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
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'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.
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" :)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.