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
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.
> 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???
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.
If your grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley, and your dad programmed a university mainframe, you aren't representative of the general public. The general public didn't really start to adopt personal computers en masse until the 90s. And if you look at, for example, conversations between David Letterman and Bill Gates regarding the internet in the 1995 (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tgODUgHeT5Y), and Gates tries to explain to him the advantage of it and David pans that he doesn't get it, with the audience laughing along to dismissive jokes about it being unnecessary complexity versus radio and cassette tapes. That was the prevailing attitude regarding computers even well into the 90s (now, they're pervasive).
> If your grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley, and your dad programmed a university mainframe, you aren't representative of the general public.
Hey, maybe so. But as it turned out, I went to pretty-damn-bad public school in the rust belt. We had those Acer clones of the Apple II in every classroom starting in kindergarten/first grade. We learned to type and played math and word games. And then IBM PC clones in the school library in middle school and high school, learning WordPerfect on DOS because they made special writing assignments just so we had to use a computer.
And in my working class neighborhood, where a house cost about $50,000 in 1990, about every other family had a Commodore 64 or better.
David Letterman made a career out of acting dumb for laughs. That's what he did.
That exchange between him and Gates was him acting dumb so that Gates could hit a home run, and Gates whiffed. To record a radio-broadcast baseball game with a tape recorder, somebody needed to be physically located within the broadcast range of the station at the time of the broadcast. And then stop and start the recording between half-innings just to have any hope of fitting the whole game on a single cassette. And then get the cassette to you, wherever you are. The internet broadcast eliminated all of those constraints. I appreciate watching that video clip, it demonstrates just how little Gates understood the potential of the internet in those "early days" :)
Fair- I did have all those experiences and perhaps they taught me to tinker with tech. But I really wasn’t magically good with configuring the printer, excel and photoshop though, but my first job assumed that I would be and I had to learn it because everyone else assumed I would be more efficient at it or something. I think this is the dominant effect that these articles get written about, older people expecting instant learning from younger people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No. The workplace isn't there to teach you basic discipline, good faith effort, self-control over your urges and basic reliability. These things are to be expected from the very start. For every generation. This is the first to fail this lowest of all tests.
There are no mysteries here about what to do or how to behave. When you work at a place, you do the work. You show up and do the work. That's it. It's not a skill problem, it's a behavioral problem.
Are there larger forces at work causing this? Yes. Overprotective and distant parenting. Pampering. Addictive tech. Zero effort convenience services. No hardships. No accountability. No social skills. Spending 18 years of your life on easy mode, and then being plunged into the real world.
I think we fundamentally disagree about this. Teaching those skills is what an entry level job is supposed to do for someone. Then they level up, make mistakes, and learn some more as they gain experience in their profession.
It sounds like the argument you are pushing is that anyone but the business owner is at fault for what employees know and how they behave. While some of that is true, it’s disingenuous to demand that employees will come in knowing what a business owner expects out of them or have the context specific skills to do a job. Reflect on your own experiences here. Can you genuinely state that your personal work history shows a perfect employee who always knew what to do? C’mon. Be real.
We're talking about a job where you attend a machine, feed it things and push 3 buttons. We're talking about picking orders. Here's the order. Collect it. And do this for 8 hours per day.
I started doing simple jobs at the age of 11. Here's a car. Wash it. Here's bricks, bring them to the brick laying guy. I think I would have understood those concepts at the age of 6.
There's no unclarity about expectations. A job surely is not some alien concept where at the age of 18 the very idea of work is unheard of?
It's not a skill issue, it's work ethic, and behavior. You're paid to work, not to be on your phone.
That’s a cute reduction, but the case being made doesn’t account for workers being humans in an ever evolving society. A job is, in fact, an alien concept to someone who has never had one before. And even people who have had jobs may have never been trained in a way that works for all employers. You’re making a moral judgment against the people with the least power in the employer-employee relationship. If a business owner wants the big bucks then their work ethic should be reflected in the training and care they take when bringing in new employees. What you’re talking about is closer to slavery than employment.
