Hacker News Reader

Comment by Farbklex | Hacker News Reader

In contrast, I am sure we all know some older people who were not in prisson for the past 30 years and still don't know how to write an email, what a zoom call is or when it's appropriate to double-click vs single click items on a computer.

I know people in their 50s who pretend that "they don't need this technology" or "I can just go to the bank if I need something". Sure, if you're in your 80s you might want to dodge most of the digital stuff. But in your 50s? You're gonna have to live with an increasing digitalization for multiple decades.

Rant: If you are not an IT person and need to work with Excel and PowerPoint for the next 20 years then ffs sit down and learn the in-depth tools and tricks in the tools over the span of two weekends.

View on HN

I remember my first job in tech support where I'd have to walk 40-50 year old white-collar workers through basic tasks like opening files in folders, connecting to WiFi, resetting passwords, etc. I have no problem whatsoever helping people with that sort of thing when they truly need it, but it would always irk me when they'd just giggle and say things like "Oh, I'm just not a computer person!" This would blow my mind, like, could you imagine a carpenter having to constantly be told how to use a cordless drill and justify it with "Oh, I'm just not really a power tools person!" It's one thing to grumble about technology these days, but refusing to learn the basics of the thing you use to do your job is ridiculous.

That rant, wow. It really resonates deeply with me. People would rather cumulatively spend some 10000 hours yelling at Office for the rest of their lives, instead of spending 10 over the course of some evenings/weekends to brush up on the basics. Even from an immediate-more-important-priorities-perspective it almost doesn’t make sense to me.

I think computer geeks tend not to recall how many hard-won insights and how much time it took for them to reach the point where learning "the basics" of MS Office would only take ten hours of study & practice. We think it's easy because we're building on decent-to-good mental models of how computers & software & networks operate.

Normal people don't have those, and every second of the thousands of hours it'd take to gain them would be miserable for them. Not everyone enjoys this crap. Most aren't born with the kind of good abstract and/or spatial reasoning abilities that makes this stuff relatively easy to figure out, either.

Will brushing up help when Microsoft moves all the menus in the next edition? How about when they add in new errors and make File Explorer not return correct results and Windows Search just searches Bing instead of your computer? Or when they add stuff like “you aren’t allowed to attach that file to an email. It’s because it’s open in Word, but we’re not telling you that. Yes, we know this only happens in Outlook and not Gmail.” Its Office’s fault that everyone hates it.

Microsoft moves the menus in office at most once a decade. They just kept adding onto the Office 95 menus for twelve years, then they introduced ribbons, now 13 years later they move away from ribbons.

They aren't some SaaS company that moves things for fun

All of which largely became unimportant when they introduced the "Tell me what you want to do" search box to Office programs. Blessed be its name.

Anecdote: As a young intern at a German bank I was sent to talk to an older colleague (probably in his 50s, no idea for how long he already works for the bank). I needed him to look up some account number or ID in a data export he had.

1. He opened the data export in Excel.

2. I told him the number for which I needed some additional information.

3. He started scrooling in this 1k + entries Excel file.

4. …

5. I ask: Can you press CTRL + F and type in the number?

6. …

Related to this: just how easy is powerful software meant to be?

People who don't know how to drive don't blame it on cars.

It's fractal, I see this even in the tech industry itself - people are reluctant to sit down with a manual for an hour to figure out how some software (or device) works, and prefer to forever call it "too complicated to use", just because they couldn't grok it in 30 seconds.

The flip side of this is that interfaces are changing constantly. As soon as I've committed something to muscle memory, a forced app update will overhaul a UI and I need to relearn where to find basic commands. When compounded by the hundreds of programs I use across multiple OS's and platforms, I get used to just assuming that interfaces are and features constantly in flux. This means that I invest less in deeply learning any specific tool.

I'm a software engineer yet I don't do online banking (I literally "just go to the bank if I need something"). I don't consider myself a "luddite", I just don't see the advantage over traditional "offline banking". Same with shopping and all the other little nuisances of daily life.

I would imagine you do understand the advantage of 30 seconds of time from anywhere in the world versus a 20-60min round trip to the bank.

I imagine there are other reasons you value than time and space convenience. Why do you feel the physical trip is more valuable?

Not OP, but my bank keeps pushing me to get their app to deposit checks. My phone doesn't do apps and I don't feel like taking up space on my tablet. Besides, there's a branch with a drive-through three minutes away from my house and another one a block away from work, so it's not that much time or travel and I get to talk to somebody outside of home or work for a few minutes. (Even if some of that time is spent declining their suggestion to get the app.)

Wait, your bank's drive-through is staffed? Every drive-through at a bank I've seen is just an ATM.

Yeah, the ones here have multiple lanes with pneumatic tubes to transfer stuff to and from cars, and one of the tellers wears a headset like a fast food drive through. When a car pulls up, they step away from the counter and serve the drive-through window, often multiplexing to assist multiple cars. It's kind of interesting to watch, and can be (or at least feel) more efficient than going inside.

They typically only staff the drive-through when the bank lobby is also open, or a half-hour later. One of the lanes will also usually have an ATM and a dropbox for after-hours service.

TD Banks drive-throughs are staffed. I recently had to get something notarized and it was good to be able to do it without going in to the bank.

I have to interact with my bank maybe twice in a year, and rarely do I have to show up in person. Speaking over the phone works just fine ;) In contrast I have to show up at dentist or hairdresser appointments in person, and I don't consider this "wasted time" either.

I switched to cutting my own hair (and modifying my hairstyle slightly to make that easier) exactly because of the time wasted sitting in the lobby. I don't mind the value-added time (when the hair is actually being cut/styled), but the non-value-added time was too high for me.

I switched dentists for a similar reason; prior dentist kept a buffer of patients waiting to optimize their throughput. I had a dental appointment yesterday [at the newer place] and I was annoyed that I arrived 15 minutes early, because I know they make it a point to bring patients in exactly on time. Sure enough, 2:00 hits and I get called back.

how do you check your balance or transaction ? you only do that over the phone ?

I check the balance when I'm getting cash from an ATM. Transaction logs are sent by mail or I can print them at service machines. Really people, it's not that complicated, it worked before online banking was invented after all ;) I'm not sure if all those services (like the physical mail thing) are available to new customers though, I think those are nudged heavily to use an online account.

I only need cash for maybe once a month. Transaction logs sent by mail are way too slow.

Yea that way much slower and much less convenient compared to online banking.

I haven't gotten cash in over a year and I'll only need to get some more at some point over the next month or so because I was in a store whose credit card system was down.

About the only thing I'd do with a bank in person (other than ATMs) would be either special transactions--much of which you can handle over the phone or on-line these days--or if I still had to deposit sheafs of checks like I did when I had a business years ago. (Though I assume these days most people would pay digitally in some manner.)

I've observed over the past year that even brokerages and the like that pretty much used to require going into a branch have discovered that's actually not necessary.

I don't care so much about the speed of transaction logs but that I can access my records, pay bills, transfer money, etc. with a few clicks.

I cannot speak for him but kind of understand. Obviously depends on what is it you want to do. You go to the bank and express what you need in simple speech to another human, who handles everything. Depending on the bank, a journey to do the same on web/app may be less preferable, especially if handle a lot of mental load during the day.

I wonder what requests are being made - for myself the entirety of what I do in a bank is moving money from one account into another, and that is way easier online than trying to get a human to understand exactly what I want.

Getting a human to change over a bunch of direct debits from one account to another is way better than doing it myself online.

What country do you live in?

Here in the UK, the only time I've needed to step into a bank in the last 10 years is to have a meeting about my mortgage. Our online banking services are so good there's literally no reason to have brick-and-mortor banks for day-to-day tasks.

For me, not having to travel to a bank and wait in a queue to do basic tasks such as transferring money is such an advantage.

Also on the flip side, our in person banking services are rather poor. I dread when there's something I need in person in the bank, because the branch only opens 10-4 M-F with a large break for lunch, meaning I need to take off work time to do it, and it's full of people who somehow apparently still manage to do their banking primarily in branch despite that.

Why then the huge queues on certain days? It could be luddites asking to withdraw their pension payments, or of course it could be business owners needing to deposit cash takings, or getting till floats for the day's trading. While I personally am in the same position as you, I feel that banks are listening to this kind of comment and shutting up physical stores.

Some version of this meme[0] has been circulating since before memes were a thing. I remember the Public School IT guy cracking a joke about packing heat in case the copier tried something funny (which sets a lower bound for the age of this joke because you haven't been able to pack heat in a school in three decades and haven't been able to crack that joke in a school in two).

[0]https://i.imgur.com/6wbgy2L.jpeg

I'm about to wire up some doorbells in our house and my wife can't for the life of her understand why we didn't simply buy, "one of those wireless ones." It's because the wired ones just work and always will just work and never don't work. No batteries. No internet. No computer chips. Etc, etc.

One cloud-based solution for opening garage doors, myQ, was offline for a few hours recently. People on Twitter were claiming, in all apparent sincerity, they had to literally break into their own homes.

I have this same predilection and I have thought a lot about it and I am pretty confident I know where this comes from for me:

When I was young, after opening my first checking account, I fat-fingered a transfer from checking to savings online and the bank software interpreted this as me trying to transfer more than I had, so it happily proceeded to give me a large cash advance and then charge me $75 for the trouble, and another $35 for the NSF fee.

Now, maybe because I work in software, and maybe even moreso because I have literally written checking account software - I do not use online or mobile apps for non-trivial banking things. I call a person. Or I walk up to a person. I verify everything they are doing before they do it, and by acting as my agent during more complicated tasks they assume liability if they fat-finger something or mess something up (so far).

For the curious: the online form had separate inputs for dollars and cents, and some JS regex removed punctuation marks. So when I typed "1,0,period, 0, 0", instead of trying to transfer $10, it transferred $1000. I absolutely breezed through the "verify the amount step".

I hate, hate, hate when online forms do this. I almost accidentally bought a $500 gift card yesterday while trying to buy a $5.00 one because this exact same thing happened.

It would have been nice to have a notice pop up when they dropped the decimal, the same way so many forms do for the "invalid character" in my last name. (But I have no strong feelings on the subject whatsoever.)

Glad another software guy saying this. Digital infrastructure as how it now has no integrity.

I prefer going to bank if I have time.

Even the largest bank like Feds can have 3 trillion dollars operation error. https://thespeakernewsjournal.com/us/bank-wires-worth-trilli...

Knowing what I know and the kind of security that is in online banking does not bring any confidence in me.

Why do you think the in person operations are less likely to make errors?

I mean, go ahead and do what you want, but if checking recent transactions makes sense for online banking, it probably makes sense for offline banking too.

If I make an error, I eat it. If the banker makes an error, they eat it, or at least you have some ground to stand on.

The app for my bank account lets me view balances (and some other info), transfer funds between my subaccounts (for free), and deposit checks.

There's not functionality in there to shoot myself in the foot.

Keep trying, you'll find it.

I mean, you could transfer too much money out of the subaccount that rent/mortgage/etc. is paid out of

You are right. Most security are really depending on banks whether they operate with integrity and your relationship with them. For security get to know your banker. And I wouldn't recommend any of large banks. Local credit union and small bank with good balance sheet are better bet.

Budgeting using a tool like YNAB has allowed me to manage monthly funds more effectively, pay off debts faster, and save up more quickly for the things I want to buy. It's possible to use it by inputting all your receipts in manually but it's such a time sink. Automatic importing let's me see exactly where my funds are and budget quickly in a few minutes at the start of my day. When cards are not importing correctly it's such a difference importing stuff manually.

As another example with online banking switching banks effectively becomes zero friction. When Ally slashed rates it took a couple days to move nearly all funds out to a savings account with a much better rate.

Not to mention nearly all brick and mortar stores have savings account rates that are effectively zero. My first interest payment when I was a new Ally customer was basically what I got the entire ten year period I was at bank of america

That's good for you, but it sounds like you are spending way more time managing finances online, than I do offline ;) I have an average weekly budget that I keep track of in my head, and that's it. That's also the reason why I prefer paying in cash. Easier to keep track of the outgoing money.

In the US atleast if you're making cash payments you are subsidizing all credit card and debit card transactions. I end up at the end of the year with hundreds of dollars (often times over a thousand if I was awarded a bonus for a new card) returned back to me in cash back. If I convert to miles they are worth even more. I never use cash anywhere that accepts cards.

Online banking also makes it very easy to manage my cards to ensure I'm never paying interest since the first interest payment usually totally eats up any savings from cash back.

> Easier to keep track of the outgoing money.

It definitely is not. How is keeping track of random cash purchases in your head easier than a computer doing it for you automatically and instantly?

Ok, technically I don't keep track of it in my head, but in my pocket. I start with a given amount of Euros in my pocket. Each purchase reduces that amount. If I want to check my current balance I reach into my pocket and see how much money is left. Checking this against the current date gives me a rough idea if I'm over- or under-budget.

But how do you sell your purchase data for a 1% discount this way?

A few:

- being able to mange banking while traveling internationally (or to a state/province that does't have a branch)

- 30 second transfers between accounts (or to other banks)

- few minutes to open a new account

- see posted (and pending) charges within a day or two instead of a month (I regularly import for my budgeting software)

I'm a developer and actually do consider myself a little bit of a luddite. But online banking is helpful to me over traditional banking.

Open an account in minutes? How many accounts do you use per month? I have had six in 49 years. Only the first and last of your list seem very useful to me.

Not many, but I switched banks two months ago and doing it online made it trivial.

I didn’t say each point was of equal value or frequency. I was just trying to list some benefits for someone that asked.

I do prefer online-first, but I do miss being able to go to the bank. Self-service is great right up until it isn't. If I walk into the bank with a question, there's a near-certain chance I'll walk out with an answer. Instead of clicking around progressively darker corners of the site, I'll just stand at the counter until the answer comes to me.

It sounds "so karen", but it's very difficult to ask for a manager online, and very difficult to refuse in-person.

As someone who has never really done "offline banking", I don't really understand how this works? Do you maintain your own ledger of all your accounts and their balances? Or are you driving over to the bank to check on things once or twice a month? If you have to transfer between accounts, do you go to one bank, get a check, then go to another bank? And this means you're entirely excluded from low-cost banks that don't have branches?

Honestly this is kind of blowing my mind. I've only been to the bank one time in probably a decade, and it was when I needed a $30k check to buy a car. Even my mortgage was done mostly over email (though they did send a guy out to have me sign paperwork.)

You get paper statements. Yes, you keep a ledger (ye olde "checkbook") and you write checks, use your debit card or get cash.

(No, I no longer do this. I'm just old enough to remember a time before online banking existed when the hot new thing was being able to check your balance via the automated phone system.)

Honestly, I'm not sure if you're trolling or not :) But in case not: I have one account at one bank. I think there's a monthly fee on the account, but TBH I don't know how much, in any case it's not nearly enough to consider changing to other banks.

Recurring payments (e.g. rent, internet, power etc...) are handled through automatic orders which I had setup once. For the very rare cases where I need to pay a bill "manually" there are service machines in the branch office's lobby, which is about 5 minutes walking distance from my home.

Not at all trolling :). Your setup sounds like it would be unusual in my spheres, where most people have probably close to a dozen different accounts (credit cards, retirement accounts, investments, mortgages, etc.) Online banking is very convenient for managing all this info.

Increasingly banks are reducing the ability to do that.

Here in Australia most banks have closed down branches in many smaller communities over the last 20 years.

Many of the 'standard' accounts that people have either only one in-branch visit per month, or none at all - and charge a fee for it.

Credit Unions and Building Societies are not much better, if at all.

There's also a growing number of online-only banks which don't have any physical branches, and all your interaction with them is online or over the phone.

What? None of the big 4 banks in Australia charge you for going into a branch?

> I just don't see the advantage over traditional "offline banking".

You must live somewhere with an extremely temperate climate.

SUBTEXT: If you live somewhere with things like "snow" or "ice" or "Winter Storms" you'll change your tune once you begin to seriously worry how slowly you'd die after you break your hip on a sidewalk that's more snow-covered ice than concrete.

Banks around me are swapping tellers for atms. Like literally no way to talk to anyone inside.

I also prefer to go to the bank. I got my issue solved just by giving my id and wait 10m.

On the phone they couldn't even understand what I'm talking, ton of a security questions... I gave up.

I tried online and had some issues. Some code didn't work even if I had it saved.

Physical much more efficient. I can just relax 10m and get my things done just by saying 1 sentence

My wife teaches basic computer skills to older people (think 65+). I hear her teaching sometimes, and I find it remarkable what "basic" actually means to these people. She takes a lot of pride when her students are able to reply to an email, or find content and services online.

>Rant: If you are not an IT person and need to work with Excel and PowerPoint for the next 20 years then ffs sit down and learn the in-depth tools and tricks in the tools over the span of two weekends.

Until the IT people decide to change technologies on you because we do it so often to ourselves.

Except Excel. I'm pretty sure that's immortal.

>ffs sit down and learn the in-depth tools and tricks in the tools over the span of two weekends

Even IT people don't know their tools as much as I'd like them to. Taking time out like this, to get to know the tools, is a worthy effort for all.

Very few tools designed today have any features that facilitate learning. Developers don't understand how learning works and don't really care. Operating systems mostly washed their hands of this issue as well. It's a mess.

I agree. Jetbrains did well with their IDE I think, they show context aware suggestions often, but in a non-obtrusive way. This is effective because the information is there when you need it, not when you have no idea what to do with it.

True. There are just too many.

I should still improve my knowledge of git, gradle, intelij, various command line tools, docker and so on.

That by itself isn't to much but all this stuff comes on top of just staying up to date with the plattform you are working on and learning the next framework or library which you immediately need. Looking at you, android and your yearly updates, Kotlin, and a dozen jetpack libraries.

I get that, there's too much and changes too often. But there are cases where going a little deeper improves productivity a lot. Where I work we're assigned to projects that last at least a couple of years, so it pays off to spend some time learning the tools.

>I know people in their 50s who pretend that "they don't need this technology" or "I can just go to the bank if I need something". Sure, if you're in your 80s you might want to dodge most of the digital stuff. But in your 50s? You're gonna have to live with an increasing digitalization for multiple decades.

I'm in early 20s and I almost never used smartphone nor I'm not about to get one

I'm SE.

It seems to be ramping up now. It was only 4 years ago that my bank drastically cut the number of "real people" you can talk to at the bank, for example.

>You're gonna have to live with an increasing digitalization for multiple decades.

Technology exists for people, not the other way around.

If you were in your 50s in the 90s I could understand avoiding technology. I have some sympathy for those in their 90s who had retired before the 1990s, but in the late 1990s Terry Wogan (b 1938) and his producer Paul Walters (b1947), with a breakfast radio show reaching 20% of the UK and aimed at fairly old people, showing that it wasn't too late for people their age to learn computing and send emails, watch webcams, etc.

If you're a boomer, you were in your 40s when windows 95 came out, and internet was common in average households in your 50s - no excuse.

For prisoners who were incarcerated, surely the rehabilitation and release process educates on basic information age technology like going to a library and using a computer to access public services

Reply on news.ycombinator.com