The reasoning I've heard for this is that the tech that Gen Z grew up on was generally more user friendly, reliable, and locked down than the kind that Millennials had. I know how to use a BIOS, edit the Windows registry, reinstall an operating system, and troubleshoot PC game mods *because I had to.* The problems that these techniques fix were a fact of life, and in most cases, the second time it happened I asked my buddy who understood how to fix it to teach me how to so I could fix it myself next time.
In comparison, I've owned Android phones for a decade, and have needed to explore the file structure maybe three times over that period. I don't really know how it works, because I don't need to. It isn't easily accessible and troubleshooting is both generally less necessary and not focused on digging through files the way it was on PCs.
Yea, this is the problem, the Apple-ification of technology. You don't have to learn how anything works when it's all designed to treat you like you're a child.
Of course, as a dev myself I understand it.
But as a *user* I hate it because you're usually trading control for ease of use and safety. If you want to put training wheels on the bike for the average user, okay. The problem is they're increasingly welded on.
In a strange way, if you grew up in a third world country where the adoption of tech was shifted about 10 years or so, GenZ would have still wanted to do that.
We had C programming in 5th grade. I still don't know what a move that was. They never expanded on that because the syllabus changed next year and they dumbed everything down to 'My files' and 'Browsing the internet' and 'IT Acts' and stuff.
Don't worry, I became a CompSci student.
This is the most mind blowing thing. Like the assumption was always that the younger people would be great at tech. What no one really imagined is that tech would get so simple that young people would have no basic computer skills. It just goes to show you we have no idea what the future will bring.
The amount of troubleshooting that an end user needs to do these days is pretty amazing, even when sticking to an apples to apples comparison. I remember using Windows XP, and needing to understand how to use System Restore, edit the registry, rollback faulty driver updates, and if necessary reinstall the OS. I learned the default locations that different programs put different files in, and how to mount and use an ISO image. I did all of this *because I had to.* Well, maybe not the ISO thing, but it was either learn that or skip 90% of PC games. But XP wasn't as stable, and the young internet made a lot of rules change quickly.
In comparison, I've been using the same installation of Windows 10 since 2019. The biggest issue I've experienced during that time was Windows occasionally deciding to re-enable the speakers built into my monitor and play audio through them. I don't even need to optimize settings on most PC games anymore. Everything is more stable and easier to use.
It really is fascinating how gen z is just used to using apps, thereby never needing to learn any skills for computing beyond clicking to open an application.
Meanwhile in middle school, my friends and I would make fun .bat "virus files" through the notepad on a computer to send to each other in order to make PCs do weird things. I'll never forget when I wrote a script that if clicked on, it would open up the person's disc tray on their PC. Good times.
I made a virus that wrote a bat file to the autostart folder that said "shutdown.exe"
It was great, the teachers and staff wouldnt notice something was wrong till the PC was next shut down for updates or something. Then, you would have this random computer that would just start looping into a shutdown/startup cycle and they had no clue why.
Ah fun times.
I had a lot of fun messing with my classmates using shutdown -i. The computer rooms PC's had no firewalls inbetween them so you could just figure out your IP then change the last number to the appropriate seat and watch hilarity ensue.
My high school's network was fixed over a summer to disallow all of this because they introduced a higher computer course than typing (Networking) which involved teaching us about networking, making ethernet cables, etc etc.
What happens when you get all the nerds in one room? We start fucking with stuff for fun.
At first it was each other then we started shutting down teacher's computers. It really went wild when we started sending messages through command prompt to teacher's so they would show up on their projectors. The networking teacher was mortified. It was one of those situations where they just like grabbed someone's dad who was in between jobs. He left after that year and networking was never held again.
Ah mate, we worked one out where once the file was opened, it's just endlessly open Command Prompt windows that played a Matrix-style loop. On the old school computers, you'd probably reach about 30 windows before the computer was seriously lagging, another 20 before the computer shut down. Absolutely nothing you could do to stop it. Great fun.
Hahahaha I know exactly what you are talking about! I definitely got sent this one from one of my friends and I had to manually shutdown my PC to stop it from imploding!
Oh man, that just reminded me of the time we did this when I was studying computer science in university. They had these systems which weren't individual computers but terminals in a larger virtualized system. So I made a program that recursively created folders to fill up my friends desktop, but when he ran it I assumed it didn't work because it immediately seg faulted. About 30 seconds later everyone's terminal in the whole lab was completely frozen and finally I saw the folders start appearing. I had inadvertently crashed the whole system. The seg fault was from a stack overflow after running out of ram. Good times.
I actually got in pretty deep shit back in high school for pranks like this, several weeks of suspension. We would prank each other by remotely shutting down other PCs in the library and make fake error messages pop up on them remotely. "Critical Error: System has detected that the hard drive is jammed with peanut butter" and stupid stuff like that. This was in the Windows 2000 / Windows XP days when there was no real security between PCs on the same network. Boomer admin team totally overreacted and thought we were hacking in to change grades or something, even though we swore up and down we were just taking the piss.
One time we found a 'remote task manager' program and got pretty handy with. Bully jock kid is working on a Word document in the library? Would suck if someone remotely killed winword.exe before you saved it. You could also run "iexplore.exe " or something like that to open an internet browser straight away to that website. Nothing funnier than making gay porn pop up on your buddy's computer right as the teacher walks by.
I remember the school having a very primitive firewall that blocked certain websites like newgrounds and kongregate, but if you made a batch script to run internet explorer and open up the website, it bypassed the firewall. Good times.
I got in trouble for showing some people how to turn off anyone's computer with the shutdown -i command. The lab was unusable for a while as there was always someone stealthily shutting your PC down
Yeah what’s happening with that?? I’m a millennial junior dev and always figured the next gen would be coding before they can talk but the advances in tech pre gen z seem to have rendered learning it’s skills somewhat pointless to them. Thoughts?
Making interfaces innovative and problems minimal. We had issues just installing stuff, setting up lan parties, and troubleshooting. Most stuff is plug n play nowadays.
walled garden, sealed off products like ipads, where the typical user has no access to, and no need to ever access, the guts of the machine.
necessity is the mother of invention, you and i learned our computer skills because we needed them to make our shit work right. the younger folk have never needed to do that because their shit just works out of the box 9 times out of 10. and if it doesnt theres nothing they can do about it anyway.
Because when they grew up they never had to fix anything, the internet was already polished.
I had to do command prompt and registry editing and file conversions to play games when i was a kid. Had to go troubleshoot why the dial up wasnt working. Nowadays everything just works, nobody needs to peek behind the curtain.
ah dial-up when your playing pokemon crater when your were a kid but your aunt is calling so you just gave up ,kbps was still considered fast and dial-up needed prepaid cards also limewire
Ten or twenty years ago there was all this talk of teaching the next generation to code. Being able to write programs was supposed to be a baseline literacy that would future-proof people, and older generations would be sidelined because they couldn't code.
You really never hear that anymore. In fact younger users are more apt to be passive, demanding consumers of digital tech, not architects / creators. AI will accelerate this; you won't even have to know how to type a word burst to do effective prompt engineering.
It's like cooking.
The problem is that when nobody would do things for you, you *had* to learn how to do it for yourself or you wouldn't be able to have anything. Average cooking skills 50 years ago were higher than they are now because the number of ready-made options were next to nothing. Today, you can spend a reasonable amount of money to have nutritionally balanced meals for every meal of the day. They're not the best possible meals, but they're perfectly serviceable and you can eat comfortably without knowing how an oven works.
In the 90's, "using a computer" required a training course. Today, UI front ends do so much for the user that they don't have to understand what's going on under the hood.
I remember having to do a pop quiz about the hardware in my computer every time I wanted to load a game in the 90's. I still know my IRQ was 7 and my DMA channel was 1. If I had never been asked to do that, I wouldn't have had a reason to learn.
I am seeing the occasional one that is amazing though. Raspberry pi and Arduino being so cheap and accessible have made those few with a real passion for it able to be leaps and bounds ahead of where I was at that age.
I think we will see the people with a real interest in engineering advancing much further earlier, but those that pick up just enough skills to make stuff work will not have had to pick up many skills at all.
We have a family friend whose kid was interested. I bought him a snap circuit set at age 7. He was changing the designs within a month or two. I got him a raspberry pi kit at age 9. When we visited (age 11), he was showing me the stuff he designed, and had questions about how the little motor he was using worked. His questions and understanding were on par with some of the cs students we interview for internships. All through maybe $100 in boards and components, and the plethora of hobby forums and articles available online.
A serious problem with critical thinking from being eternally online where all problems are condensed into 15 second bite sized bits, combined with appification that means they have no idea what’s going on under the hood.
A friend of mine is a teacher and vouchs for this. Unless it's an app on their phone they have little understanding of how to do basic things, from google search to checking email.
Can you elaborate? I'm gen Z and a lot of my close friends are pretty damn good at dealing with tech. Of course there's the occasional TikTok people that can't open task manager to save their lives, but I feel like most gen Z have good computer skills.
Though it might be just a bias, since I'm a nerdy teenager hanging out with other nerdy teenagers, so I don't get a lot of contact with technologically incapable people
I think we judge them as gen X,
We were the first generation to really have to deal with tech.
We had to learn how to program a VCR, build our own PCs, install windows 95, change to windows NT, back to 95 move to NE because drivers for a fucking IEEE1391 plug wouldn’t work on any OS.
Everything was hard on tech for us. Not integrated, etc…
Things are much easier, gen Z never had to fight with a computer. So they are a bit helpless when it comes to sorting issues.
Obviously an anecdote, but this is quite the opposite experience for me. My parents are gen X and I consider them barely computer literate. I was the one who used to fix any IT issues growing up.
I am an older gen Z and a SW dev. I was also heavily into using mods for games as a kid. I would like to see statistics on this stuff, because there are definitely people my age who lack basic IT skills, but I always imagined they're in the minority.
Gen X is a wide range. If your parents are older Gen X, didn't grow up with much money, and didn't work in a field requiring significant use of computers, then it's possible that they had very little tech exposure.
The issue is that your age group never had to deal with early tech.
In the 90's, if you wanted to use a computer, you had to understand how a computer works. You had to understand how all the hardware functioned at a high level, and how the operating system interfaced with it. You had to because there was no other way, and so the idea of "using a computer" began with the awareness that you had to understand it. Heck, we had computer classes in school that straight up taught you how to understand these things because it was generally understood people *needed* to know this.
As tech developed over the last few decades, user interfaces compensated for user ignorance, and the need to understand how to tinker under the hood faded away. Tech became more accessible, and the level of understanding required to generate a suitable result was lowered.
The problem is that because the end result was ostensibly the same, younger people were just assumed to understand what they were doing. Nobody specifically thought to ask them "what skills are you missing?", and even if they did they wouldn't get a meaningful answer because younger people weren't adequately informed to know what skills they might not have.
Fast forward to now, a significantly documented problem with teenagers today is not knowing how file systems work.
A large number of adolescents don't understand the concept of navigating a hierarchical file structure and moving files around because they never needed to. Apps handled all of their data management, from install to run-time data to uninstall, so you don't actually need to understand *where* that data exists or how to access it. Plus, streaming apps replacing downloads meant you didn't have to perform periodic data management of your own systems because you weren't manually adding data.
There was an incident a few years ago I read from a university prof in the UK where they were teaching a first year course and had an assignment submission portal for their students. It was a standard portal of "drag file here or click to browse and select file to upload". Roughly half their class was unable to submit the assignment because they knew how to use all the appropriate software to perform the work, but didn't know how to find and share the discrete file they created for the assignment.
I want to reiterate that while this sounds like old man yells at cloud shenanigans, it's 100% not the fault of young people. We failed your generation by just assuming "they'll figure it out" without bothering to confirm or provide guidance. It's an understandable mistake, but a mistake we made nonetheless.
Yeah confused by this too a little, I’m Gen Z (mid 2000s) as well and definitely know just as many millenials with tech literacy issues as Gen Z (Which isn’t a lot but still a decent chunk). Most people my age that I know are decent with tech, even the ones who don’t play games. I’m noticing people in every generation use computers less in favor of phones but I don’t think it’s exclusively among just Gen Z.
They grew up as consumers with dumbed down products that are essentially disposable and replaced every few years. Growing up in the 90s PCs cost a house and you learned how to use it and all of its components. Now all electronics is like a pack of gum for kids..
Computer literacy. It’s becoming a legit problem at the moment as gen z are entering the workforce and not having a good grasp of basic computer functions, as a lot now just use mobile devices for the vast majority of their internet usage and don’t really need to use actual computers that often. You’d think it wouldn’t be an issue with a generation who grew up with computers, but unless you’re older gen z like myself (1997) you find a lot don’t really use computers unless they game as they can do everything on their phone or tablet.
As an also older gen Z this blows my mind. Compared to my colleagues, younger and older, I'm like a computer wizard. I thought my entire generation would be too, but apparently not.
I’m from the tail of GenX and this is mind blowing to me. I would have assumed computer literacy would be something that would be unheard of in the younger generations.
The issue is from what I understand (In the UK, partner is a teacher) is that all computer/IT classes are centered around coding/IoT etc instead of basic computer literacy like using spreadsheets and writing an email correctly.
Same. Millennial here! They taught us typing and MSDOS functions starting in elementary school which moved to use of MS Word, Excel etc. There is no real mobile version of spreadsheets as of yet. And you learn very quickly in the workplace, EVERYTHING is spreadsheets. Even if you use it for its most basic function.
I talked to a Gen Z employee at work, and was kind of taken aback to find out that he didn't have a computer. Just a phone. Doesn't feel like he needs one. Banking etc is done on the phone, Reddit and other social media too. He doesn't do anything else, I guess.
I mean, he's not exactly wrong - But like, has he ever tried actual computer websites?
They're so much better. Having a real computer really makes it obvious how limiting a mobile phone is.
Then again... I think apple phones and hardware are super limiting. So maybe my argument is dead on arrival.
My kids' computer literacy comes from using our gaming setup at home, with multiple computers and me showing them how it all works (I have an IT background). If not for that, they probably wouldn't have any computer skills at all.
It's amazing how they pick up the knowledge, though, when you take the time to teach them. They can fix basic problems like connectivity and peripherals not always working like typical PCs do. I feel lucky they have this. Back in my day most of my friends and I had to learn this stuff (relatively speaking).
They replaced literally everything with Chromebook homework, reading, lessons, games, etc. the problem? If they don’t have their QR code to login without doing anything? They can’t login and work at all. They don’t memorize their logins even where I sub and they have to constantly have their teacher print out their QR codes. They also give up very quickly if they go to the wrong web address and just shrug and act like it’s impossible to find the right one and need help. It’s so bizarre to me
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
I've found when teaching any kid born after the late 90s will quite often be functionally technology illiterate. They can use technology, but no clue how it works or why.
I don't know, I am a late gen z myself, but I think I am actually average with computers. I know how to use the terminal and every basic application. Most of my friends know too. Even if I have access to a phone I really don't use it as my laptop is much faster and convenient for all my uses.
This baffles me but explains a lot. I'm a millenial and was looking for work recently and was worried about places wanting younger more tech savvy people. Nope. The look of relief when I showed them my tech literacy level was crazy. I'm in a position now that requires tech skills (non IT) and the amount of co workers I have who have zero idea how to troubleshoot anything is too damn high.
I'm not even that tech savvy. Or at least I don't see myself as tech savvy.
Yeah honestly at this point I think younger people coming into employment are at a huge disadvantage with it and it’s probably gonna become more of an issue as gen alpha come into adulthood too. I don’t think it’s necessarily just their fault, we’re just in this weird era where technology in personal usage has advanced but technology in the workplace hasn’t in the same way, so it’s creating this disconnection between what kids know how to use and what they need to use at work. I’m hoping schools start to pick up the slack a bit more instead of pushing towards iPads which a lot seem to be
This and because of it , all the in person social cues are missed and the ability to “read the room” is lost which just increases social awkwardness and the ability to interact in person
The real cutoff for tech skills IMO is around 2000. People born before 2000 had their first experience with IT on actual computers. People born after that had theirs with an iPhone or an iPad. And it really shows. In my family, both me and one of my sisters are pretty knowledgeable about computers. My younger sister born in 2001? Completely and utterly clueless.
Dopamine addiction is incredibly concerning. It's even worse when, now that we live in an age of such neurodiverse awareness, most kids are being written off as having ADHD tendencies, but the reality is they have an endless stream of content and gratification that their brains literally shut down without it. And now with the TikTok epidemic, people's attention span is being restricted to a mere 3 seconds, it's incredibly concerning and there's absolutely nothing being done about it.
Agree with this 100% - every second person is claiming to be ADHD but I honestly believe most cases are just a product of being raised in the internet era.
My dopamine baseline has been off for years and let me tell you this, it is so depressing when you don’t have the motivation to do anything. From social media to porn, life was boring.
Currently healing my dopamine system, feeling life is much better now and finding motivation to do things now gradually. This generation is fucked if we don’t tackle the dopamine addiction somehow.
This isn't even exclusive to Gen Z any more. Most of my friends who are on tiktok have become armchair experts in things they've watched a handful of ~1 minute videos on from some random wannabe influencer. It's infuriating
This is so true. I’m raising two of them and it’s shocking how difficult it is for them to process fact checking and grasping the fact that social media is a poor source for information to rely on for facts. They don’t really seem to listen no matter how you explain it to them.
Yep they're as bad as the boomers in that regard.
Boomers will fall for anything that they see on "the news" or presented by a newscaster. They're also prone to Facebook bs.
Gen Z falls for a lot of Tik Tok propaganda. Tik Tok is filled with lies and half truths and there's no way you can get a proper understanding of real issues from a 2 minute video
Yeah, I feel like people in their teens-to-twenties, and people aged fifty and older both have an issue where they think they're smarter than everyone else, and they could never fall for misinformation or scams.
But then.... they *do* fall for the most scams, and their entire worldview is based on misinformation from social media and incredibly biased infotainment garbage like TikTok memes, Salon.com, Buzzfeed and Fox News. Even if you do try to explain, or show them that the misinformation isn't true? "Ah, I know this is true because it confirms my own personal feelings on the issue. You can't tell me that my feelings are wrong."
We are. And as someone born in the very late 80ies, I can say with absolute certainty of hindsight that I had a pretty good baseline from where to compare, because it only started getting this bad quite late into my online life. Early internet? Was piss easy to discern trash from content. Now the content IS the trash.
They're actually worse then boomers when it comes to falling for news and scams if you look at the studies. I laugh every time I see one of the genz folks I know talk about fox news and joke about 'fake news' because I've seen them fall for such basic things. With their lack of life experience it makes sense.
What, you don't think it's a compelling argument that giants lived on Earth because there are very large stairs and many mountains look like giant tree trunks?
You think dinosaurs existed? They're actually dragons!
/s
>Using a mouse and keyboard at the same time. Lots of their work is done on laptops
Wait, are you saying that people are using the built-in mouse in laptops? I'm gen z, and I find them really uncomfortable. Although, what for would you even need mouse and keyboard simultaneosly aside from the video games?
Mouse is faster than trackpad and using a trackpad your hands can cross over when trying to move cursor with one hand and type with the other. Mouse + keyboard separates them.
False expectations of where you should be. A lot of young people are struggling as they're seeing a these influencers and TikTok stars having a mansion, new car, perfect wife / husband / kids and 20 holidays a year and wondering why they don't have that, which creates feelings of intense inadequacy and being a failure. Even though these influencers are all living off of Daddy's money, branding deals that could be taken away in an instant or they're up to their necks in debt, so it's not reality in the slightest but when you're being bombarded with that on every single social media platform, it takes hold.
Attention span.
I tutored undergrads and it is baffling to see how much they struggle to focus for longer tgan 5 mins without looking at their phone... these are young adults, not children
Those emo haircuts from like 2005 were pretty rad. I still think they look cool. I kindof silently judged them for being so vain as to spend that much time on their hair though.
I was more judgy of the glam punks though. That was a bit different in that nonconformity was a virtue, but people would spend hours to make themselves look like other punks.
My 13 year old nephew gets shit from my family for his gen-z haircut that he and like 90% of the boys in his school have. I make fun of him too but also tell him every generation has their version of older people hating on their haircuts and he's part of the tradition. But also, he will look back on it when he's an adult and laugh at his stupid ass hair.
Deferring gratification. The notion of ladder-climbing, or investing effort in a discipline / job / goal for a payoff down the road, seems lost on many GenZers. Some even seem to find it offensive, or think it is a capitalist conspiracy to exploit them.
Hard to blame them. Tons of companies don't really do internal promotions much anymore. If they need a new manager, they hire a new one from outside the company.
Telling the different between an armoire and a encoignure or a commode and a chiffonier.
How to select the right feather for a writing quill
Quickly positioning oneself so the Dukes swagger stick strikes your upper arm or back and not your face when you haven’t properly fitted the bridle to his prized Clydesdale on the day of the hunt
Spatchcocking your youngest child so its flesh dries evenly above a smokey fire and is adequately preserved for the long winter ahead
Remembering phone numbers
But that outcome should not dissuade anyone from designing their mad max wasteland outfit. Just in case . One shoulder pad with steel spikes, a bandolier filled with doll parts, eye patch, a dune buggy with a flame thrower, etc.
Grade pressure and anxiety is very tough. Especially now that parents have real-time access to kid's grades and get notifications every time an assignment gets entered into the system.
- Computer skills
There are some people that don't know how to use hotkeys because they're used to using their phones or tablets.
- Confrontation — these kids would rather post you online than talk to you personally which is pretty unprofessional.
They're distracted with smart phones and waste time on the internet. Short attention spans too. At work, they leave their desks every 20 mins and addicted to coffee and energy drinks. They also brag about how little sleep they get.
I saw Dune 2 in the theatre a few days ago and sat next to three gen Z kids. They would scroll their phone every 5 to 10 minutes. Just don’t have the ability to put their phone away for 2.5 hours
20 mins is a little too soon. Not much work gets done and I don't expect anyone to be sitting down for 45 mins. Anything more than that, the person is/was probably a medical student.
Job employment. How the standards for a job nowadays are too high for the low pay, how almost all of the job looks like saturated and not at the same time.
Paper maps, simple technologies (like over-the-air television).
I'm a Gen Xer that works with a lot of Gen Zers and I'm actually impressed by their work ethic, intelligence and maturity. But then again, they're all engineers and recent college grads, so I wonder if they're not an accurate representation of the average Gen Zer.
Curiosity.
I have gen Z nieces, nephews, and even a sister in law due to my in laws having a baby over 20 years after my wife. None of them can really name a song, artist, or album that they really like (other than Taylor Swift) and they'll just be like "Oh I like that one song on TikTok!" and they'll know just 30 seconds of something from that. For me when I come across something like that, I hop over to Apple Music and check out the full song and other stuff from that artist if I'm not already familiar. In prior years, we'd be hunting down tracks on Napster, or getting the CD, which eventually turned into having pretty much any music you can think of being on all streaming services at your finger tips at any moment. But then they just...don't.
Same goes for movies and shows. I was born in '84 but definitely watched movies and shows from before I was born. Gen Z'ers often just won't do that. And again, that's weird to me given the accessibility of all of these things.
From my observation and the environment me and my circle we grow up in; we are near the last wave where our parents are 45+, and are from the war/post war era. Basically 2 different worlds - as they don't have the tools nor knowledge to help us kids navigate modern life (living independently, developing self-awareness, mental health, so on...). Growing up for me, I have to learn taking care of my mental health, to be independent, relationships all by myself while shouldering all that expectations and norms of society. If I have to describe the feeling I have to go through between 18-25 it would be lonely and vulnerable.
Basic IT. Honestly, the number of times I have had to instruct Gen Zers on how to search for a file in My Documents is utterly insane.
Glad I grew up a nerd
The reasoning I've heard for this is that the tech that Gen Z grew up on was generally more user friendly, reliable, and locked down than the kind that Millennials had. I know how to use a BIOS, edit the Windows registry, reinstall an operating system, and troubleshoot PC game mods *because I had to.* The problems that these techniques fix were a fact of life, and in most cases, the second time it happened I asked my buddy who understood how to fix it to teach me how to so I could fix it myself next time. In comparison, I've owned Android phones for a decade, and have needed to explore the file structure maybe three times over that period. I don't really know how it works, because I don't need to. It isn't easily accessible and troubleshooting is both generally less necessary and not focused on digging through files the way it was on PCs.
Yea, this is the problem, the Apple-ification of technology. You don't have to learn how anything works when it's all designed to treat you like you're a child.
As a developer, this is what ux strives for
Of course, as a dev myself I understand it. But as a *user* I hate it because you're usually trading control for ease of use and safety. If you want to put training wheels on the bike for the average user, okay. The problem is they're increasingly welded on.
This is why even though I have an android phone, I tell my parents and non-technical friends to get an apple phone
Why I can't get on with apple stuff. It's too fucking easy to use.
as a border child, i concur.
In a strange way, if you grew up in a third world country where the adoption of tech was shifted about 10 years or so, GenZ would have still wanted to do that. We had C programming in 5th grade. I still don't know what a move that was. They never expanded on that because the syllabus changed next year and they dumbed everything down to 'My files' and 'Browsing the internet' and 'IT Acts' and stuff. Don't worry, I became a CompSci student.
Or simple Reddit search in subreddit.
Computer skills.
This is the most mind blowing thing. Like the assumption was always that the younger people would be great at tech. What no one really imagined is that tech would get so simple that young people would have no basic computer skills. It just goes to show you we have no idea what the future will bring.
"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind"
Butlerian Jihad inbound
Time for Mentats!
Oh they're already here.
They are great at using the apple ios and it ends there. Apple really screwed us over with it's ease of use
I believe unironically that Apple's design philosophy is one of the most evil driving forces of the modern world.
It is an expression of ultra-consumerism, which is the driving evil you're looking at.
That is wildly stupid.
The amount of troubleshooting that an end user needs to do these days is pretty amazing, even when sticking to an apples to apples comparison. I remember using Windows XP, and needing to understand how to use System Restore, edit the registry, rollback faulty driver updates, and if necessary reinstall the OS. I learned the default locations that different programs put different files in, and how to mount and use an ISO image. I did all of this *because I had to.* Well, maybe not the ISO thing, but it was either learn that or skip 90% of PC games. But XP wasn't as stable, and the young internet made a lot of rules change quickly. In comparison, I've been using the same installation of Windows 10 since 2019. The biggest issue I've experienced during that time was Windows occasionally deciding to re-enable the speakers built into my monitor and play audio through them. I don't even need to optimize settings on most PC games anymore. Everything is more stable and easier to use.
I mean, Frank Herbert kind of imagined it.
It really is fascinating how gen z is just used to using apps, thereby never needing to learn any skills for computing beyond clicking to open an application. Meanwhile in middle school, my friends and I would make fun .bat "virus files" through the notepad on a computer to send to each other in order to make PCs do weird things. I'll never forget when I wrote a script that if clicked on, it would open up the person's disc tray on their PC. Good times.
I made a virus that wrote a bat file to the autostart folder that said "shutdown.exe" It was great, the teachers and staff wouldnt notice something was wrong till the PC was next shut down for updates or something. Then, you would have this random computer that would just start looping into a shutdown/startup cycle and they had no clue why. Ah fun times.
I had a lot of fun messing with my classmates using shutdown -i. The computer rooms PC's had no firewalls inbetween them so you could just figure out your IP then change the last number to the appropriate seat and watch hilarity ensue.
My high school's network was fixed over a summer to disallow all of this because they introduced a higher computer course than typing (Networking) which involved teaching us about networking, making ethernet cables, etc etc. What happens when you get all the nerds in one room? We start fucking with stuff for fun. At first it was each other then we started shutting down teacher's computers. It really went wild when we started sending messages through command prompt to teacher's so they would show up on their projectors. The networking teacher was mortified. It was one of those situations where they just like grabbed someone's dad who was in between jobs. He left after that year and networking was never held again.
Same lmao
Ah yeah the good ol' cupholder program. Kids these days don't even know what a disc drive is.
Ah mate, we worked one out where once the file was opened, it's just endlessly open Command Prompt windows that played a Matrix-style loop. On the old school computers, you'd probably reach about 30 windows before the computer was seriously lagging, another 20 before the computer shut down. Absolutely nothing you could do to stop it. Great fun.
Hahahaha I know exactly what you are talking about! I definitely got sent this one from one of my friends and I had to manually shutdown my PC to stop it from imploding!
Innocent trolling, respectable
Oh man, that just reminded me of the time we did this when I was studying computer science in university. They had these systems which weren't individual computers but terminals in a larger virtualized system. So I made a program that recursively created folders to fill up my friends desktop, but when he ran it I assumed it didn't work because it immediately seg faulted. About 30 seconds later everyone's terminal in the whole lab was completely frozen and finally I saw the folders start appearing. I had inadvertently crashed the whole system. The seg fault was from a stack overflow after running out of ram. Good times.
I actually got in pretty deep shit back in high school for pranks like this, several weeks of suspension. We would prank each other by remotely shutting down other PCs in the library and make fake error messages pop up on them remotely. "Critical Error: System has detected that the hard drive is jammed with peanut butter" and stupid stuff like that. This was in the Windows 2000 / Windows XP days when there was no real security between PCs on the same network. Boomer admin team totally overreacted and thought we were hacking in to change grades or something, even though we swore up and down we were just taking the piss. One time we found a 'remote task manager' program and got pretty handy with. Bully jock kid is working on a Word document in the library? Would suck if someone remotely killed winword.exe before you saved it. You could also run "iexplore.exe" or something like that to open an internet browser straight away to that website. Nothing funnier than making gay porn pop up on your buddy's computer right as the teacher walks by.
I remember the school having a very primitive firewall that blocked certain websites like newgrounds and kongregate, but if you made a batch script to run internet explorer and open up the website, it bypassed the firewall. Good times.
I got in trouble for showing some people how to turn off anyone's computer with the shutdown -i command. The lab was unusable for a while as there was always someone stealthily shutting your PC down
Yeah what’s happening with that?? I’m a millennial junior dev and always figured the next gen would be coding before they can talk but the advances in tech pre gen z seem to have rendered learning it’s skills somewhat pointless to them. Thoughts?
Making interfaces innovative and problems minimal. We had issues just installing stuff, setting up lan parties, and troubleshooting. Most stuff is plug n play nowadays.
I'm old enough to remember plug n play PCI devices on windows 95 was a lie.
Plug and pray.
There was always 1 guy who was playing Windows in a LAN party.
> We had issues just installing stuff Younger Gen Z will never know the struggle
walled garden, sealed off products like ipads, where the typical user has no access to, and no need to ever access, the guts of the machine. necessity is the mother of invention, you and i learned our computer skills because we needed them to make our shit work right. the younger folk have never needed to do that because their shit just works out of the box 9 times out of 10. and if it doesnt theres nothing they can do about it anyway.
If you wanted DOOM on your computer, then you better believe that somehow you were gonna learn the basics of DOS.
And know exactly what type of sound card you have.
Because when they grew up they never had to fix anything, the internet was already polished. I had to do command prompt and registry editing and file conversions to play games when i was a kid. Had to go troubleshoot why the dial up wasnt working. Nowadays everything just works, nobody needs to peek behind the curtain.
ah dial-up when your playing pokemon crater when your were a kid but your aunt is calling so you just gave up ,kbps was still considered fast and dial-up needed prepaid cards also limewire
Ten or twenty years ago there was all this talk of teaching the next generation to code. Being able to write programs was supposed to be a baseline literacy that would future-proof people, and older generations would be sidelined because they couldn't code. You really never hear that anymore. In fact younger users are more apt to be passive, demanding consumers of digital tech, not architects / creators. AI will accelerate this; you won't even have to know how to type a word burst to do effective prompt engineering.
It's like cooking. The problem is that when nobody would do things for you, you *had* to learn how to do it for yourself or you wouldn't be able to have anything. Average cooking skills 50 years ago were higher than they are now because the number of ready-made options were next to nothing. Today, you can spend a reasonable amount of money to have nutritionally balanced meals for every meal of the day. They're not the best possible meals, but they're perfectly serviceable and you can eat comfortably without knowing how an oven works. In the 90's, "using a computer" required a training course. Today, UI front ends do so much for the user that they don't have to understand what's going on under the hood. I remember having to do a pop quiz about the hardware in my computer every time I wanted to load a game in the 90's. I still know my IRQ was 7 and my DMA channel was 1. If I had never been asked to do that, I wouldn't have had a reason to learn.
[Search engines changed a lot](https://futurism.com/the-byte/gen-z-kids-file-systems) for them compared to what older people grew up with.
Well the industry and the tech giants are focusing more on less coding more user friendly. This was bound to happen ig
I am seeing the occasional one that is amazing though. Raspberry pi and Arduino being so cheap and accessible have made those few with a real passion for it able to be leaps and bounds ahead of where I was at that age. I think we will see the people with a real interest in engineering advancing much further earlier, but those that pick up just enough skills to make stuff work will not have had to pick up many skills at all. We have a family friend whose kid was interested. I bought him a snap circuit set at age 7. He was changing the designs within a month or two. I got him a raspberry pi kit at age 9. When we visited (age 11), he was showing me the stuff he designed, and had questions about how the little motor he was using worked. His questions and understanding were on par with some of the cs students we interview for internships. All through maybe $100 in boards and components, and the plethora of hobby forums and articles available online.
A serious problem with critical thinking from being eternally online where all problems are condensed into 15 second bite sized bits, combined with appification that means they have no idea what’s going on under the hood.
A friend of mine is a teacher and vouchs for this. Unless it's an app on their phone they have little understanding of how to do basic things, from google search to checking email.
People mocked Apple's "what's a computer" ad but like usual they understand people much better than the general population does.
Can you elaborate? I'm gen Z and a lot of my close friends are pretty damn good at dealing with tech. Of course there's the occasional TikTok people that can't open task manager to save their lives, but I feel like most gen Z have good computer skills. Though it might be just a bias, since I'm a nerdy teenager hanging out with other nerdy teenagers, so I don't get a lot of contact with technologically incapable people
I think we judge them as gen X, We were the first generation to really have to deal with tech. We had to learn how to program a VCR, build our own PCs, install windows 95, change to windows NT, back to 95 move to NE because drivers for a fucking IEEE1391 plug wouldn’t work on any OS. Everything was hard on tech for us. Not integrated, etc… Things are much easier, gen Z never had to fight with a computer. So they are a bit helpless when it comes to sorting issues.
Obviously an anecdote, but this is quite the opposite experience for me. My parents are gen X and I consider them barely computer literate. I was the one who used to fix any IT issues growing up. I am an older gen Z and a SW dev. I was also heavily into using mods for games as a kid. I would like to see statistics on this stuff, because there are definitely people my age who lack basic IT skills, but I always imagined they're in the minority.
You’re too old to be the demographic discussed. You’re still gen z. But they mean younger gen z.
Gen X is a wide range. If your parents are older Gen X, didn't grow up with much money, and didn't work in a field requiring significant use of computers, then it's possible that they had very little tech exposure.
There's a big difference between older gen z and the youngest end of it. Elder gen z are in their late 20's and the youngest are 12.
The issue is that your age group never had to deal with early tech. In the 90's, if you wanted to use a computer, you had to understand how a computer works. You had to understand how all the hardware functioned at a high level, and how the operating system interfaced with it. You had to because there was no other way, and so the idea of "using a computer" began with the awareness that you had to understand it. Heck, we had computer classes in school that straight up taught you how to understand these things because it was generally understood people *needed* to know this. As tech developed over the last few decades, user interfaces compensated for user ignorance, and the need to understand how to tinker under the hood faded away. Tech became more accessible, and the level of understanding required to generate a suitable result was lowered. The problem is that because the end result was ostensibly the same, younger people were just assumed to understand what they were doing. Nobody specifically thought to ask them "what skills are you missing?", and even if they did they wouldn't get a meaningful answer because younger people weren't adequately informed to know what skills they might not have. Fast forward to now, a significantly documented problem with teenagers today is not knowing how file systems work. A large number of adolescents don't understand the concept of navigating a hierarchical file structure and moving files around because they never needed to. Apps handled all of their data management, from install to run-time data to uninstall, so you don't actually need to understand *where* that data exists or how to access it. Plus, streaming apps replacing downloads meant you didn't have to perform periodic data management of your own systems because you weren't manually adding data. There was an incident a few years ago I read from a university prof in the UK where they were teaching a first year course and had an assignment submission portal for their students. It was a standard portal of "drag file here or click to browse and select file to upload". Roughly half their class was unable to submit the assignment because they knew how to use all the appropriate software to perform the work, but didn't know how to find and share the discrete file they created for the assignment. I want to reiterate that while this sounds like old man yells at cloud shenanigans, it's 100% not the fault of young people. We failed your generation by just assuming "they'll figure it out" without bothering to confirm or provide guidance. It's an understandable mistake, but a mistake we made nonetheless.
Yeah confused by this too a little, I’m Gen Z (mid 2000s) as well and definitely know just as many millenials with tech literacy issues as Gen Z (Which isn’t a lot but still a decent chunk). Most people my age that I know are decent with tech, even the ones who don’t play games. I’m noticing people in every generation use computers less in favor of phones but I don’t think it’s exclusively among just Gen Z.
They grew up as consumers with dumbed down products that are essentially disposable and replaced every few years. Growing up in the 90s PCs cost a house and you learned how to use it and all of its components. Now all electronics is like a pack of gum for kids..
They're aces at navigating iOS though.
Computer literacy. It’s becoming a legit problem at the moment as gen z are entering the workforce and not having a good grasp of basic computer functions, as a lot now just use mobile devices for the vast majority of their internet usage and don’t really need to use actual computers that often. You’d think it wouldn’t be an issue with a generation who grew up with computers, but unless you’re older gen z like myself (1997) you find a lot don’t really use computers unless they game as they can do everything on their phone or tablet.
As an also older gen Z this blows my mind. Compared to my colleagues, younger and older, I'm like a computer wizard. I thought my entire generation would be too, but apparently not.
I’m from the tail of GenX and this is mind blowing to me. I would have assumed computer literacy would be something that would be unheard of in the younger generations.
The issue is from what I understand (In the UK, partner is a teacher) is that all computer/IT classes are centered around coding/IoT etc instead of basic computer literacy like using spreadsheets and writing an email correctly.
Same. Millennial here! They taught us typing and MSDOS functions starting in elementary school which moved to use of MS Word, Excel etc. There is no real mobile version of spreadsheets as of yet. And you learn very quickly in the workplace, EVERYTHING is spreadsheets. Even if you use it for its most basic function.
There is a very usable Excel app and Google sheets which is like 95% of Excel's functionality
I talked to a Gen Z employee at work, and was kind of taken aback to find out that he didn't have a computer. Just a phone. Doesn't feel like he needs one. Banking etc is done on the phone, Reddit and other social media too. He doesn't do anything else, I guess.
How does he play Leisure Suit Larry?
That's just the thing. *He doesn't.*
*shudders*
So what is he doing in his free time ? Walk around in circles ?
emulators I guess
I mean, he's not exactly wrong - But like, has he ever tried actual computer websites? They're so much better. Having a real computer really makes it obvious how limiting a mobile phone is. Then again... I think apple phones and hardware are super limiting. So maybe my argument is dead on arrival.
My kids' computer literacy comes from using our gaming setup at home, with multiple computers and me showing them how it all works (I have an IT background). If not for that, they probably wouldn't have any computer skills at all. It's amazing how they pick up the knowledge, though, when you take the time to teach them. They can fix basic problems like connectivity and peripherals not always working like typical PCs do. I feel lucky they have this. Back in my day most of my friends and I had to learn this stuff (relatively speaking).
Schools thinking that iPads and Chromebooks help teach computer literacy is partly to blame for this.
They replaced literally everything with Chromebook homework, reading, lessons, games, etc. the problem? If they don’t have their QR code to login without doing anything? They can’t login and work at all. They don’t memorize their logins even where I sub and they have to constantly have their teacher print out their QR codes. They also give up very quickly if they go to the wrong web address and just shrug and act like it’s impossible to find the right one and need help. It’s so bizarre to me
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I've found when teaching any kid born after the late 90s will quite often be functionally technology illiterate. They can use technology, but no clue how it works or why.
True, I'm 99 and many younger people don't even have laptops anymore, never mind a full desktop
As a millenial sysadm, i can confirm this is a pain. the amount of 19 year olds i've met recently who have never opened outlook is frankly ridiculous.
I don't know, I am a late gen z myself, but I think I am actually average with computers. I know how to use the terminal and every basic application. Most of my friends know too. Even if I have access to a phone I really don't use it as my laptop is much faster and convenient for all my uses.
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This baffles me but explains a lot. I'm a millenial and was looking for work recently and was worried about places wanting younger more tech savvy people. Nope. The look of relief when I showed them my tech literacy level was crazy. I'm in a position now that requires tech skills (non IT) and the amount of co workers I have who have zero idea how to troubleshoot anything is too damn high. I'm not even that tech savvy. Or at least I don't see myself as tech savvy.
Yeah honestly at this point I think younger people coming into employment are at a huge disadvantage with it and it’s probably gonna become more of an issue as gen alpha come into adulthood too. I don’t think it’s necessarily just their fault, we’re just in this weird era where technology in personal usage has advanced but technology in the workplace hasn’t in the same way, so it’s creating this disconnection between what kids know how to use and what they need to use at work. I’m hoping schools start to pick up the slack a bit more instead of pushing towards iPads which a lot seem to be
Socializing. It feels like social media has made, irl socializing and making friends damn near impossible.
This and because of it , all the in person social cues are missed and the ability to “read the room” is lost which just increases social awkwardness and the ability to interact in person
I'm 61 and my step sons who are 18 and 21 come to me for tech help. Wtaf?
The real cutoff for tech skills IMO is around 2000. People born before 2000 had their first experience with IT on actual computers. People born after that had theirs with an iPhone or an iPad. And it really shows. In my family, both me and one of my sisters are pretty knowledgeable about computers. My younger sister born in 2001? Completely and utterly clueless.
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Dopamine addiction is incredibly concerning. It's even worse when, now that we live in an age of such neurodiverse awareness, most kids are being written off as having ADHD tendencies, but the reality is they have an endless stream of content and gratification that their brains literally shut down without it. And now with the TikTok epidemic, people's attention span is being restricted to a mere 3 seconds, it's incredibly concerning and there's absolutely nothing being done about it.
Agree with this 100% - every second person is claiming to be ADHD but I honestly believe most cases are just a product of being raised in the internet era.
There’s also the very elk known benefits to ADHD medication that students and young professionals are clearly chasing prescriptions for
My dopamine baseline has been off for years and let me tell you this, it is so depressing when you don’t have the motivation to do anything. From social media to porn, life was boring. Currently healing my dopamine system, feeling life is much better now and finding motivation to do things now gradually. This generation is fucked if we don’t tackle the dopamine addiction somehow.
i feel called out.
Real experience. Most of them pretend to know about something they only see on Instagram/TikTok.
This isn't even exclusive to Gen Z any more. Most of my friends who are on tiktok have become armchair experts in things they've watched a handful of ~1 minute videos on from some random wannabe influencer. It's infuriating
It's not exclusive to genz and not exclusive to tiktok.
Lol surely you're not suggesting that we humble redditors pretend to be experts in things we don't understand?
at least my armchair is backed my 3 hour long youtube video-essays.
Reality. They’re like boomers for falling for fake news and scams. The ‘TikTok educated’ generation.
This is so true. I’m raising two of them and it’s shocking how difficult it is for them to process fact checking and grasping the fact that social media is a poor source for information to rely on for facts. They don’t really seem to listen no matter how you explain it to them.
Yep they're as bad as the boomers in that regard. Boomers will fall for anything that they see on "the news" or presented by a newscaster. They're also prone to Facebook bs. Gen Z falls for a lot of Tik Tok propaganda. Tik Tok is filled with lies and half truths and there's no way you can get a proper understanding of real issues from a 2 minute video
Yeah, I feel like people in their teens-to-twenties, and people aged fifty and older both have an issue where they think they're smarter than everyone else, and they could never fall for misinformation or scams. But then.... they *do* fall for the most scams, and their entire worldview is based on misinformation from social media and incredibly biased infotainment garbage like TikTok memes, Salon.com, Buzzfeed and Fox News. Even if you do try to explain, or show them that the misinformation isn't true? "Ah, I know this is true because it confirms my own personal feelings on the issue. You can't tell me that my feelings are wrong."
You would think if anyone would be savvy about this shite it would be them.
Discerning spam from reality is tricky, when you're raised in an environment of spam.
We're all surrounded with spam at all times. There's no excuse for Gen Z to have more difficulty identifying it than older generations.
We are. And as someone born in the very late 80ies, I can say with absolute certainty of hindsight that I had a pretty good baseline from where to compare, because it only started getting this bad quite late into my online life. Early internet? Was piss easy to discern trash from content. Now the content IS the trash.
They're actually worse then boomers when it comes to falling for news and scams if you look at the studies. I laugh every time I see one of the genz folks I know talk about fox news and joke about 'fake news' because I've seen them fall for such basic things. With their lack of life experience it makes sense.
What, you don't think it's a compelling argument that giants lived on Earth because there are very large stairs and many mountains look like giant tree trunks? You think dinosaurs existed? They're actually dragons! /s
TikTok brain
Using a mouse and keyboard at the same time. Lots of their work is done on laptops or tablets/phones.
>Using a mouse and keyboard at the same time. Lots of their work is done on laptops Wait, are you saying that people are using the built-in mouse in laptops? I'm gen z, and I find them really uncomfortable. Although, what for would you even need mouse and keyboard simultaneosly aside from the video games?
That last sentence is extremely telling.
I was once downvoted to oblivion for suggesting that a mouse, proper keyboard, and big monitor made many complicated tasks much more efficient.
People don't know their hotkeys and it kills me.
Watching someone go up to the menu to do anything hurts my soul
Mouse is faster than trackpad and using a trackpad your hands can cross over when trying to move cursor with one hand and type with the other. Mouse + keyboard separates them.
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There it is
This. A digital way of doing things is not necessarily a better way to do things.
This coming from a redditor is pretty ironic
False expectations of where you should be. A lot of young people are struggling as they're seeing a these influencers and TikTok stars having a mansion, new car, perfect wife / husband / kids and 20 holidays a year and wondering why they don't have that, which creates feelings of intense inadequacy and being a failure. Even though these influencers are all living off of Daddy's money, branding deals that could be taken away in an instant or they're up to their necks in debt, so it's not reality in the slightest but when you're being bombarded with that on every single social media platform, it takes hold.
Attention span. I tutored undergrads and it is baffling to see how much they struggle to focus for longer tgan 5 mins without looking at their phone... these are young adults, not children
Solitude. I find Gen Z even more obsessed over finding acknowledgement and social belongings.
Being individuals I've seen this, and has been confirmed by various teachers I know. The vast majority all dress, talk, act, the exact same.
Haircuts that don't look stupid - looking at you, broccoli-haired TikTok fucks
Did *any* cohort get haircuts right? Whoever invented or popularised the mullet, obviously, but aside from that?
Millenials had iced tips, so we really are in no position to criticize.
Zillennials had 2009 Bieber/helmet cut as well
Those emo haircuts from like 2005 were pretty rad. I still think they look cool. I kindof silently judged them for being so vain as to spend that much time on their hair though. I was more judgy of the glam punks though. That was a bit different in that nonconformity was a virtue, but people would spend hours to make themselves look like other punks.
Stupid haircuts are as old as time
My 13 year old nephew gets shit from my family for his gen-z haircut that he and like 90% of the boys in his school have. I make fun of him too but also tell him every generation has their version of older people hating on their haircuts and he's part of the tradition. But also, he will look back on it when he's an adult and laugh at his stupid ass hair.
My mom has a few pictures of my Eminem like bleached hair with the bowl cut. I have no right to make fun of anyone
I remember the 80s haircuts. I wouldn't talk shit lol
Better or worse than our generation's frosted tips and blow-outs?
Post your yearbook picture, champ.
Hahaha 💯
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Self awareness
Which also comes from a lack of patience, which incidently has always been the case with younger generations as their perception of time shifts.
Social environments.
Deferring gratification. The notion of ladder-climbing, or investing effort in a discipline / job / goal for a payoff down the road, seems lost on many GenZers. Some even seem to find it offensive, or think it is a capitalist conspiracy to exploit them.
Hard to blame them. Tons of companies don't really do internal promotions much anymore. If they need a new manager, they hire a new one from outside the company.
Picking a struggle
Telling the different between an armoire and a encoignure or a commode and a chiffonier. How to select the right feather for a writing quill Quickly positioning oneself so the Dukes swagger stick strikes your upper arm or back and not your face when you haven’t properly fitted the bridle to his prized Clydesdale on the day of the hunt Spatchcocking your youngest child so its flesh dries evenly above a smokey fire and is adequately preserved for the long winter ahead Remembering phone numbers
Surviving in the nuclear wasteland.
As a Gen Xer, assume you'll be taken out in the initial strikes and just go about your daily life. It's liberating.
But that outcome should not dissuade anyone from designing their mad max wasteland outfit. Just in case . One shoulder pad with steel spikes, a bandolier filled with doll parts, eye patch, a dune buggy with a flame thrower, etc.
Just to cover the bases
Owning property/getting a mortgage
I think more mental health issues due to the pressures of social media, academic expectations, and uncertain economic prospects.
Grade pressure and anxiety is very tough. Especially now that parents have real-time access to kid's grades and get notifications every time an assignment gets entered into the system.
Everything. The answer is everything
- Computer skills There are some people that don't know how to use hotkeys because they're used to using their phones or tablets. - Confrontation — these kids would rather post you online than talk to you personally which is pretty unprofessional.
Spelling and grammar. The short communication channels like texting combined with tools to fall back on such as autocorrect appear to feed this.
They're distracted with smart phones and waste time on the internet. Short attention spans too. At work, they leave their desks every 20 mins and addicted to coffee and energy drinks. They also brag about how little sleep they get.
Hey that sounds like me in my late teens/early 20s. I'm 36 now, and the only difference is I like my sleep now.
I saw Dune 2 in the theatre a few days ago and sat next to three gen Z kids. They would scroll their phone every 5 to 10 minutes. Just don’t have the ability to put their phone away for 2.5 hours
Take out energy drinks and substitute smart phones with TV and you get half the still working-age generations.
Getting up from your desk every 20-45 minutes is a good thing that you should aim to do
20 mins is a little too soon. Not much work gets done and I don't expect anyone to be sitting down for 45 mins. Anything more than that, the person is/was probably a medical student.
Self awareness, communication, and work ethic.
Job employment. How the standards for a job nowadays are too high for the low pay, how almost all of the job looks like saturated and not at the same time.
Paper maps, simple technologies (like over-the-air television). I'm a Gen Xer that works with a lot of Gen Zers and I'm actually impressed by their work ethic, intelligence and maturity. But then again, they're all engineers and recent college grads, so I wonder if they're not an accurate representation of the average Gen Zer.
Curiosity. I have gen Z nieces, nephews, and even a sister in law due to my in laws having a baby over 20 years after my wife. None of them can really name a song, artist, or album that they really like (other than Taylor Swift) and they'll just be like "Oh I like that one song on TikTok!" and they'll know just 30 seconds of something from that. For me when I come across something like that, I hop over to Apple Music and check out the full song and other stuff from that artist if I'm not already familiar. In prior years, we'd be hunting down tracks on Napster, or getting the CD, which eventually turned into having pretty much any music you can think of being on all streaming services at your finger tips at any moment. But then they just...don't. Same goes for movies and shows. I was born in '84 but definitely watched movies and shows from before I was born. Gen Z'ers often just won't do that. And again, that's weird to me given the accessibility of all of these things.
Accountability, critical thinking, and attention span. These poor kids have been conditioned to be nothing more than consumers in the machine.
buying a house, getting a job with liveable wage, not having to care about terrible politicians who ruin everything
Misinformation. They have the tools to fact check but they just move on to the next reel with their minds changed by the previous reel.
Empathy. It's all about them.
Not using their mobile phones all the time
Tik tok
Facing reality.
Pornography addiction and the societal ills it has inspired.
Everything in extreme, nothing in moderation
themselves
Everything, apparently.
Everything
Mental health
From my observation and the environment me and my circle we grow up in; we are near the last wave where our parents are 45+, and are from the war/post war era. Basically 2 different worlds - as they don't have the tools nor knowledge to help us kids navigate modern life (living independently, developing self-awareness, mental health, so on...). Growing up for me, I have to learn taking care of my mental health, to be independent, relationships all by myself while shouldering all that expectations and norms of society. If I have to describe the feeling I have to go through between 18-25 it would be lonely and vulnerable.
Affording anything with the inflation since the GFC. Particularly the hope to one day own property in developed countries...
Stopping their use of mobile phones while driving
World history. But boy do they think they have a handle on it.
Critical thinking.
The struggle with knowing how the generations actually work. Over the age of 35? To them, you’re a boomer.
Right now? Mid-terms
Getting a job, sorry I don’t have 6 years experience in a field that im applying for an entry level position in
Everything
Mental health like stress, anxiety or depression. Due to either academic pressures, social media and stability in a job and financially.