Something I’ve noticed as an elder millennial working in IT is that there’s an assumption by older generations that because zoomers have grown up with smartphones that they’ll be automatically be proficient with tech as a whole, but it’s not correct in my experience and I really think it’s doing them a disservice. They’re better than anyone else I’ve met at navigating apps/mobile UI but tend to struggle as much as boomers with more traditional computers, because it’s simply not what they grew up with and no one thought to teach them.
Honestly I expect, just like in the early days of personal computing, that Gen Z and beyond will suffer from PC illiteracy. The main issue is that phones and tablets are being used almost exclusively during school and on personal time, so they have no idea what Windows nor even Mac looks and feels like. What happens with Zoomer gets an office job for the first time? They have to figure out how to use Windows and Office for the first time. It's crazy to think that your 70 yr old Grandma and your 17 yr old Nephew could potentially be on the same level of knowledge of how to use Windows, Office, etc...
This is something we see with our students at school. I think we do them a disservice assuming they have skills we had to acquire as technology progressed. Even something as fundamental as typing is not being actively taught.
Maybe the main problem is that they don't have the concept of trial and error. Yeah sure a printer has weird UX, but just press buttons and see what happens 😁.
It comes down to good interface engineering. There was a time engineers were really good at making complex systems simple to operate. Now it seems they're good at making simple systems complex to operate. It seems to coincide with most companies outsourcing design to cheap labor markets.
On another trend in interface engineering, I think a lot of "apps" are easy to use because they simply don't provide options. This is how you will use our software and that's all there is to it. The plus side is simplicity, the down side is inflexibility.
I'm pretty good at dealing with systems of all kinds myself. I get really infuriated at times by the lack of flexibility for the sake of simplicity in systems now. You can always read a manual, but you can't easily change programming or design.
I’ve seen this with my Zoomer sister-in-law. She just recently learned how to use Microsoft - their home and school system was entirely Apple. She’s still not great at troubleshooting.
Non-universal experience, but I'm a zoomer (24) and I'm basically my family's IT department, my apparent specialty being the wrangling of our unruly printer-scanner. My millennial older brother (who will be 28 this summer) never even thinks to ask google basic troubleshooting stuff when he has a problem. I think it's less about generation and more about individual inclination to read instructions and look through settings menus, that sort of thing.
Not surprising, and not entirely their fault. In my experience, software for operating a scanner or printer is almost invariably terrible. In the case of printers, this is intentional; printers are designed, first and foremost, to extract money from you.
For what it's worth, the Document Scanner app from the Gnome project (the Debian package for it is named simple-scan) is pretty good.
However…
Every morning when he turned it on, he would be greeted by a pop-up from the storage service Dropbox, which he always accepted without reading.
This is not acceptable. If there is a message on your screen, you are expected to read it, so read it. You don't have to re-read it if you see the same message again, but you do have to read it the first time you see it. No excuses. If you get messages that are annoying and unnecessary (note: that's an “and”, not an “or”), then you're using bad software; replace it with something better.
And yes, it's normal to have to replace software with better software. Sturgeon's law is in full force and effect here.
Younger people seem more willing to learn, and can quickly adapt to new skills
Absolutely. The older you get, the harder it is to learn new skills. That's why children are sent to school: they're at exactly the right age to learn all that stuff.
“Gen Z is very comfortable navigating software they’ve never used before, because they’ve been doing it their whole lives,” Bench said.
This is also true of Gen Y (Millennials), including myself, for the same reason.
The scanner at my last job was great. It was part of the printer, set up by central IT, and could send the scanned document to my email address. 10/10 scanner.
The AIO printer / copier / scanner I bought myself for WFH sucks as a scanner. Mostly because I'm on Linux, and there just isn't an easy way to get the documents from the scanner to my computer. I often just use Photoscan on my phone.