle-aged people with 0 experience of copying/printing could nail the process on their first try.
netsharc 4y ago
The reddit post is just some guy ranting/asserting without even a small anecdote as evidence. Oh Gen-Z doesn't understand folders? Oh noes... What a useless HN submission. And they're directories, not folders.
- branon 4y ago
  yeah, commenting "reddit bad" is no less of a faux-pas than linking directly to reddit, especially for something so random that doesn't satisfy any specific intellectual curiosity except by linking to other, much better articles instead it's just redditors vying for upvotes, talking about old news, making the same dozen tired jokes and references they hijack top comment in _every single thread_ to make, possibly with some humorous anecdotes and genuinely useful links mixed in. This is not necessarily what I come to HN to read. The mental strain of separating the wheat from the chaff on reddit is too great so I come here to skip that part. Despite this, I feel that addressing it is mostly nonproductive, and who am I to talk, but all the same, you brought it up so there's my 2 cents - I agree with you.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  We literally just had this discussion yesterday[1], and the reality is most people do not computer. At all. We, and by we I mean us IT enthusiasts and professionals alike, need to realize that we are a small bunch of nerds with highly specialized, rare skills who appear like aliens to the wider public. Most people have far better (in their minds) things to care about than messing with or learning computer, and we need to lower our bar of presumption. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35044693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35044693
dpz 4y ago
I've seen this with a lot of tech and younger people. "Kids" these days are just used to things working and not having to fix things themselves and missing out on getting the better understanding. The only reason I'm in tech at all is from years of running game servers for my friends, fixing my computer, buying something cheap and putting the time in to save a small amount of money.
- capableweb 4y ago
  > I've seen this with a lot of tech and younger people. Everyone has seen this with "younger people" since forever, it is not new at all. Every generation feels like the next one has it easier and is lazier when it comes to fixing things themselves or whatnot. Every person in a generation has said "kids these days are just X" in one way or another, while being guilty of the very same thing themselves when they were younger. People born today are as likely to do all those things you described as you were, it's just a small amount of people in general that does those things in general, so it skews your perspective.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    On that subject, I'm curious what is the "computers" equivalent for Gen Z and Gen Alpha. It would be interesting to know what the hot topic for the next two or three decades actually will be.
    - xypage 4y ago
      Probably AI, regardless of your opinion on its stability/reliability it's definitely the next big thing right now.
  - mwcampbell 4y ago
    I think the best thing we (older generations) can do is just be happy at the evidence of progress, and get out of the way so the younger generations can do things their way. So, for example, I won't try to teach my nieces or nephew programming unless they specifically ask; the generation gap between me and them is much bigger now than it was between my uncle and me in the late 80s.
qwerty456127 4y ago
The majority NEVER understood computers (I mean desktop PCs + servers) and never will. That's Ok. They also don't understand mobile devices but those are designed to be used without understanding.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  It's like cars and manual vs. automatic transmission. We are the stick shift enthusiasts arguing amongst ourselves and crying about how nobody can drive properly. Meanwhile, the people at large just drive a car with automatic transmission without a care in the world because they want to get from Point A to Point B and couldn't give a damn what a car is.
  - qwerty456127 4y ago
    Yes. And there still is (and probably will always be) a room for the people who undetstand the thing and there probably will always be just enough of such people.
  - mike_hearn 4y ago
    It's a bit different. Manual vs automatic transmission doesn't fundamentally alter what you can do with a car. You can still drive from A to B in either type. The only place not knowing manual might trip you up, is if you need to rent a car and they don't have automatics at all. Desktops vs phones is a very different proposition. There are a huge range of tasks that phones/tablets don't do and won't do any time soon. If you can't work a desktop computer then you're going to be unable to achieve many things that society has a critical need for. That's why universities are needing to teach students how to use files and directories but not how to drive manual cars. I read your other comments, you're right that files/folders were never a great metaphor. Recursive objects are unnatural and basically never encountered in real life, so even people who learned how to use files/folders will very often not use nested structures. Tree view widgets don't exist on phones/tablets for the same reasons, more or less, they have famously terrible usability study results. The problem is though, that iOS/Android/ChromeOS simplified their UX not actually by finding ways to make things simpler, but just by getting rid of the ability to do those things at all. Simple things are simple and complex things are out of scope. If these newer platforms represented pure progress in usability we either wouldn't see or wouldn't care about these articles because universities and companies would just use tablets for everything. They can't, primarily because of the choices made by those operating systems. Instead they have to give remedial classes in how to use Windows. It may not matter in the end, these are skills people can learn, it's not a big deal. But I don't think we should see this as being like with cars. It's clearly not. The industry made progress in some areas (simplicity, robustness) but only at the cost of abandoning large parts of what made computing so useful to begin with. It'd be more like if people didn't complain about oil changes anymore because cars had been replaced entirely with public transport. How to build a better "desktop" OS is still an open research problem, in my view.
blastonico 4y ago
This is the result of the quest to make simplistic interfaces. Everything is difficult by default, but you get used to it. It seems that the "Don't make me think" was taken too far.
appleaday1 4y ago
Who are these people keep writing these articles and keep pushing it? The truth is most PEOPLE don't know how anything works, whether its computers, scanners and things that they use daily like cars.
drumhead 4y ago
They dont even know what they look like. My teenage nephews look at my self-build and think the Monitor is the desktop. I had to show them the guts of the tower and point out the various components. They more clued up now and have ambitions to build their own machines, for gaming of course.
- miloignis 4y ago
  I thought the same when I was a kid, decades ago - I posit that cartoons show robots with "Faces" on the monitor, making that the head. Seems reasonable kid-logic that the brain of the computer is in the head!
drewcoo 4y ago
The actual article referenced: https://www.pcgamer.com/young-workers-dont-know-how-to-use-office-printers-scanners-ancient-desktop-pcs/ https://www.pcgamer.com/young-workers-dont-know-how-to-use-o... The thesis: Usability sucks? Blame the user. This is the most backward, asinine take imaginable.
beej71 4y ago
Some students coming into our CS program now don't know what a file is. Why would they? Times are a'changin'...

21 points by MarcellusDrum 4y ago

[dead]

> “Things like scanners and copy machines are complicated,” says Bemiller, who works as a publicist. The first time he had to copy something in the office didn’t exactly go well. “It kept coming out as a blank page, and took me a couple times to realize that I had to place the paper upside-down in the machine for it to work.” Sounds like every experience every human has at least once with a printer or a scanner. Nothing unique for the generation. My experience is that most people who haven't had a IT or Office job since before are relatively clueless the first weeks in their new position, and I've seen that in people from all generations, again nothing unique for "Gen Z".

gus_massa 4y ago
I agree. https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ Printers are even more difficult. I have to print sometimes in paper with a nice preprinted frame, and each time I have to make a few test until I find which one of the 4 orientation is the correct one.
- pluijzer 4y ago
  After some practise I need no more than 5 attempts to nowadays.
- tomjen3 4y ago
  I print a page on a sheet with the 4 corners marked, then I know how to turn the paper to ensure it gets done right. No more printing on the reverse side of labels.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
flashgordon 4y ago
Ha hilarious. This took me back to a couple weeks ago, and again a year ago and again another year ago.. as I had to print on my home printer and load paper. I had mentally deconstruct all the printer parts to visualize how the paper would move and turn through it all. Obviously sounds a lot less clumsier than it actually was!
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  I was terrified of faxes when I got my first job, and actually managed to avoid faxing something for a couple of years.

h2odragon 4y ago

The offset press and the mimeograph were both document duplication technologies that had long, successful, broad usage. Both died of lack of operators, not lack of machines to operate. The desktop computer has been surpassed by other less flexible data terminals as those older printing technologies were. Similarly, there will be people for whom the fit of capabilities (and lack of need for new investment) will keep the older technologies extant if not vibrant for a long time past their actual economic death. We now live in the world that Sun wanted: a small market for massively expensive "worksations", more market for bigger "servers" with no UI; and commodity, disposable, mostly read only terminals for the masses.

mike_hearn 4y ago
Well, the Sun vision was that everyone could remote to a workstation in the cloud using a very cheap almost brainless terminal that understood card based SSO, but that workstation you saw was using the standard UNIX desktop environment with filing systems, clipboards, command lines etc. What we've got now is almost the reverse: we pay for quite expensive machines that have those things and then remote the app UI backwards. The server spends relatively little resources on our requests and doesn't think in terms of pixels at all, whilst our machines spend a lot of resources doing graphical heavy lifting. And instead of all the user's data being brought together in one place (the file system) it's all scattered in different databases the users don't have access to.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  [flagged]

rsynnott 4y ago

I mean, it's not particularly shocking that even young people don't have innate familiarity with the care and feeding of a photocopier.

capableweb 4y ago
It would be more shocking if old/young/baby/middle-aged people with 0 experience of copying/printing could nail the process on their first try.

netsharc 4y ago

The reddit post is just some guy ranting/asserting without even a small anecdote as evidence. Oh Gen-Z doesn't understand folders? Oh noes... What a useless HN submission. And they're directories, not folders.

branon 4y ago
yeah, commenting "reddit bad" is no less of a faux-pas than linking directly to reddit, especially for something so random that doesn't satisfy any specific intellectual curiosity except by linking to other, much better articles instead it's just redditors vying for upvotes, talking about old news, making the same dozen tired jokes and references they hijack top comment in _every single thread_ to make, possibly with some humorous anecdotes and genuinely useful links mixed in. This is not necessarily what I come to HN to read. The mental strain of separating the wheat from the chaff on reddit is too great so I come here to skip that part. Despite this, I feel that addressing it is mostly nonproductive, and who am I to talk, but all the same, you brought it up so there's my 2 cents - I agree with you.
Dalewyn 4y ago
We literally just had this discussion yesterday[1], and the reality is most people do not computer. At all. We, and by we I mean us IT enthusiasts and professionals alike, need to realize that we are a small bunch of nerds with highly specialized, rare skills who appear like aliens to the wider public. Most people have far better (in their minds) things to care about than messing with or learning computer, and we need to lower our bar of presumption. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35044693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35044693

dpz 4y ago

I've seen this with a lot of tech and younger people. "Kids" these days are just used to things working and not having to fix things themselves and missing out on getting the better understanding. The only reason I'm in tech at all is from years of running game servers for my friends, fixing my computer, buying something cheap and putting the time in to save a small amount of money.

capableweb 4y ago
> I've seen this with a lot of tech and younger people. Everyone has seen this with "younger people" since forever, it is not new at all. Every generation feels like the next one has it easier and is lazier when it comes to fixing things themselves or whatnot. Every person in a generation has said "kids these days are just X" in one way or another, while being guilty of the very same thing themselves when they were younger. People born today are as likely to do all those things you described as you were, it's just a small amount of people in general that does those things in general, so it skews your perspective.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  On that subject, I'm curious what is the "computers" equivalent for Gen Z and Gen Alpha. It would be interesting to know what the hot topic for the next two or three decades actually will be.
  - xypage 4y ago
    Probably AI, regardless of your opinion on its stability/reliability it's definitely the next big thing right now.
- mwcampbell 4y ago
  I think the best thing we (older generations) can do is just be happy at the evidence of progress, and get out of the way so the younger generations can do things their way. So, for example, I won't try to teach my nieces or nephew programming unless they specifically ask; the generation gap between me and them is much bigger now than it was between my uncle and me in the late 80s.

qwerty456127 4y ago

The majority NEVER understood computers (I mean desktop PCs + servers) and never will. That's Ok. They also don't understand mobile devices but those are designed to be used without understanding.

Dalewyn 4y ago
It's like cars and manual vs. automatic transmission. We are the stick shift enthusiasts arguing amongst ourselves and crying about how nobody can drive properly. Meanwhile, the people at large just drive a car with automatic transmission without a care in the world because they want to get from Point A to Point B and couldn't give a damn what a car is.
- qwerty456127 4y ago
  Yes. And there still is (and probably will always be) a room for the people who undetstand the thing and there probably will always be just enough of such people.
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  It's a bit different. Manual vs automatic transmission doesn't fundamentally alter what you can do with a car. You can still drive from A to B in either type. The only place not knowing manual might trip you up, is if you need to rent a car and they don't have automatics at all. Desktops vs phones is a very different proposition. There are a huge range of tasks that phones/tablets don't do and won't do any time soon. If you can't work a desktop computer then you're going to be unable to achieve many things that society has a critical need for. That's why universities are needing to teach students how to use files and directories but not how to drive manual cars. I read your other comments, you're right that files/folders were never a great metaphor. Recursive objects are unnatural and basically never encountered in real life, so even people who learned how to use files/folders will very often not use nested structures. Tree view widgets don't exist on phones/tablets for the same reasons, more or less, they have famously terrible usability study results. The problem is though, that iOS/Android/ChromeOS simplified their UX not actually by finding ways to make things simpler, but just by getting rid of the ability to do those things at all. Simple things are simple and complex things are out of scope. If these newer platforms represented pure progress in usability we either wouldn't see or wouldn't care about these articles because universities and companies would just use tablets for everything. They can't, primarily because of the choices made by those operating systems. Instead they have to give remedial classes in how to use Windows. It may not matter in the end, these are skills people can learn, it's not a big deal. But I don't think we should see this as being like with cars. It's clearly not. The industry made progress in some areas (simplicity, robustness) but only at the cost of abandoning large parts of what made computing so useful to begin with. It'd be more like if people didn't complain about oil changes anymore because cars had been replaced entirely with public transport. How to build a better "desktop" OS is still an open research problem, in my view.

blastonico 4y ago

This is the result of the quest to make simplistic interfaces. Everything is difficult by default, but you get used to it. It seems that the "Don't make me think" was taken too far.

appleaday1 4y ago

Who are these people keep writing these articles and keep pushing it? The truth is most PEOPLE don't know how anything works, whether its computers, scanners and things that they use daily like cars.

drumhead 4y ago

They dont even know what they look like. My teenage nephews look at my self-build and think the Monitor is the desktop. I had to show them the guts of the tower and point out the various components. They more clued up now and have ambitions to build their own machines, for gaming of course.

miloignis 4y ago
I thought the same when I was a kid, decades ago - I posit that cartoons show robots with "Faces" on the monitor, making that the head. Seems reasonable kid-logic that the brain of the computer is in the head!

drewcoo 4y ago

The actual article referenced: https://www.pcgamer.com/young-workers-dont-know-how-to-use-office-printers-scanners-ancient-desktop-pcs/ https://www.pcgamer.com/young-workers-dont-know-how-to-use-o... The thesis: Usability sucks? Blame the user. This is the most backward, asinine take imaginable.

beej71 4y ago

Some students coming into our CS program now don't know what a file is. Why would they? Times are a'changin'...