The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)
The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)
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From the tasks described, it seems to me they were not measuring 'Computer Skills' as reasoning, patience, tenacity - people could have similar issues with similar tasks involving a pile of papers.
I’ve been reading the book “A Small Matter of Programming” which discusses a bit end users relationships with computers.
I think people who are into computers get surprised to know most people just don’t care about how computers work and they shouldn’t have to. They want software that is easy to use and allows them to complete their task. Ex: a spreadsheet is an incredibly powerful software that hides anything about how computers work but still allow users to create multiple different “apps” by effectively programming.
This is one reason Apple is so successful and a lot of tech users don’t understand it. Apple creates “abstractions” so that end users don’t have to deal with low level details — something they don’t want to. They want to see the machine as a black box that just provides them some service easily and smoothly.
Most of the “decaying” tech skills people say are actually stuff people don’t need to know nowadays. Everything is an abstraction anyway, and most people tinkering with desktop computers aren’t aware of how the graphics software is rendering the screen, for example.
A lot of the decaying skills are things like understanding your computer's file system (i.e. how folders and files work, where they are, etc.) This kind of skill is definitely still needed if you work in an office environment. It may not be necessary if all you're doing is being spoon-fed Instagram posts on your phone, but understanding where you saved your files is pretty damn important for most office workers' day to day jobs (especially with how dogshit Windows' search functionality is).
Not if Google Drive has anything to say about it. It absolutely grinds my gears how much effort they go to not to tell you where a document is located.
The problem is the software isn't making it simpler to operate just by abstraction, much of it is by subtraction.
It's not turning two buttons with individual functions into one, it's removing a button all together, even for the people that knew how to use it.
The problem with the abstraction is, the more you rely on technology to replace certain skills, the more dependant on it you get, and the tech industry is getting less dependable and increasingly predatory when it comes to the users that are now dependent on them. That dependence also leads to more market entrenchment.
For example, if you don't know how to manage files, you are trapped forever with iCloud or OneDrive until they create easy ways to transfer everything seamlessly between clouds (and they won't). That's bad for users and for the industry overall.
Basically, without the skills, you have to trust the tech companies to guide you by one hand and not stab you with the other, and they are increasingly unworthy of that trust.
I built my entire cloud storage strategy around Google drive because it had very simple integration with my previous seed box provider. Like, I could run Plex from the cloud through them directly off of my Google drive and then mirror that to local storage.
Super slick and easily usable setup. In a push to completely de-google my life the past 2 years I had to figure out an effective migration strategy off of that stack.
It was a total pain in the ass. Not to mention moving the rest of the people on my family plan off of Google as well. The majority of them are fairly tech savvy and even with that in mind we struggled.
I am now 100% self-hosted and learned a shit ton about docker along the way but, I couldn't imagine trying to do the same thing with a group of entry level users.