Gen Z Also Doesn't Understand Desktops
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Sounds like every experience every human has at least once with a printer or a scanner. Nothing unique for the generation.
My experience is that most people who haven't had a IT or Office job since before are relatively clueless the first weeks in their new position, and I've seen that in people from all generations, again nothing unique for "Gen Z".
Printers are even more difficult. I have to print sometimes in paper with a nice preprinted frame, and each time I have to make a few test until I find which one of the 4 orientation is the correct one.
"Kids" these days are just used to things working and not having to fix things themselves and missing out on getting the better understanding.
The only reason I'm in tech at all is from years of running game servers for my friends, fixing my computer, buying something cheap and putting the time in to save a small amount of money.
Everyone has seen this with "younger people" since forever, it is not new at all. Every generation feels like the next one has it easier and is lazier when it comes to fixing things themselves or whatnot.
Every person in a generation has said "kids these days are just X" in one way or another, while being guilty of the very same thing themselves when they were younger.
People born today are as likely to do all those things you described as you were, it's just a small amount of people in general that does those things in general, so it skews your perspective.
Stuff breaks constantly to me, to the point I ask myself how do people deal with these things without software development knowledge.
And I'm not talking about complex setups, I'm talking about android apps, android tv, stuff that should never be touched beside from a couch with a remote.
We are the stick shift enthusiasts arguing amongst ourselves and crying about how nobody can drive properly.
Meanwhile, the people at large just drive a car with automatic transmission without a care in the world because they want to get from Point A to Point B and couldn't give a damn what a car is.
Desktops vs phones is a very different proposition. There are a huge range of tasks that phones/tablets don't do and won't do any time soon. If you can't work a desktop computer then you're going to be unable to achieve many things that society has a critical need for. That's why universities are needing to teach students how to use files and directories but not how to drive manual cars.
I read your other comments, you're right that files/folders were never a great metaphor. Recursive objects are unnatural and basically never encountered in real life, so even people who learned how to use files/folders will very often not use nested structures. Tree view widgets don't exist on phones/tablets for the same reasons, more or less, they have famously terrible usability study results.
The problem is though, that iOS/Android/ChromeOS simplified their UX not actually by finding ways to make things simpler, but just by getting rid of the ability to do those things at all. Simple things are simple and complex things are out of scope. If these newer platforms represented pure progress in usability we either wouldn't see or wouldn't care about these articles because universities and companies would just use tablets for everything. They can't, primarily because of the choices made by those operating systems. Instead they have to give remedial classes in how to use Windows.
It may not matter in the end, these are skills people can learn, it's not a big deal. But I don't think we should see this as being like with cars. It's clearly not. The industry made progress in some areas (simplicity, robustness) but only at the cost of abandoning large parts of what made computing so useful to begin with. It'd be more like if people didn't complain about oil changes anymore because cars had been replaced entirely with public transport. How to build a better "desktop" OS is still an open research problem, in my view.
I agree, but we're not talking about desktops/laptops vs. mobile devices; we are talking about using computers in general and whether a deeper understanding of computers is actually valuable to most people.
>Recursive objects are unnatural and basically never encountered in real life,
I disagree, recursive objects are everywhere. File cabinets are an obvious example, being the literal source of the metaphor. Public libraries are another. An employee's place within a company is also one.
>The problem is though, that iOS/Android/ChromeOS simplified their UX not actually by finding ways to make things simpler, but just by getting rid of the ability to do those things at all. Simple things are simple and complex things are out of scope. If these newer platforms represented pure progress in usability we either wouldn't see or wouldn't care about these articles because universities and companies would just use tablets for everything.
From the perspective of the average user, it's an absolute improvement in usability. They don't have to be concerned about technicalities they never cared about in the first place anymore.
Photo and Camera apps just dump all pictures in one, single location and most people love it because they don't need to deal with files anymore. They're dealing with pictures they want to interact with, not "files".
Want to send a picture to someone? Pick a picture in the Photo app and hit the email button! Even grandmas can figure that out, unlike going into your email client and digging through the file system to find the pict-- I'm sorry, file that you want to send.
It pains me to write all this, actually, because I appreciate file system access. But the brutal reality of the matter is people don't fucking care, computers as we know it are an obnoxious nuisance to them. The people want computers that are simple and intuitive to use, power be damned because they can't and won't use that power anyway.
>They can't, primarily because of the choices made by those operating systems. Instead they have to give remedial classes in how to use Windows.
I'm actually half-expecting a paradigm shift from Apple on this front in the near future. They're slowly turning the iPad to be more in line with personal computers in productive capability, so if they succeed we might see the absolute end of the desktop and laptop form factors as anything more than an eccentric novelty; to be replaced by tablets, supported by servers on the internet ("the cloud") for the really intensive tasks.
We're already seeing an astonishing adoption rate of "It Just Fucking Works(tm)" computers like Macbooks, Chromebooks, and smartphones and tablets in places that would previously have been the absolute domain of Windows and Linux desktops and laptops. Apple and Google might be on the cusp of a turning point in personal computing history.
>The industry made progress in some areas (simplicity, robustness) but only at the cost of abandoning large parts of what made computing so useful to begin with.
Windows and Linux still exist for the enthusiasts and professionals who sincerely need or want that power of complexity and versatility.
The takeaway is most people never needed nor wanted Windows and Linux, they always just wanted a computer that works like an appliance and software engineering and IT infrastructure is finally getting to the point that desire is a reality.
>It'd be more like if people didn't complain about oil changes anymore because cars had been replaced entirely with public transport.
If the world goes the way environmentalists and certain politicians want it to go, most of us certainly won't be complaining about oil changes soon. :V
Hmm I guess I didn't use clear terminology. File cabinets aren't recursive because you can't literally put folders within folders within folders. I mean you can try but it's going to get pretty disastrous fast and most don't people don't use them that way. Likewise, the nesting scheme used by libraries isn't recursive. There's: Library > Shelf > Book. That's it. You can't have books that contain other books, or shelves that contain other shelves.
You're right that family trees, corporate org chats etc are examples of recursive structures that don't cause people problems though.
> The people want computers that are simple and intuitive to use, power be damned because they can't and won't use that power anyway ... Windows and Linux still exist for the enthusiasts and professionals
Right ... putting enthusiasts to one side, my point is that "professionals" is a massive and very important category of people. Practically any office worker is going to be a professional of some kind or another.
So they can and will use that power once they graduate beyond mere consumption and start needing to organize complex projects involving many types of data, work with that data in different kinds of apps and so on. Yes you can try and make it all happen using only search and share buttons, but that stops scaling pretty fast. Extreme example: programming would be nearly impossible with such an approach. But there are plenty of other examples, scientific/engineering work being one where the search+share paradigm just falls apart. Even just running a photography business would quickly become a nightmare if you had to rely on search for everything.
The desktop computer has been surpassed by other less flexible data terminals as those older printing technologies were. Similarly, there will be people for whom the fit of capabilities (and lack of need for new investment) will keep the older technologies extant if not vibrant for a long time past their actual economic death.
We now live in the world that Sun wanted: a small market for massively expensive "worksations", more market for bigger "servers" with no UI; and commodity, disposable, mostly read only terminals for the masses.
What we've got now is almost the reverse: we pay for quite expensive machines that have those things and then remote the app UI backwards. The server spends relatively little resources on our requests and doesn't think in terms of pixels at all, whilst our machines spend a lot of resources doing graphical heavy lifting. And instead of all the user's data being brought together in one place (the file system) it's all scattered in different databases the users don't have access to.
Why would they?
Times are a'changin'...
https://www.pcgamer.com/young-workers-dont-know-how-to-use-o...
The thesis: Usability sucks? Blame the user.
This is the most backward, asinine take imaginable.
They more clued up now and have ambitions to build their own machines, for gaming of course.
What a useless HN submission. And they're directories, not folders.
instead it's just redditors vying for upvotes, talking about old news, making the same dozen tired jokes and references they hijack top comment in _every single thread_ to make, possibly with some humorous anecdotes and genuinely useful links mixed in.
This is not necessarily what I come to HN to read. The mental strain of separating the wheat from the chaff on reddit is too great so I come here to skip that part.
Despite this, I feel that addressing it is mostly nonproductive, and who am I to talk, but all the same, you brought it up so there's my 2 cents - I agree with you.
We, and by we I mean us IT enthusiasts and professionals alike, need to realize that we are a small bunch of nerds with highly specialized, rare skills who appear like aliens to the wider public. Most people have far better (in their minds) things to care about than messing with or learning computer, and we need to lower our bar of presumption.
It seems that the "Don't make me think" was taken too far.