Ask Lemmy

I feel this is very similar to working on a car. Back in the day they fixed those things up until they crumbled to dust. Pretty much EVERYONE'S dad knew how to do at least a little something on the car. But I didn't. The car was just a tool, not a hobby, my dad would fix things when they went wrong and sometimes I'd help and learn a bit, but other than that, I had it repaired or tagged it for a new one.

Cars were always there and easily accessible, but I had to learn DOS to play video games! Computers are now our dad's cars.

100% this.

I have even noted a huge deterioration since I have been in the IT industry, and that's just been since the mid 2000's

1. People have no idea how to do basic process of elimination troubleshooting anymore.

2. They have no ability to look at logs and extrapolate what could be going on.

3. They don't understand how to use a search engine effectively anymore or how to rapidly filter through large amounts of information to find answers (I have no idea why)

4. The ability to understand how the various bits of tech actually work together and how this is happening seems to be getting more and more lost. So then which things fail people have no idea where to start.

5. More and more products as you said "just work"... Until they don't and give you jack shit to go on.

Basically just "oh... It didn't work, try again later" nothing is more infuriating than something not working and also giving you no information to troubleshoot, it's why I am basically allergic to anything made by Apple in particular but this is becoming more and more the standard.

You’re not alone. The generation raised on the iPhone/iPad struggle to figure out how to use a “real” computer and everything related to it. There’s all sorts of studies about it.

https://futurism.com/gen-z-baffled-basic-technology

Nah, it’s a thing. Youngest of the Millennial generation and I can concur with your comment after being in IT for a few years - pretty much it’s either Baby Boomers or Gen Z people who have a tough time with technology, with a 50/50 shot of a Gen X person being either super tech savvy or a technological troglodyte. AI has also made things worse since it can now do some light coding, but I’ve seen some people use it to code out entire projects only for it to not work properly at all or break UI on websites.

I’d argue that Gen Z is the worst for the same reasoning in your post: everything works OOTB, and if something goes awry then they don’t know anything or can’t do things the old-fashioned way - which at least Baby Boomers have the option to if they want to be stubborn enough.

also companies make anything beyond basic troubleshooting nearly impossible

I hadn't really thought about this before, but it's a pretty good point. Not just the companies who make the tech, but employers and providers seem do just about everything in their power to get you to submit a ticket or (even worse) chat with "support" rather than give you the tools to solve the damn problem yourself.

And the menus/settings you need to make more than superficial changes to your device get buried deeper every year.

There are actually studies already showing this, it’s because they grew up on iPads and apps and everything “just working” or dumbed down. I will look for a source but your anecdote lines up.

Now consumer tech just works. Out of the box you don’t need to tinker or do shit to the stuff.

I have the exact opposite experience , I happen to encounter software glitches nearly every day (especially in shitty apps like Spotify or Todoist) when back in the late 00's/early 10's everything worked as expected (except some occasional Windows blue screens or Linux kernel panics I guess), I guess it's just because how companies design their software for normies and if you happen to use some more advanced features, you will encounter software bugs all the time.

Useful features are removed all the time because apparently marketing departments think that people don't use them, and some of us depend on some things with no real alternatives.

Error messages were also actually helpful back then, nowadays it's just "Something happened" or "Unknown error", good luck finding out what's the problem with that info.

We need to separate early Gen Z (I'd say 1996-2004) from late Gen Z & Gen Alpha. Early Gen Z was born pre-iPad and mostly used desktops and laptops as they grew up, with iPhones and iPads only becoming available later on. I may be biased being born in '02 but when I spoke to my IT teachers even they said that the younger kids were becoming more and more difficult to teach to the basics of using a desktop OS.

i could be thinking this because i grew up around tech but im from 2002 i feel like im WAYYY ahead of the curb for tech problems. NOTHING EVER WORKS and the internet only has solutions that are close to what i need which teaches you how to extrapolate instructions til eventually you hardly need google. making minecraft servers always cause a lot of headache whether it be java not working or port not forwarding. mods not loading or an internet problem causing lag but its a wirlesscard thing not the internet ugh. or just lag in general blah blah

bottom line is im tech support for my friends and my friends are illiterate

Ditto, I have to say I'm appalled on a daily basis how software developers I work with are so foreign with the tools they use to earn a living.

Extremely infuriating as well.

Coming from a simulation software company here, not everyone in my company will know how to deal with servers or IT security and I think it's ok. The programmers and engineers are brilliant, creative thinkers, all highly educated, but some just never bothered to learn this one thing. It's almost offensive how our IT department treat the engineers, as if we'll break anything we touch, but I get it from a security stand point.

As a student, I used to work part time in server maintenance for our uni, that's how I personally got that knowledge. But even people working in the "tech industry" don't all have the same sets of skills or tech interests.