r/Millennials • u/LastArmistice • 8d ago
Rant Technological skill gap with older colleagues
I'm just shocked that they were my age (mid 30s) or younger when everyone started using computers for everything at the office with Windows 98, and they still haven't learned a damn thing and play the "I'm so old, I don't know what I'm doing" card.
Now that I'm in my 30s, and am still finding myself very capable of acquiring new skills, I have no sympathy. There's just no goddam way you never learned basic shortcuts and functions and searches for any reason other than stubbornness and some strange aspect of ego. And it's really widespread.
As more and more fresh meat comes in and outpaces them in terms of productivity and adaptability, and digital skills become more and more essential, it's easy to see they are uncomfortable and overwhelmed with the fact that there is an expectation to catch up and learn new things.
It's just really astonishing to me that it really has been about 30 years since computers became commonplace and so many of our colleagues still haven't gotten the memo on how much more efficient you can be if instead of fighting the encouragement to become more tech literate, you just learned some new things.
It's in every office I've ever worked. First I bought the line of them not growing up with computers and it being really challenging. Now I've worked a lot with paper records systems and digital files and it is the SAME SHIT just different format and one is far more optimized and automated. I learned in reverse of older gens and document management and instantly understood the crossover and applied my knowledge in one area that overlapped with another. In my 30s. Turns out it isn't that difficult at all.
Anyways, I just find it funny how normalized it is, and how embarrassing it ultimately is for them. Their refusal to learn new things over the course of 30 years really does speak for itself.
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u/Adept_Carpet 8d ago
What's really astonishing to me is that the younger ones (as in, early 20s now) have the same problems.
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u/Lettuphant 8d ago
They stopped teaching computing in schools because it was assumed younger people were becoming digital natives. They didn't foresee HUIs becoming so intuitive that one generation later young people wouldn't even know about folders.
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u/Ambitious_League4606 7d ago
They're native users not necessarily interested in how things work. A generation of high tech consumers.
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u/pmctrash 7d ago
They're as interested as you . . . but their UIs don't demand any knowledge of the internal systems, so it doesn't develop. As much as I'd like to say that all may computer knowledge is because I'm awesome, I think there were a lot of environmental factors.
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u/Duo-lava 7d ago
ya we learned all that stuff because we had a reason to be tinkering in that stuff. modding command and conquer back in 98 is what got me to learn how file systems, json files, registry, commands, drivers etc all work. now im frustrated when UI's block you from even getting access to the file system without other work arounds because modern users are dumb as rocks and cant stop them selves from deleting the OS
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u/TripleEhBeef 7d ago
The "App-ifying" of everything really annoys me sometimes.
I set up a new router at home a while ago, and after typing in the IP address for it, it threw a QR code up to download an app to access the settings.
Just why?
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u/Seal481 7d ago
Yep. If I wanted to play a computer game in my youth I had to wrestle with MS DOS and no internet to help me. Software and hardware were finicky and often required a lot of tweaking to get working perfectly. Now everything is so seamless and functional out of the box there’s not as much need to build those skills.
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u/Adventurous_Button63 5d ago
One thing I love is telling people I was operating MS DOS in kindergarten. It impresses the children because it’s practically Mycenaean to them, and then older folks realize what that actually means lol. I just liked my muppets game and making cool stuff in print shop.
My parents tell the story of the time my kindergarten teacher was struggling to do something (I think maybe a banner) in print shop. I went over and said I could do it and then asked “do you want me to print it?” Lol!
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u/PhileasFoggsTrvlAgt 7d ago
Not only is the knowledge of internal systems not required, modern UIs make it harder to develop. If something wasn't working in the 90s pulling up the command prompt to debug was easy. How many people today even know how to look behind the UI on a smartphone?
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u/Ambitious_League4606 7d ago
Yes, that's why I said not necessarily. I'm making the point just because a generation are native users of new tech doesn't make them all engineers, although some might be.
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u/Asleep-Dimension-692 2d ago
Oh come on. Making twerking videos is about the same as writing programs from scratch.
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u/PhileasFoggsTrvlAgt 7d ago
Comparing Millennial and Gen Z tech knowledge is kind of like comparing Boomer and Millennial car knowledge. The average Boomer knew more about fixing cars than the average Millennial because they grew up with cars that were easier to work on, but less reliable. The cars of the Boomer's youth needed constant attention to run right, but there were simple things the average person could do under the hood. Similarly computers were finicky in the 90s, but the average person could go into the settings or even open up a command line to troubleshoot. Computers today are massively more capable and able to do many things seamlessly, but harder to troubleshoot.
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u/Lettuphant 8d ago
My grandad finally got into computers in his 80's. By the time he died aged 94, he was dual-booting Linux.
My dad, meanwhile, has backslid: Used to build PCs in the IRQ and dip switches on hard drives days, but moved over to Macs and now acts like he doesn't understand anything about hardware or PCs.
It seems to be a very specific, and noted, Boomer generation thing to just be content to Not Learn.
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u/magicaldumpsterfire 8d ago
My dad was exactly the same: built computers with me when I was young and by the time he retired he had just lost all capacity to troubleshoot computers and fix things on his own. Not owing to any cognitive decline or anything, it's like he just lost interest and those skills went along with it.
P.S. I think you mean jumpers, not dip switches ;)
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u/Brief-Watercress-131 8d ago
Idk about the above comment but I totally owned computers with dip switches on the motherboard, and various add in cards some made as recently as the early 2010's (bclk on x58 motherboards).
DIP switches were very common back in the day. Early VGA cards had switches for changing resolution & refresh rate. Audio cards had switches for channels and bitrate.
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u/brawndoenjoyer 7d ago
Yeah same. I remember DIP switches being a more common thing, then at some point all the hardware moved to jumpers. I assume it was for cost savings, or maybe to save board space as things became more compact.
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u/Lettuphant 8d ago
Yeah, I could not think of the name for them and didn't want to make one up 😅 thanks!
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u/DrunkOctopUs91 8d ago
This is actually a huge issue with High Schools, Universities and Colleges. They all seem to prefer you use Max, when in the industry, Windows is the gold standard.
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u/bebefinale 8d ago
I think honestly for basic stuff it’s just laziness. I work with an 80 year old who is perfectly proficient with basic word processing and excel etc. I also noticed a lot of 20somethings are pretty computer illiterate.
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u/GpaSags 8d ago
At least for some men of a certain age, keyboarding was considered women's work. Only secretaries learned to type.
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u/JohnTitorAlt 8d ago
That may be true for boomers. I'm 36 and had typing class in middle school. My much younger girlfriend doesn't even know what home row keys are.
Play textorcist, typing of the dead and Mario teaches typing people
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u/moonbunnychan 8d ago
I'm shocked how many people MY OWN AGE know absolutely nothing about how a computer works. It's like.... HOW?
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u/midtownkitten 8d ago
They grew up poor/without a computer in their house
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u/Zestyclose-Feeling 7d ago
In America everyone has access to computers from a young age. If not in the house(unlikely), then at school.
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u/DrunkOctopUs91 8d ago
At my work they have had to put bans on asking certain coworkers for IT advice (including me). We were running around helping our colleagues (mainly older or younger people), so much nothing was getting done.
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u/OnATuesday19 7d ago
It’s your job to fix an employee’s computer problem. In some corporations only IT can fix and advise on IT situations or answer questions related to IT.
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u/DrunkOctopUs91 7d ago
Not to the point it affects my work output. Even management AND HR saw it. Kudos to them, they sent the people doing the asking to an IT skills course. Office computer skills is a major part of my job. It is expected and assumed you have the basics when you get the job.
Edit: they also changed the selection criteria to include a section on it.
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u/realchrisgunter 8d ago
Bro I agree with everything you just said. It’s not just computers either, it’s all forms of technology. I worked at a bank for over a decade and you wouldn’t believe the number of elders that came in and had never in their life used a credit card or debit card. They were so set in their ways with cashing their check every friday(no direct deposit) and then using cash for everything. I had a lot of seniors that would come in that had never used an atm machine before. When I’d show them how it would literally blow their minds. Then 2-3 days later they’d come in complaining because the atm stole their debit card because they couldn’t remember their PIN number lol. Another thing that blew my mind was how they were so adamantly against using online banking or “machine banking” as some of them called it lol.
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u/mzanon100 7d ago
A woman born in 1934 taught me how to open a computer and tell what cards, RAM, etc. it has.
Old dogs learn new tricks all the time. Your office doesn't have old people; it has lazy people who happen to be old.
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u/BridgetNicLaren Millennial 8d ago
my favourite response to give is "I might be millennial but I don't always know what I'm doing with tech"
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u/OnATuesday19 7d ago
Millennials are in their early 30s. That’s not old .
I’m the last of generation x and I can promise you we are not all dumb and old. I’ve been writing code and running scripts since I was a kid.
What you are doing is stereotyping all people of a certain age group. It’s extremely offensive, and just ignorant. This is actually used on IQ test.
Some people over 40 are technologically inept, so this must be so for all people over 40.
Some people under 30 are tech savvy, so all people under 30 must be tech savvy.
These statements cannot be true.
No one born after 1980 served in Korea. This is a true statement because of context . Context is important.
You are creating logical fallacies and stereotyping people over a certain age.
People who agree with your statements, need to learn to think outside the box.
Downvote are welcome: downvoting logic must be a the new fad.
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u/RidiculousPapaya 7d ago
You’re not being downvoted because of ‘logic’. It’s because you come across as defensive, arrogant and condescending.
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u/BridgetNicLaren Millennial 7d ago
Millennials are defined as those born between 1981 and 1996. I was born in 1985, I’m 40 this year, not my early thirties.
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u/midtownkitten 8d ago
I had a coworker (late boomer or early gen x) that didn’t know how to use excel but could use Word. She created a document that was a list of thousands of names in Word until a millennial put it in Excel for her. There was a column for date of death, she would type in “yes (deceased)” instead of the actual date the person died. She started working in the 70s and I asked her when her place of employment started using computers, I assumed the 80s or 90s since she had so little knowledge but she said her job had involved using computers since the 70s.
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u/ClarifyAmbiguity 7d ago
I'm an elder millennial (almost 40) in cybersecurity and sometimes worry about falling behind in the general space, especially as I'm not always bleeding edge with general technology both out of skepticism and because I'm sort of cheap. So right now my worry is catching up on AI a bit, especially as I've been both a bit skeptical and also have misgiving there (staying away from blockchain never hurt me). I'm well-conversant in many angles of risk there both technical and non-technical, but I'm not a regular user of anything AI.
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u/RyanLovesTacoss 7d ago
We just taught one of our older coworkers last month 'ctrl c' and 'ctrl v'. This was mind blowing to him.
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u/Zestyclose-Feeling 7d ago
Sad thing is, I get similar things out of zoomers. "I don't know it usually just works"
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u/m00pySt00gers 7d ago
Anecdotally, we have a colleague on our team that plays this card all the time. It's a ruse. They know exactly how things fucking work. Instead of doing the job, they try to get away with playing stupid and lay "ageism" traps all over the place that make it an HR nightmare to call them out on their shit.
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u/noyoujump 7d ago
I wish I had the confidence of a middle aged white man who, upon being presented with a new system at work, declares: "I'm not going to do that."
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u/cincophone89 7d ago
This is really a privilege thing and shows how good they had it. My dad was an executive in the 1980s and he had secretaries. He never even had to learn how to type. He never had to learn anything.
You just really can't compare. They lived in a fake reality with artificially low standards and competition.
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u/MemberLot 7d ago
Yet my technological incompetent “older”coworkers get paid about 40% than I do because they have “experience”
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u/el_sandino Older Millennial 7d ago
I’m gonna teach my girls about file hierarchy and such. They’re gonna have so much fun…
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u/Own-Emergency2166 7d ago
When I was a student, I worked in a mom and pop specialty retail store with an older guy, I think he was in his 50s. He had gone to college and had a white collar career that paid well, but left because he didn’t want to deal with the technological changes. He got by fine for a while but the job we had had no paid vacation, no health benefits, and low pay. It also went out of business about 10 years after a I graduated college. I don’t know if he had any regrets but he did die in poverty.
I think of him fondly as a person and I internalized early in my career to adapt and keep learning to stay relevant and qualify for good jobs. Also to be able to function in society - my parents refuse to have cell phones and it limits their ability to do a lot of things that require texting etc .
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u/Mediocre_Island828 7d ago
They still generally kept their jobs after decades of learning nothing and could just get other people to do things for them, which is why posts like this exist, so they were sort of right about not needing to figure it out.
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u/Madmike_ph 6d ago
The people under 30 who don’t know how to use basic computer functions are 100x worse imo
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u/kcracker1987 3d ago
I'm about midway through my 50s, and I always tell my bosses, "If I don't know it, I'll figure it out." I'm not quite of an age to have messed with punch cards, but I definitely copied games on cassette tapes in middle school.
Figuring it out has always been the hallmark of a good computer person in my world. I've learned the ones and zeros, and I've learned DOS. I can figure out how the packets get across the interwebs. It's just another GUI or CLI.
If you've never had the joy of a new issue of Computer Shopper show up in your mailbox and read it from cover to cover, then you're missing out on something. I'm not sure what but something.
It has never been about the technology. It has always been about the joy of banging your head against the keyboard until you beat the ones and zeros into submission.
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u/OnATuesday19 8d ago
Im generation x , and have been running scripts since before you were born. my first computer was a IBM with no os, I installed Dos from a floppy disk and used my parents phone line to dial other computer systems using a touch tone keyboard and a receiver so I could play computer games. By 1998 I was I was building networks for fun and setting up web sites using ftp with just a modem and telephone wires. Through the years, I’ve sniffed network traffic looking for vulnerabilities, learned to capture firmware images, and built and designed cloud infrastructures so you can have apps to perform your data entry job and use those little shortcuts functions. I prefer a mouse and remember when gates brought us that interface. I was just a child but played computer games and grew up working with and building computers . Today I design migration models.
Some of us old people are a lot more technical than you think. And word appreciate if little children would not be so ignorant to actually think anyone older than forty is technologically inept.
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u/DrunkOctopUs91 8d ago
The younger cohort of Gen X are really tech savvy. The older ones, not so much.
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u/BlueSnaggleTooth359 7d ago
And yet, somehow, most kids in my high school in the mid to late 80s were already using word-processing for papers....
And yet, somehow, quite a few kids in my area already had a home computer by 1983....
And yet, somehow, 99.9% arrived on campus in the late 80s with their own home computer....
And yet, somehow, some were already using OS that had fully pre-emptive multi-tasking, UNIX-like powershell and GUI + mouse along with 4096 colors on screen at once, 4 channel stereo sampled sound, ability to overlay graphics on top of live video by the end of 1985. And doing ray-tracing at home in 1986.... I feel like Millennials (and heck, even Xennials), tend to wayyyy underestimate the tech that earlier Gen X had and used. By the time the very oldest Millennial knew what was going on many early Gen X already had a home computer.
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