The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)
The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)
Nielsen and Norman group know what’s up. I learned this at my first office job. Everyone thought I was a wizard hacker when I showed them inspect element. I got in trouble with my director who flagged IT Security when I showed my team lead an inspect element on some intranet page. I had changed a title to something else as a proposal and they had thought I had hacked their intranet and changed it myself. Triggered a whole security incident.
I thought everyone with a computer knew about this. I was wrong.
Wow, this is bleak.
I read somewhere (I think the deloitte tech survey from a few years ago) that many people have replaced their pc with smartphones and use their phone as their primary tech device. Would be interesting to see if any of these low-level skill folks are actually high (or higher) on mobile skills.
I believe the most computer proficient people were born between 1975 and 1995. Before that and they were too old to figure it out without a lot of effort. After that they grew up with touch screens and it’s all just magic. Right in the middle we were able to grow along with advancements in computing.
I was teaching a class with mostly students born after 2000. One of them had never used a computer with a keyboard and mouse. Never used folders and files. Kind of blew me away.
I am by no means top at anything I do with a computer, but I do find it said that I tend to know more than almost anyone I interact with in real life when it comes to using computers.
For the most part the way I became proficient with a computer has come down to reading comprehension. I would like to see studies showing the overlap of computer proficiency, and reading comprehension.
That reminds me: i once searching for jobs in the usual local aggregators, it didn't have a link to the original offer nowhere, so i used developer console's picker to figure the URL out. My mother: did you just hack the job page?
Computers are magic and we are wizards because we understand more or less how it works.
As frustrating as this may be, it's even more frustrating when I see exactly the same thing among PROFESSIONAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS!
directory structure and basic text editing are foreign concepts to them. If it's not in their IDE, they really don't understand it.
Also, 90% of them are hunt-and-peck two finger typists.
It has always been this way. Part of my "age-driven degradation" is that I can see the same patterns repeating themselves often at odds with the age of the people in question. The average competency age always shift younger as any skilled profession does. I however am constantly having to show people that should have a newer skillset than me basic problem solving skills and somehow we can both read the same documentation and they not see the solution.