They even know how to use Word and PowerPoint and Excel
Oh how poorly has this sentence aged in the last 10 years. There’s another nice article about this phenomenom of kids not understanding folder structure here.
Back in uni I was the smart guy whom everyone would ask for help, both with tech and non-tech issues:
“Hey nudny ekscentryk, my phone won’t connect to the campus WiFi”. Oh yeah that happens I said, you probably didn’t fill in the login credentials correctly. This was actually rather tricky, because it used your.student.ID@separate.uni.subdomain.edu for logging in and required changing the default password at least once since registering, for database reasons I guess. They tried it, didn’t work. Are you sure you know your password? No, they don’t. Let’s check in their password manager. They have an iPhone, which I haven’t used since I indefinitely switched to Android a couple years back. Took me 20 seconds to find the password manager in Settings though. The password is not there. “Oh you mean my university password? It’s in my notes”. We go to Notes app. There’s nothing here, do you use Evernote or something else entirely for that?. They use a fucking Google Docs document for notes. It’s not very handy is it? Like you have to zoom in to edit, it’s all clumsy because it’s a document and the text’s formatted weirdly. Not a problem to them, because “well at least it syncs so I can access it from my iPad.” Okay, whatever. It’s not like your built-in iOS password manager doesn’t sync. We managed to connect to the WiFi network. “could you also do that for the WiFi in the other building?”. But it’s the same network, it will connect automatically to either. They know better: “nah it can’t be, the range is too far”. I explain it’s not the same hotspot but the credentials are shared and in fact since it’s eduroam, a global network, it will work in pretty much any university campus in the world automatically. “wow that is crazy, will that also work for my iPad”. Well if you log in with the same credentials. “could you do it for me? i’ll fetch my iPad”. No, I’ve shown you how to do it, you can do it yourself now. They can’t use a computer.
A different time I was proofreading a classmate’s thesis, see quadruple x’s next to each heading. hey, what’s up with these? I ask her, she replies: “oh I put them here so I can easily find each heading when formatting text. If I make any changes I can just search for <xxxx>” and it will automatically let me go through all headings easily without scrolling manually :)". I open the Navigator (I use LO Writer) and it’s empty. She wrote an 80-page document without ever using Styles. All headings, title page etc. were formatted manually. I enable the Formatting Marks. Holy shit. She uses spaces and tabs to move text around. Loads of line breaks to move text to the next page. I could tell the document looks off but I never though this was due to so poor editing skills. Or rather lack thereof. You know you’re doing everything the hard way here?. “What do you mean?”. There are tools for all that you’ve done here. Like you can use Styles to mark headings and then edit them in bulk. You can add automatic numbering, which will later let you create an index within a second. To move next to the next page you can use page breaks. “Okay cool but this is how I do it”. Alright, then you are just giving yourself extra work, what’s the point of not doing this correctly once and then never bothering with formatting ever again?. “Could you do it for me?”. I can show you all these tools but I won’t be doing that for you, as I’m already proofreading your paper factually. “Okay whatever”. Guess what, she never bothered and when handing it the finished paper (probably around 120 pages), her instructor made her do it anyway. She asked me to help her with that. I said no, because I offered help before and she didn’t bother. After submitting the paper, the reviewer returned it and made her re-do all citations in an, at least, consecutive style. “Oh fuck that guy why would he give me so much work!? You know how many hours it took me to insert all these in here.”. It was around 280 citations total, out of 30 different pieces of writing. She obviously did all of them manually by typing out footnotes. You know there are bibliography managers which do it automatically in a consecutive style for you?. “Will it automatically fix what he asks?”. Well, no, because (again) you originally did it incorrectly. This one issue was even stranger for me than her not using styles for formatting: one year later we both attended a “methodology of scientific publishing” class, where they introduced us to Google Scholar, Zotero, Impact Factor and other stuff she could use now. We even had a take-home project to create a bibliography in Zotero and she did it (with online help). But she didn’t bother to retain it in her skillset, so when needing to actually apply that skill, she wasn’t even aware this was exactly what she learned a year earlier. Crazy; she can’t use a computer.
But forreal, I think it’s really interesting how people who aren’t familiar with computers never think to themselves, “there has to be a better way to do this.”
Like, I’m an EE, and electrical engineering software is notoriously terrible (I like to joke it’s because it’s written by EEs). Even knowing that, if I run into a problem where I want to accomplish something where the default option is to click and drag something 200 times, the first thing I do is google “how do thing Altium.” Sometimes the answer really is to do it the hard way, but I at least check first.
Edit: I’m just remembering a story where I was asked to review a PCB and schematic design for a client. I think they had hired like someone’s kid to do the design work to save money as there were problems all over the place.
Probably the most glaring was with the component markers or “reference designators.” In Eagle CAD, when you place a component (resistor, chip, etc), it comes with a little label to be printed on the PCB. This label has a default location next to the part and moves with the part, but you can’t move it relative to the part without using a separate tool to allow that. This is important when designs get dense as labels might overlap each other or other parts.
Any way, rather than searching for how to move reference designators relative to components (it’s called the “Smash” tool), this kid deleted all reference designators from the design and just manually placed labels. That means that when you move a component, you have to manually move the label. Also, normally, reference designators are hi-lighted when you select components so you know which one goes with which component. These manual labels had no association with the parts. The only way to tell if a label was next to the right part was to select the component to figure out its name, and then visually scan the labels to look for the one with a matching name.
There were hundreds of parts on the PCB. This was $1500 software, and they assumed that this was the correct user flow. Place parts, delete labels linked to parts, make new labels not linked to parts.
I think it’s really interesting how people who aren’t familiar with computers never think to themselves, “there has to be a better way to do this.”
Sort of a communal learned helplessness. Years of abusive user interfaces and faceless corporations providing an all or nothing platform instead of modular tools leads to a mindset of “that’s just the way it is and I have to deal with it”.
Off topic here, but do you speak a slavic language? Your username means boring eccentric right? I speak some Czech (am American) and I definitely miss the Czech subreddit
Oh how poorly has this sentence aged in the last 10 years. There’s another nice article about this phenomenom of kids not understanding folder structure here.
Back in uni I was the smart guy whom everyone would ask for help, both with tech and non-tech issues:
“Hey nudny ekscentryk, my phone won’t connect to the campus WiFi”. Oh yeah that happens I said, you probably didn’t fill in the login credentials correctly. This was actually rather tricky, because it used your.student.ID@separate.uni.subdomain.edu for logging in and required changing the default password at least once since registering, for database reasons I guess. They tried it, didn’t work. Are you sure you know your password? No, they don’t. Let’s check in their password manager. They have an iPhone, which I haven’t used since I indefinitely switched to Android a couple years back. Took me 20 seconds to find the password manager in Settings though. The password is not there. “Oh you mean my university password? It’s in my notes”. We go to Notes app. There’s nothing here, do you use Evernote or something else entirely for that?. They use a fucking Google Docs document for notes. It’s not very handy is it? Like you have to zoom in to edit, it’s all clumsy because it’s a document and the text’s formatted weirdly. Not a problem to them, because “well at least it syncs so I can access it from my iPad.” Okay, whatever. It’s not like your built-in iOS password manager doesn’t sync. We managed to connect to the WiFi network. “could you also do that for the WiFi in the other building?”. But it’s the same network, it will connect automatically to either. They know better: “nah it can’t be, the range is too far”. I explain it’s not the same hotspot but the credentials are shared and in fact since it’s eduroam, a global network, it will work in pretty much any university campus in the world automatically. “wow that is crazy, will that also work for my iPad”. Well if you log in with the same credentials. “could you do it for me? i’ll fetch my iPad”. No, I’ve shown you how to do it, you can do it yourself now. They can’t use a computer.
A different time I was proofreading a classmate’s thesis, see quadruple x’s next to each heading. hey, what’s up with these? I ask her, she replies: “oh I put them here so I can easily find each heading when formatting text. If I make any changes I can just search for <xxxx>” and it will automatically let me go through all headings easily without scrolling manually :)". I open the Navigator (I use LO Writer) and it’s empty. She wrote an 80-page document without ever using Styles. All headings, title page etc. were formatted manually. I enable the Formatting Marks. Holy shit. She uses spaces and tabs to move text around. Loads of line breaks to move text to the next page. I could tell the document looks off but I never though this was due to so poor editing skills. Or rather lack thereof. You know you’re doing everything the hard way here?. “What do you mean?”. There are tools for all that you’ve done here. Like you can use Styles to mark headings and then edit them in bulk. You can add automatic numbering, which will later let you create an index within a second. To move next to the next page you can use page breaks. “Okay cool but this is how I do it”. Alright, then you are just giving yourself extra work, what’s the point of not doing this correctly once and then never bothering with formatting ever again?. “Could you do it for me?”. I can show you all these tools but I won’t be doing that for you, as I’m already proofreading your paper factually. “Okay whatever”. Guess what, she never bothered and when handing it the finished paper (probably around 120 pages), her instructor made her do it anyway. She asked me to help her with that. I said no, because I offered help before and she didn’t bother. After submitting the paper, the reviewer returned it and made her re-do all citations in an, at least, consecutive style. “Oh fuck that guy why would he give me so much work!? You know how many hours it took me to insert all these in here.”. It was around 280 citations total, out of 30 different pieces of writing. She obviously did all of them manually by typing out footnotes. You know there are bibliography managers which do it automatically in a consecutive style for you?. “Will it automatically fix what he asks?”. Well, no, because (again) you originally did it incorrectly. This one issue was even stranger for me than her not using styles for formatting: one year later we both attended a “methodology of scientific publishing” class, where they introduced us to Google Scholar, Zotero, Impact Factor and other stuff she could use now. We even had a take-home project to create a bibliography in Zotero and she did it (with online help). But she didn’t bother to retain it in her skillset, so when needing to actually apply that skill, she wasn’t even aware this was exactly what she learned a year earlier. Crazy; she can’t use a computer.
https://xkcd.com/763/
But forreal, I think it’s really interesting how people who aren’t familiar with computers never think to themselves, “there has to be a better way to do this.”
Like, I’m an EE, and electrical engineering software is notoriously terrible (I like to joke it’s because it’s written by EEs). Even knowing that, if I run into a problem where I want to accomplish something where the default option is to click and drag something 200 times, the first thing I do is google “how do thing Altium.” Sometimes the answer really is to do it the hard way, but I at least check first.
Edit: I’m just remembering a story where I was asked to review a PCB and schematic design for a client. I think they had hired like someone’s kid to do the design work to save money as there were problems all over the place.
Probably the most glaring was with the component markers or “reference designators.” In Eagle CAD, when you place a component (resistor, chip, etc), it comes with a little label to be printed on the PCB. This label has a default location next to the part and moves with the part, but you can’t move it relative to the part without using a separate tool to allow that. This is important when designs get dense as labels might overlap each other or other parts.
Any way, rather than searching for how to move reference designators relative to components (it’s called the “Smash” tool), this kid deleted all reference designators from the design and just manually placed labels. That means that when you move a component, you have to manually move the label. Also, normally, reference designators are hi-lighted when you select components so you know which one goes with which component. These manual labels had no association with the parts. The only way to tell if a label was next to the right part was to select the component to figure out its name, and then visually scan the labels to look for the one with a matching name.
There were hundreds of parts on the PCB. This was $1500 software, and they assumed that this was the correct user flow. Place parts, delete labels linked to parts, make new labels not linked to parts.
Sort of a communal learned helplessness. Years of abusive user interfaces and faceless corporations providing an all or nothing platform instead of modular tools leads to a mindset of “that’s just the way it is and I have to deal with it”.
Off topic here, but do you speak a slavic language? Your username means boring eccentric right? I speak some Czech (am American) and I definitely miss the Czech subreddit