We are the bridge generation.
We know and saw a world without the internet and we experienced it when it first came to be.
We saw the first mass produced computers and computer devices which broke often, didn’t work the way we wanted them to, they weren’t fast and they didn’t have much memory in any way. We were the first generation to see all this. Our parents were too old and busy to figure it out but we were young enough to be curious about it all. We also kept wanting to have the newest fastest hardware and software so we had no choice but to either buy, beg or steal these things to get them. We learned to swap parts, add parts, remove parts, install an OS, uninstall the OS, run backups, store data and learn it all on our own because there was no easy internet social media community to help you. Software was constantly changing and we had to keep up by either buying expensive titles or we learned about Linux and open source software or we became digital pirates or both.
Now the digital landscape has changed. Younger generations prefer handheld devices so to them everything is solid state … they never can imagine changing the RAM, HDD, SSD, CPU, GPU or the PSU or even bothering to learn what those things are. Because everything is built in and no one (or very few) people bother with fixing or tinkering with anything. There are fewer people who learn about software and about how or where to find it, install it, configure it and run it. To new generations who only know the digital world through locked devices, there was less incentive to learn or even have access to know how these things worked.
We are the bridge generation. We got to see the world without the internet and the world with one. No one before us got to see what we saw, no one after us will experience what we went through. Our civilization dramatically changed during our lifetime and we got a front row seat.
We got to live in the most interesting times in history, so far. Most of us are depressed for it.
It’s not easy growing up in houses, watching our parents complain about tiny things while cashing huge paychecks… And now they tell us it’s our fault we can’t afford that lifestyle.
Boomers are real pieces of shit, as a whole. Not all of them, of course… But man, there’s a very real trend.
I thought it was because we didn’t want to work. Man, I really dislike that statement.
Boomers are real pieces of shit
I have some weird news for you: Generations don’t exist. Boomers? Not real. Silent Generation? Nope. Gen X? No! Millennial? Non-existent! ALL OF THEM.
The PSU is the only thing you can change easily. I love that everything is USB-C and that I can plug in everything, everywhere.
But I’m kind of happy everyone uses handhelds, I got really tired fixing everything for my entire family and friends.
“My printer seems to be defectiv…”
Entschuldige, ich kann kein Englisch. Muss weg, keine Zeit. Bye!
I work in Tech and this is my mantra: printers are Of the Devil.
My buddy worked tech support for a fairly large facility. They got tired of getting calls for a busted printer, only to walk all the way across the facility to discover it was out of paper. It got to the point that if someone called about a printer, they would wait an hour before responding. If nobody else called within that hour, they assumed the issue was resolved on its own.
I’m sure they got to us because they were too evil for hell and the devil itself got tired of them.
The part that royally pisses me off is that a roommate used to work for Lexmark. One day he brings home an “all in one” printer, fax, scanner, and something else I am forgetting. Best scanner I have ever seen. No light bar. The thing worked by taking four pictures and digitally meshing them together. When you scanned a document, there was a series of 4 rapid flashes. One Magenta, one Cyan, one Yellow, one White.
The damn thing was absolutely perfect at digitizing anything you put onto the unit’s scanning glass, but it did have a design issue where the scanning glass wasn’t parallel to the floor, and was instead tilted like a desktop picture frame.
According to my roommate, that particular design flaw is why they decided to kill the printer, never releasing it to the public. AFAIK they never even tried that scanning tech in any other printer.
In healthcare IT there’s often a person who specializes in just printers. My friend makes a lot of money doing that.
I once turned down a job solely because they asked too many questions about printers during the interview.
I won’t be the printer guy! That path leads to depression.
Oh and cancer. Toner gives you cancer.
It’s like all the old geezers who cum into carbeurators but like, shouldn’t they be happy that fuel-injection is a million times better and more reliable? I work on my own car and I can handle that shit in my driveway easy but these people seem to want more work to do. Yes, Fred, carbs make more sense for dirtbikes but oh my god otherwise shut up.
As for printers yea what the fuck. They all work differently even within the same company when all they need to do is take the exact same control module, maybe two versions of it, and slap it onto different bodies. But, instead, it’s just a giant fucking mess.
The PSU might be easy in practice but all those cords are daunting to the novice. Much easier to swap the RAM or even to take out and put in a new GPU.
I love that everything is USB-C
Well, maybe things are easier now. My 12 year old PC build has a modular PSU with a bunch of different cords.
The comp for an older generation is cars. Cars saw similar growth and adoption in the 50s-80s. And they had similar growing pains, reliability and maintenance issues were common place. So being able to perform maintenance and having an understanding of how they work was far more wide spread than just hobbyist and professionals.
As cars advanced the need to perform field maintenance and ad hoc repairs became less required so future generations (on average) became less knowledgeable and skilled at various car repair (and modification) activities, because cars just work now so there’s really no need to worry about learning how to fix minor issues, because they’re just not a common problem.
Case in point: I drive an EV and I don’t think there’s a damn thing I personally can do to fix it other than maybe change a tire. It doesn’t even have a spare and I wouldn’t even know how anyway.
My god, I’m the iPad kid of cars.
It’s a deliberate choice by companies because they sell you the thing, and the service to fix the thing.
There’s a lot you can still do. All the suspension, battery cooler pump, brakes, wheel bearings, a ton of things to do with the electrical system and lights, fuses and relays, window and lock motors, blinker arms and switches, fluid changes, hvac and ac components, the traction motors themselves…generally the only thing hard for a shade tree mechanic is the battery itself. They’re really heavy and hard to remove.
Now some components are going to be hard to get a hold of because there isn’t any third party companies making replacements, but eventually as need arises, they’ll get made. Until then there’s places like pick n pull where you can go take used parts off used vehicles or buy used and tested components from ebay if the manufacturer won’t sell you something. I bought a new oem hybrid battery just a couple years ago from a Toyota dealership and installed it myself.
You also can’t wrench on a car anymore in the way you used to. It’s all computerized and you need special software to access and configure parts.
I can’t replace my airbags without special pairing software that cost tens of thousands of dollars. It’s unlikely that I’ll learn by performing the repair because the tools are no longer available.
Eh…that’s still pretty doable. Many things actually got easier for auto work. A $12 bluetooth obdII dongle and a $4 piece of software on your phone will give you most all the trouble codes you need to diagnose problems, and that’s it it doesn’t outright tell you the issue. Almost no car parts are parts paired and thanks to the internet there’s guides that are way better than a Haines manual to show you how to fix things, as well as a dozen different places to order parts from.
In the past 15 years the only time I’ve used a mechanic was to replace a clutch.
Here I am at 41 and know how to screw with everything. I stayed inquisitive and stayed a tight ass. I think I’ve paid for a professional to do something twice in the past 20 years. I didn’t want to take on the task of replacing a clutch on a front wheel drive suv on the ground in my driveway.
The difference is that you don’t need to be car savvy not to get into an accident. But you do need to be tech savvy not to be at risk of cyberthreats.
Drivers truly don’t need to know how a car works, software is not like that.
Also, you can get by without a car, whereas most people need at least an email address.
Edit: I don’t understand the downvotes. Do people think that you need to know about how engines work to drive a car. Or do people don’t think you need to understand file structure to manage excel files?
My 13 y o niece had no idea how to uninstall a program on a PC. I was a little stunned.
I’m reasonably certain that all four of my housemates, (58 y/o +) don’t have any idea how to close a program either on their laptops, or their phones. Thankfully I’m the only desktop guardian.
My government teacher in 12th grade got hit with an RIAA suit for seeding thousands of hours of music on Kazaa. When she found out that it was “illegal pirating” she deleted the icon off the desktop and thought she was done.
She never had to deal with a 4GB hard drive running out of space :-/
Defragmenting often to free up some precious megabytes. I felt like the king of the world upgrading from 4 to 20 GB.
Now I treat a few gigabytes the way I used to treat a few megabytes (like they’re nothing)
Great write up
Very eloquently put.
It’s not like your bridge generation is the only one that know how to use a computer. To me it seems that there are a few ‘experts’ in each generation and the others don’t bother learning it. This is pretty normal and called specialization, the thing that civilization allows us to do.
I grew up with computers, there was no strict need to change OSes or even hardware (of you got prebuilts). Even so, it’s amazing what unrestricted Internet access and an interest in videogames can lead to. And I know a lot of others who either have at least the basic skills, or are studying Computer science together with me.
Perhaps there are trends in each generation, but acting like it’s just one generation that can do computer things is just wrong.
Poverty is also a driving force. I’ve never had a lot of money so I had to be creative in order to do a lot of things. I know how to fix repair and even build my own house. I know how to fix and maintain most things with all my vehicles. I know how to build fix and maintain my own computer systems because I could never afford expensive devices or to pay anyone to fix things for me.
Because I couldn’t afford much, I’ve instead had to spend most of my time doing things myself.
I’m not sure what the generation breakdown is. I’m in my 50’s and fix PCs. My brother in law is in his 70’s and fixes PCs. One of his 3 daughters (40) fixes her own PC.
It seems like it’s everyone between 40-80.
GenX is what the comment is about. Millennials were born to home computers but the early ones had to contend with much the same mess we did.
Millennials were born to home computers
The majority of Millennials probably first got a PC in the home in their tween/teen years.
Early millennials are definitely thrown in there and remember “before the internet and cell phones” where a thing. I was flipping dip switches on my motherboard to make my swapped out components work. My first pc I got a hold of ran on dos and 5 1/4 floppies. Teens of the 90"s are probably the most pc tech literate ones.
Yeah, early millennial and OPs comment fits to a “T” for me, though I think some of my experiences had a bit more socialization in context, like ICQ, Aol chat, and MSN messenger. The rise of cell phones, text messages, T9, etc. My kids are amazed when I pull out the VHS tapes at my parents, or my dad pulls out some cassettes or vinyls (though those have been more popular of late).
I think your family are tinkerers, and they are a rare breed. A group of people who just love taking things apart, bringing them back together and doing all sorts of other things with them. My family is a bit like that but we never had the technical expertise. I’m indigenous from northern Ontario and a lot of my cousins and relations have a grade school education but there is a whole lot of excellent small engine mechanics. I have one cousin who barely spoke any English but her regularly swapped while engines from trucks to keep old vehicles running.
I tinker myself which is why I learned about computers and computer technology on my own but never to a really high level.
So every generation has their outliers and your family were probably the same group of people that made things or fixed things in earlier generations.
in my 50s* + in his 70s*
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Learning to edit config.sys to get some share ware game working without help was a rite of passage for many.
Kids don’t even understand file structures because modern OSs obfuscate that stuff.
That’s my biggest gripe to be honest with modern OSs. My files in my folders are organized like I organize my house. I live in and around that. I hate the idea of a “Downloads” and other stuff with “automatically in the cloud backup for this app”. Give me a file to save you stupid app.
Yeah ya stupid app!
tell em!
Android has taken away a lot of the manual usage shit when it comes to doing what you want of it on behalf of security protections. Well fuck you, if I want a program to have certain access to things I should be allowed to do it, whether you like it or not. My N20U still can’t have a full and proper root.
I don’t mind that they simplify it. It makes it easier for more users. Its the fact that even advanced users can’t access it. Not a problem with a perfect app on a perfect operating system with perfect interoperability. None of those exist.
A colleague was trying to share a 365 file with me last week. I didn’t have permission to open it. I was begging them to just save a “physical” copy to disk and email it to me. I hate the cloud.
Genuinely, Microsoft onedrive/365 share sucks ass. It just does. I got 365 Family since my family doesn’t know how to use anything else besides office apps so I just got the subscription that also gives you onedrive. So, I’ve been using that cloud storage if it’s available and god dammit, why is it so hard to share, find and search files in there.
Kids? Try being a manager trying to hire for entry level data work.
I got maybe one out of five people who even knew how to do basic things like opening windows explorer and navigating through folders. And from that slim margin, finding someone who actually knows how to use software like excel or outlook or word, it makes me want to reword the listing to say that we need people with 5 five years experience. For entry level.
I have become that which we hate. I am demanding experience for entry level work, simply because the entry-level work pool has zero knowledge how things work. You have spent all your time browsing and none of your time challenging yourselves to install software yourself, to copy and move files, or tried even opening your “settings” panel to adjust things. When I started working a lifetime ago, I took some free lessons in learning how to navigate excel and other popular programs. Using that TINY bit of training, I went on to make formulas and automated several of the systems at my first job. I went from counting screws in the warehouse to an eventual VP position.
You can get much, much further ahead of the curve if you actually try to learn a little more about the things you use every day, and you will grow your opportunities more than you can imagine.
“Get off my lawn kids. And god forbid we train people.”
The common man won’t go out of their way to learn a software they don’t even know they will use. Why is it somehow worst for young people?
The personal computer as we grew up with is long gone, but somehow, companies and hiring managers expect everyone to be like it is still the case.
And let’s be real, the vast majority of people don’t know how to use excel even if they work with it every day. For them, it’s a database with a UI and a chart module.
So yeah, ask for 5 years experience for an entry level data entry position, that’ll fix it for you.
For them, it’s a database with a UI and a chart module.
As someone in the generation mentioned in the OP meme I can confirm, most people in my generation don’t know how to use Excel either, didn’t know it when we were younger and that is mostly because it is largely used in professional settings for a narrow range of jobs for its actual purpose and everyone else in a slightly wider range of jobs would be better off using a web app with an actual database.
My last job still had an access app for generating task lists
I’ve met software developers who didn’t know how to use Excel properly (in the sense of not even knowing they could use formulas).
I think that’s very much for the reason you state: they “won’t go out of their way to learn a software they don’t even know they will use”.
It’s not just a “common man” thing, it’s an everybody thing - there’s just too much stuff and not enough time to learn it all, so even software developers might never find themselves in a situation were they have to understand Excel enough to know such simple things as how to use functions in the cells, how to use references to other cells or how to make some references be relative to a cell’s position and other absolute.
Mind you, they’ll probably learn it way faster than “common” people simply because so much of its advanced usage follows “programmer logic”, but that still requires them to be forced to actually use it long enough and often enough that they put the effort into learning it.
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Well I’m your man! Been using Windows since I stopped using DOS. I meet every requirement you’ve listed here for the job you’ve described and then some. And not one of your peers will give me a call back. Not one.
If nothing else, gimme some pointers about how to make it thru your ATS. If i can get human eyes I can get hired. Problem is getting that far.
And pay is 39k.
Amen. Been on the hunt for 3 years, had one call back. It’s brutal.
I am demanding experience for entry level work, simply because the entry-level work pool has zero knowledge how things work.
And they don’t need to, that’s not what entry level means.
If a skill isn’t needed in day to day life anymore and is needed for the job you’re putting out, it’s no longer a common knowledge skill.
When the talent pool changes, so should expectations.
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Kids aren’t well organized and file structures take time and practice to understand. No idea why anyone would assume a 10 year old who has been using a computer for maybe two or three years would be as experienced as a 30 year old who’d been doing the work for over 20.
Also, no shortage of Millennials who don’t know how computers work. I deal with them every day.
Other than iOS what PC OS hides file structures?
Android is atrocious with this. Windows can be pretty annoying as well, saving things but you have no idea where it is.
Honestly, I find the most frustrating part about file management on android is how terrible the AOSP file manager and most other files managers are. They simply do not make sense. For some reason, someone thought it would be a good idea to make the big button called “pictures” show you images regardless of where they are located instead of being a shortcut to the “pictures” directory.
Other than dumping files into documents and apps, windows is very open.
Android isn’t a PC OS.
It’s sad that they keep trying to make PCs more like phones. I want phones to be more like PCs.
I agree 100%. It’s a bleak future.
Nobody said PC, Android is a computer operating system.
Smartphones are computers that occasionally make phone calls.
I said PC
No, you edited your post around 19 hours later to add “PC”. Honesty is not your strong point is it?
Yup I did change it. If I had kept it as “computer” that’s what you would have cried about. Even though it’s obvious computer means PC.
When people talk about smartphones they either call it that, or they say android/iOS
What’s a computer?
iOS is literally designed for toddlers to be able to use it. “iPad kids” aren’t especially gifted, “iPad adults” are especially stupid.
But on the bright side, those same groups think they “know computers” because they can press large, brightly colored buttons - so they walk around with unearned confidence in their abilities and impatience/lack of appreciation for the people that actually have to fix things.
It’s also why a large swatch of these same fucking idiot, drains on humanity loudly challenge the validity of voting tech infrastructure without any factual basis to their argument - they just “feel” like they get it.
My boss very confidently proclaimed that all serious IT professionals use a Mac. Said Linux “is for programmers and nerds”
So, programmers != IT professionals, huh…
IT professionals are more the folks that install and maintain large scale computer systems and networks, like a company’s IT department or MSP. Programming is closer to engineering. Software engineering.
“IT professional” does typically lean more towards that yes, but it also encompasses software developers.
