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‘Scanners are complicated’: why Gen Z faces workplace ‘tech shame’
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Technology
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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...
I work in a job where a lot of student aged people need to send me evidence to get a tax discount, and they are so bad at just attaching a document to an email.
Half of them I get are photos of the documents rather than scans, the ones using iPhones let their phone compress the image to the point it's unreadable and the android users send me a drive link I can't access as I don't have a Google account logged in at work.
None of them seem to be able to scan a document as a pdf and attacging it directly to an email.
Just wanted to say that - young people don't grok files and folders, it's hard for me to understand how they manage
Indeed! I teach an introductory web design class for undergraduates and despite my best efforts it takes a lot of students the whole semester to figure out file paths. If I had more time in the term, I think I'd dedicate a unit to it, just to get everyone up to speed — and I may have to do it anyway. In fairness to the kids, even Mac and Windows machines these days do a lot to minimize users' exposure to file structures in the name of usability. Meanwhile, the phones and school Chromebooks they've grown up using completely obfuscate this information.
I wish you luck with that class, and I expect the students get the other stuff - I have colleagues with masters degrees who aren't really sure how stuff works outside of the downloads folder
Thanks! Yeah, students do pretty well in the course overall. It's for non-devs and is oriented toward exposure to different technologies rather than mastery of them — basically demystifying how web apps work.