Students are currently arriving at the university without any basic understanding of file hierarchies (folders containing folders and files). And they have no clue what a zip file is. Nor do they know what to do with it.
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
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I used to be able to just say "please download the materials from [learning platform] and organize them so you can work with them before class" and that would be fine. Nowadays I have to give step-by-step instructions that involve things like "create a folder", "navigate to your download folder" and "cut (ctrl-x) the files and paste (ctrl-v) them into the new folder" unless I want half the students to get lost.
Some don't even have a concept of downloading a file. They're so used to streaming and mobile UIs that they seem to think that a downloaded file is simply gone once you close it (and needs to be re-downloaded).
God, that's depressing
dude we have to do the same shit with people, and it's not always young people. Some people just don't fucking understand stuff
literally step by step instructions with screenshots and they sometimes still don't get it, and usually it's not because the instructions were unclear, they simply did not follow what it clearly said because they fundamentally lack understanding or something I don't fucking know
I used to think it was an unreasonable challenge just to get people to paste values and not formats in Excel. it seems like that's going to be even more difficult going forward. I fucking hate it when I'm looking at a table with a half column of cells with a border on the bottom because my dumbass coworker doesn't give a shit about quality and just dragged the first row cell down. like it takes no extra effort to do it cleanly, that shit pisses me off. and it's not for lack of knowledge, they've been taught this and shown it explicitly and told that it's the expectation to have cleanly formatted files. I couldn't imagine handing in work that just had a giant shit stain on the front and thinking that's okay.
I wonder if it is the IT magic. Recently I needed a group to fill a table with values from a test that produced a radar chart. Click on the point, get a numeric value, not too hard. The only complication was that it was a "totally legally disctinct"-test so translated differently and truncated from the proper test. So I worked out translations and a table in order.
My instructions was that you start at 9 o'clock and fill in the table clockwise.
Cue constant question regarding translations and where whatever value should go, while I had done the work and all they needed to do was follow a simple instruction to fill it out as directed. I did that work for them, I don't even remember the translations, that's why you should follow the simple instruction.
Group of all ages, just somehow unable or unwilling not to try and express themselves in that was supposed to be 30 seconds of data entry.
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Time to bring back the manuals from the 80s when students were seeing computers for the first time in university.
Reading? In this day and age?
It has to be YouTube videos.
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I mean, they're close to illiterate, and can't focus on reading anything longer than two paragraphs, according to what I've read on /r/teachers. Phones don't have apparent file management, so they don't know about it.
Idiocracy indeed.
Phones are aggressively hostile to any file management. Many apps just straight up don't give control of actual directories to end users. Manually modifying the directories of software at all is effectively hidden under an exploit and outside legacy ported software it is hard to meaningfully change anything even that way.
So I would not blame youngsters that don't have personal computers. Mobile OS obscure the use and neuter the potential of learning the file system, there are massive hurdles for fringe benefits, completely different from especially PC use in our time where this was fundamental knowledge and enabled doing all kinds of interesting and useful stuff.
It took me years to get over the fact that I can't simply copy and paste stuff from folder to folder anymore. Most phones these days won't even let you do it, and some computers won't either.
Everything wants you to sync everything instead, and gives you these awful file managers like the photo apps that make you five different stupid albums that you didn't ask for and can't turn off, but makes you have to search around to find the basic albums that just hold your photos...
Apple and Google are the worst, but even Microsoft tries to be more like them. I just don't use a computer anymore, haven't in years. When I do again, I'm definitely switching to Linux...
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Scary
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How old is this screenshot?
Young people don’t even know what a directory is.
You can be pretty old and still the youngest person in the office.
They’re on X, and I refuse to install it to guess at this person’s age. From the look of it they’re in their 20’s/30’s, so I think they’re one of the exceptions to the rule that most young people don’t know shit about computers.
Hell, even my kids don’t understand that mobile phones, slates, car stereos, gaming consoles, and even musical greeting cards can be computers. To them a computer is a desktop PC. They’re getting there, though.
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My IT experience as Gen-X.
Boomers: Look to me because somehow they have avoided learning anything IT related in the last thirty+ years.
Millennials: Look to me because I have more experience and a wider breadth of knowledge. Thumbs up for Millenials.
Gen-Z: About as confused as Boomers but excusable since they just started. Surprising lack of basics in some. Those that do know enough, have less knowledge and experience than Millenials and way way less than us gray beards. So they rarely get to solve problems, thus they rarely get to grow and learn.
Zoomers are the full on ADD version of people. All they grew up on was a tablet or phone that "just works" and they get their answers from a Google search or 1 minute video. Many of them simply don't want to learn beyond the bare minimum they can get away with and just want the instant gratification or the answer. They don't care about understanding why it's the answer.
Wide exceptions to every generation, of course.
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Younger people are no longer the most computer literate on average. Its between Millennials and Gen X that are the most computer literate generation. Boomers are too old computers weren't big when they were young. Zoomers are too young, computers became highly simplified during their childhood with the start of web 2.0 into the era of tablet & phone domination.
Alphas are going to be on the other hand completely illiterate, because education is increasingly a joke in the US. Also AI will do everything for them.
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I'm at the end of GenX. I'm the tech support for the young and the old. FML.
Yeah same. The young know nothing but apps.
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Depends, in some technical fields it's starting to flip because kids don't need to learn computer skills as much when they just use iPhones and tablets where everything "just works".
Yeah. My friend from high school works in high school. Among others he teaches IT. Compared to today's kids we were hackers. We knew how to crack a game, install a driver, replace some hardware. Today's kids don't know how to download a file.
I went to school with someone who didnt like deadlines, so she would do the following:
- fill a word document with nonsense
- open word document in hex editor
- corrupt file through some means she googled
- submit the file to our submission system
- wait for teacher to open the file, get 'corrupted' message
She'd do the work at her own pace in the mean time, and when she got asked for another copy because it was corrupted, shed hand it up. She graduated with me, and I dont know what she does now but I hope she's in infosec.
Our IT teacher knew if we did something late because he would look at when the file was last edited. We had a great IT teacher that also wanted to teach us how to think instead of just teaching basic word and excell.
Couldn't you then just change the system clock before editing the file? Or hell, is the metadata able to be altered by the user?
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Well, not everyone knew how to crack a game, but many did know how to use an existing crack for a game
I work in IT and can guarantee this person generates a disproportionate amount of tickets.
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As a millenial I don’t think this is true anymore, the Gen Z needs a lot of help with computers too. It’s up to Millennials to be the IT
I don't know what the age gap is in her office, but my personal experience is that the top "basic computer skills as a default" peaked before her generation. Except for plugging in the projector. No one knows how to do it.
The projector? You mean that thing that shines a light through clear sheets and then through a lense and mirror making anything on the sheet appear on the wall.
All other forms of projectors are the product of a Drunken Satan trying to immitate tech bros.
As someone who used to do projection mapping professionally: I agree
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It was true 20 years ago, but is it still true nowadays when it's the 30-40 year olds who mostly grew up with the kind of computer used in business settings whilst the 20 olds usually grew up with smartphones instead?
Can confirm: Most young hires in enterprise are only familiar with iOS and Android, and now maybe prompt "engineering".
Desktop operation is as challenging for them as anyone.
Totally agree. And I think it’s also compounded by Windows becoming a more hostile OS to power users. There are some shortcuts in Office based on the Menu (! Not the Ribbon !) that still work and I know it’s just a matter of time before those go away too. Really feels like the Dark Ages for PC computing (other than the side effect of the rise of Linux).
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not in my workplace
we have to teach people how to navigate directories. mind-blowing
fuck, yesterday I had to explain a local drive map and the user-specific OneDrive folder location to our IT guy (who is 20-25). although I am pretty sure he is a jr tech
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Sadly this seems to no longer be true unless the youngest person in your office is like 30 because kids don't learn this shit anymore.
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Yeah or oldest, anyone reaching adolescence after the advent of the iPhone is reliably dumber with tech than boomers who used a computer for work
Yeah, in my experience in desktop support the older generations usually at least tried something to fix their problem. The younger generations were just like, "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas."
Gen-X here. I showed my Gen-Z kid how to build a gaming PC, and then he showed his friend how to do it. So, now, they're the "IT" guys for the group.
The kid has been sitting in front of a computer since he was four. It occurs to me just now that I didn't really teach him anything about file management, drives, etc. He learned the same way I did, I suppose. By wanting to, and searching for answers. He was the first one to switch to Linux a couple of years ago. I don't know his motivation for doing it, but it prompted me to make the switch soon after.
I built PCs for a living in the early 90s.
Today, there are a lot of younger people than me in the office, and I'm happy to let them believe they have to do all the IT stuff because they're the most tech savvy.
They're not. It's just convenient to have someone do the shit I don't want to do.
Since lemmy is all IT people or people who see helping others with computers as more of a break than annoying extra work, I translated the context.
"I am not a social media manager but I am the youngest volunteer at this non-profit so I am basically the social media manager."
I'm Gen X and one of the oldest people where I work. Just one person besides me has any true understanding of computers/IT, one year younger than me.
Everyone else is completely lost if the connection between your personal terminal and the office printer fails. Or the cleaning lady has once again managed to release the mystic cables out of their holy sockets.
Sometimes I fix stuff in the terminal just to tease the younger colleagues, then I show them how it can be done with the GUI. They find it baffling that a "not-programmer" can "hack stuff".
It is both funny and frustrating.
One time when I was early in my field (stationary engineering) I had a funny experience. It was a small boiler room so only one guy on shift at a time. I came in to relive the operator (60s guy retiring that year) and one of our computers was down. It was one we took hourly readings from for something not too important that we could get the same reading from elsewhere. So anyway, he tells me hes entered the password a dozen times and it just doesnt work. We had the password sticky noted to the monitor so I was skeptical. I noticed caps lock was on, turned it off, entered the password and signed right on. His response was "wow thats great. At least someone around here is good with computers"
I'm not IT but I've been the only engineer under 50 which meant IT occasionally conscripted me when a problem looked like it might be too physical in origin
My IT experience as a "Generation Jones" Boomer.
Older Boomers: Ugh. Please.. let me sort it and you just go back to watching TV.
Gen-X: Ah, you got that? Fantastic!
Millennials: You're going to need something better than a phone to set that network up with. We have to do some port forwarding on the new modem, so the camera system can connect, so at minimum we need the office laptop. Can you squeeze under the cabinet and pull those ethernet lines I snaked up from the basement? I think they're just inside the bottom of the pocket..
Gen-Z: That is awesome that you want to help! Let me show you a few neat tricks. I've got some ancient laptops you can dabble with.. they're bang-up for running torrents, I know you are tight for cash and streaming costs and arm and a leg now. Lemme show you how to save some money.
I think this picture is like 12 of 13 years old.
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