Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem • Hacker News Board

Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem

#71

Post by fleddr » Wed, Dec 14, 2022, 10:46 PM UTC

wingely wrote: post #57

fleddr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 co…

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.

Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem

#72

Post by wink » Wed, Dec 14, 2022, 11:03 PM UTC

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #38

nkrisc wrote: post #8

I 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 think most people would struggle to diagnose technical issues with web-conferencing tech. The older folks in the workplace have had the advantage of observing the rituals other people do to try and get it to work (turn it off and on a again, restart your router, etc.) Every single company I've worked for has had at least one meeting where a group of developers all sit there awkwardly as one of us tries to fix the…

We have one conference room at work with a display that's inside the table and there are no instructions to be found how to get it to go up.

Turns out you actually have to connect something via HDMI (or whatever) and it will automatically turn on the motor to emerge from the table.

The room is 007 and actually being dubbed the "James Bond room" by building management but due to working from home none of us had ever been to that room.

So yeah, sometimes even a group of usually tech-savvy people can't figure it out because it surely can't be "just connect it". Nothing ever just works.

Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem

#73

Post by wink » Wed, Dec 14, 2022, 11:09 PM UTC

Kon-Peki wrote: post #40

chrisco255 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

> 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.…

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.

Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem

#74

Post by Brian_K_White » Wed, Dec 14, 2022, 11:13 PM UTC

danaris wrote: post #56

fleddr wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Except it's not new, because before the early 2000s, it was still pretty common for people to not have a home computer at all , but still have to use one regularly at work.

No, in that case it's still the case that every computer you did encounter, however many or few that was, had similar mental models and UI's.

Very broadly similar but still more similar to each other than anything from before y2k vs ios or even chromeos.

A mere lack of owning a pc yourself didn't teach you some other mental model.

If you didn't own a pc, you still encountered them in possibly several places, school, work, library, friends. And by work I mean even as a kid with a kids job, may still have involved a pc at work, so still in the learning time before later entering the work force for "real". And whatever that total level of exposure was, even if it wasn't much and even if it wasn't all the same platform, it was still all of a similar level of complexity and involved similar mental models to understand what is happening and how to interpret the interface.

None of them were an Android or IOS phone where it's not even clear when one app is native vs a pwa, or that even most native apps are still not really native, but merely local.

Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem

#75

Post by wink » Wed, Dec 14, 2022, 11:16 PM UTC

thenerdhead wrote: post #34

Maybe this is more of a lagging generational tooling thing. When I entered the workforce as an 16 year old, I used popular tools like TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, Trillian, xFire, mIRC, and more. The workforce was stuck using email and in-person meetings. Now, the workforce is using similar concepts to those popular tools I would use all built into a single platform known as Slack/Teams/etc. I'm in the peak years of my caree…

I'd say I've been an early Discord user (not a huge fan, but a seasoned user nevertheless) and I don't get what fundamental difference to slack there would be.

Except that the longer I use Slack the less I hate it and it's the opposite for Discord.

Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem

#76

Post by wink » Wed, Dec 14, 2022, 11:20 PM UTC

masswerk wrote: post #35

I'm not surprised at all. (I actually assumed this, when the talk about "digital natives" was en vogue.) As it happens, we tend to accept technology that was mostly sorted out when we were born for granted and this tends also to be the kind of technology we're least prone to investigate. E.g., when I was born, high frequency (HF) was mostly sorted out. But, just before this, it was a hot topic in research and hobbyis…

I tend to agree with your assessment, but I see a key difference is that computers are simply versatile and you can make them do everything you want (skills in configuring/coding notwithstanding) but even big leaps seem so much easier than working with electronics or hardware. So even the people in my parents generation who were good with hardware could do some fun stuff, but the possibilities of any computer (and access to the internet) can do so much more if you want to solve a problem or create something - that's where I think the comparison breaks down. To solve something in a mechanical or electronic way I need a very high level of skill/knowledge, but to do it with software (even just making several tools work together) enables much more in less time/less knowledge.

Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem

#77

Post by chrisco255 » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 12:45 AM UTC

Kon-Peki wrote: post #40

chrisco255 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

> 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.…

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).

Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem

#78

Post by wingely » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 12:58 AM UTC

fleddr wrote: post #71

wingely wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

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 skil…

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.

Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem

#79

Post by fleddr » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 1:53 AM UTC

wingely wrote: post #78

fleddr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 skil…

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…

You're overthinking the situation here.

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.

Re: Gen Z workers are not tech-savvy in the workplace – and it’s a growing problem

#80

Post by wingely » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 3:09 AM UTC

fleddr wrote: post #79

wingely wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're overthinking the situation here. 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…

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.