Used to be for a fresh out of college worker, you just needed to show up to work on the first day, then anything you didn't know you could observe and learn through a mixture of osmosis and inquisition. Now, if you start a remote job, you have to have a baseline set of skills to navigate the corporate structure. Reaching out to the "people team" (read: HR) is unlikely to be all the helpful, and you may end up asking…
It's incumbent on us as more senior engineers to reach out to younger folks, not the other way around. That is an art I see properly practiced less and less these days.
Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem
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Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem
#52My intuitive takeaway here is that people who grew up with all this incredible technology, do not appreciate the power it bestowed upon us (because "that's just how things are"). Secondary, using all this tech growing up deprived people of learning certain things, the tech made it too easy, now even a middling effort is too much. Lastly, and this one is timeless: they're too cool to care. GPT summary of the article:…
I hadn't heard this elsewhere in the comments, and it landed surprisingly hard for me.
What would have to happen to make tech cool again? The old hook seems semi-dead: culturally, tech is no longer the hotbed of creativity & possibility that at least some of us once were so drawn to; it's much more settled/established, the advances originate in far less cool & human places/far bigger & more imposing attention-capitalism. There's a lot of talk about apps and the skinner-box worlds of especially mobile. So like, what hooks could tech have today? Where would youngsters get more involved with tech?
And what changes to the industry or our paradigms might be open to us to allow tech to re-exude cool & empowerment?
Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem
#53The computing environment of earlier young generations were near-identical to what is found in the workplace. Desktop, mice, filesystems, office programs, the like. So the transition is smooth. Not so much for smartphones. My nephew is 18 y/o and his "tech" experience is gaming on his phone. His sister is only on social media. When I asked them to forward a document, they took a photo of it with their smartphone, whi…
> My nephew is 18 y/o and his "tech" experience is gaming on his phone. His sister is only on social media. When I asked them to forward a document, they took a photo of it with their smartphone, which is quite telling.
This is it. Complexity and friction begats skill, but if everything you use is dumbed-down to be "easy," you won't develop many skills in that area.
Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem
#54Newer generations of devs had more exposure to technology, and so some of the fundamentals like not getting scared because stuff has a screen, or searching a bit for options. But no shit, Facebook and tiktok don't make you a tech wizard. With tech having evolved you don't need to do as much tinkering, and why would you develop a muscle for that then?
When I was a kid, the only way to play with the home computer was to spend 1/2h copying code from a magazine, so of course I learned a couple of things on the way, because I didn't have a choice. I will wager and say that installing a game by clicking on a button is a better thing. You can still play with code if you want to, and lots of people do, it's just not the only way, and so playing with the computer does not equate to knowing how it works in the way it used to because of necessity.
I do feel like a lot more devs than before can't solve a medium complexity non-code related problem, like restoring a broken dev environment or installing an OS. I think it has got less to do with age or any true generational aspect, and more with the increased size of the group. 1) dev used to be a geek job, and that's not true anymore, 2) if you started dev recently, whatever your age, the toolsuite is much better than it used to be, requires less of you, gives more attention to usability, with the downside that you don't exercise random tech skills as much as was needed in the old days. If everything you do is webdev on node, why would you need to know much about networking, OS and even compilers.
Those are skills that are less useful in proportion than they used to be for "dev" because "dev" is much more diverse than it used to be, and naturally people who don't need them will not acquire them.
That's my perspective, based on personal anecdotal evidence, so it's worth nothing. It's hard talking about that without sounding like an old fart.
Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem
#55I 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
Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was similar to my take. Is the issue that they aren't as tech savvy? Or is the issue that they are more likely to feel ashamed? Maybe older workers feel more comfortable in their roles? I have come across a mountain of references talking about "digital natives" in the past, but I don't recall any of them talking about the fact that "tech" and "digital" is usually about the UI first. Nobody is going to feel comfo…
"Nobody is going to feel comfortable on a UI they haven't experienced." Well, the difference is that earlier newcomers in the work force did experience that UI. Because home computing back then was highly similar to what is found in the workplace. In that sense it's a new and unique problem to Gen Z.
Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What motivates the opposite? 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 on…
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.
Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem
#58I have only my personal experience and perceptions, but I think most people here (likely technically savvy) would agree that, quite simply, most people of any generation are not technically savvy. While I don't "get" TikTok, I understand how it works, on a broad technical level. A 20 year old might understand the social scene of TikTok and "get" it, but my guess is the average 20 year old will have no idea how a webp…
I would say that it is not about being tech savvy it is more about how their brain is wired. Some people just do not do analytical thinking: break down a complex a task into smaller, more manageable parts and make a plan. In other words, they do not think step-by-step. And majority of computer task require that type of thinking.
I would venture to say that most people do not think like this. And the people who do and the people who don't usually have a hard time communicating or understanding one another.
Much of my success in my career has been acting as a liaison between technical and non-technical folks.
Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem
#59I have only my personal experience and perceptions, but I think most people here (likely technically savvy) would agree that, quite simply, most people of any generation are not technically savvy. While I don't "get" TikTok, I understand how it works, on a broad technical level. A 20 year old might understand the social scene of TikTok and "get" it, but my guess is the average 20 year old will have no idea how a webp…
Another part of the problem is that a good chunk of kids only use phone/tablets/gaming consoles, and have little experience with desktops/laptops. Likely as a result, several university professors have reported issue with gen Z students not understanding what files and folders are: https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...
Millenials are more tech savvy not just because we grew up with computers, but also because computers & software when we grew up was much more complex and complicated to use than the software today's users are facing...,
Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem
#60Is half the problem that gen Y grew up with email as a communications platform and had actual computers with actual mice and actual software installed on said computers. Gen z may be plugged into their phone, but a phone is a far cry from the tech that is actually used on the office. And Tik Tok isn't like an Excel spreadsheet. Further, prior generations had to write letters etc which transfers across to email in a p…
I don't think this is the case at all, my brother and I are at opposite ends of the GenZ age scale and we both had full-on computer labs in school, winxp/7 for myself and win8/10 for him. We didn't go to posh, expensive schools either. I think this comment parallels the same attitude that older generations take about tech issues in the linked article, where they don't feel shame for having 'poor' computer skills sinc…
I had a pc at school and at home, and I didn't have IT support at home.
Not everyone had a pc then, but I would guess more had them than now. People now use tablets and phones, which aren't as good prep for the workplace.