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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

#81

Post by Gigachad »

Rooster61 wrote: post #46
nixpulvis wrote: post #18

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.

It just isn’t happening in my experience. I learned so much being in the office when I started out but now it seems like most people just silo away and reappear at the next standup. The seniors get a bunch done and the juniors feel stuck and aren’t progressing.

I remember learning so much about business just listening to people talk around me but now all of that knowledge is in private calls and you’ll only hear what you strictly need to hear.

I’d love to go back to the office at this point but unfortunately the local businesses just aren’t competitive with remote work and WFH is still preferable to moving state.

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

#82

Post by seanvk »

I've a 18 year old and a 20 year old. Both boys in college. Despite my being an electrical engineer and they're having grown up in an environment where I've always had computers and electronics of various kinds about, they really never took an interest. They are both education majors and are taking up my wife's calling in teaching. Which is great, but they really don't have a clue about technology beyond Xbox/PS5/iPhone.

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

#83

Post by thallosaurus »

dxbydt wrote: post #64

I work with a bunch of middle-schoolers. While they use a lot of tech, lot more devices than me & visit a lot of (imo questionable) domains, they refer to things in a very non-canonical fashion. Like, they don't ever, ever, say file. They'll say googledoc. Where's your homework ? "Its a googledoc - here's the link". Or "its on google classroom". But not - "its a pdf file. or txt file. or jpg file. Similarly, "I like…

I think I just understood why NFTs are/were so huge.

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

#84

Post by solarkraft »

Gigachad wrote: post #81
Rooster61 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It just isn’t happening in my experience. I learned so much being in the office when I started out but now it seems like most people just silo away and reappear at the next standup. The seniors get a bunch done and the juniors feel stuck and aren’t progressing. I remember learning so much about business just listening to people talk around me but now all of that knowledge is in private calls and you’ll only hear what…

It may be a bit harder to do, but in my experience people are still happy about you reaching out and them getting to share what they've been doing.

It doesn't happen much but itself anymore, which is why I find a lot of value in explicitly "just chatting" with people.

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

#85

Post by peoplefromibiza »

anthonygd wrote: post #63
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I swear I read the same article about my generation when I entered the workforce me too. But when I got in the tik tok of the time was called IRC and really cool people used Bitchx and double booted Linux and BeOS

Thank you! I've never been called really cool before :)

I wish we really were :D

tangentially, it's so strange that the "nerd culture" has only changed in people's perception, but the actual nerd culture of the 80s-90s is still considered something only people with no social skills would appreciate.

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

#86

Post by Kon-Peki »

chrisco255 wrote: post #77
Kon-Peki wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> If your grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley, and your dad programmed a university mainframe, you aren't representative of the general public.

Hey, maybe so. But as it turned out, I went to pretty-damn-bad public school in the rust belt. We had those Acer clones of the Apple II in every classroom starting in kindergarten/first grade. We learned to type and played math and word games. And then IBM PC clones in the school library in middle school and high school, learning WordPerfect on DOS because they made special writing assignments just so we had to use a computer.

And in my working class neighborhood, where a house cost about $50,000 in 1990, about every other family had a Commodore 64 or better.

David Letterman made a career out of acting dumb for laughs. That's what he did.

That exchange between him and Gates was him acting dumb so that Gates could hit a home run, and Gates whiffed. To record a radio-broadcast baseball game with a tape recorder, somebody needed to be physically located within the broadcast range of the station at the time of the broadcast. And then stop and start the recording between half-innings just to have any hope of fitting the whole game on a single cassette. And then get the cassette to you, wherever you are. The internet broadcast eliminated all of those constraints. I appreciate watching that video clip, it demonstrates just how little Gates understood the potential of the internet in those "early days" :)

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

#87

Post by thenerdhead »

wink wrote: post #75
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.

I think each of these apps have different working models and cultures surrounding them. I'm constantly surprised of how people contribute in discord in comparison to Teams / Slack. Perhaps there's less barriers with tools that are more comfortable for the users?
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