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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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I am an older millennial born in 83 and I’ve been in IT for about 21 years now and grew up building and fixing PCs for everyone. I think the newer generation is going to be the ones that need the most help. Might be anecdotal but in my years in IT at first it was the older folks with all the problems taking on and using tech. Now it’s the younger kids coming in. In my opinion it’s the way we consume tech now. All tech in the 80’s - early 2000’s required a lot of tinkering and figuring out I always figured the older folks were just set in their ways and didn’t want to learn anything new. My first 15 years in IT I always heard people say “I’m not a computer person” as an excuse to not knowing how to change a signature in outlook, an app they’ve been using for a while, or some other basic business app everyone should know how to use.
Now consumer tech just works. Out of the box you don’t need to tinker or do shit to the stuff. Younger gen is coming us used to shit just working and when anything goes wrong they don’t do well with troubleshooting also companies make anything beyond basic troubleshooting nearly impossible without them so most just don’t try to figure shit out. This type of behavior is getting worse now people get tech that can do a few hundred things and they only use it for two of the few hundred and now you are stuck trying to explain how to do basic tech tasks to an end user who is just going to forget it an hour or so later.
I’ve noticed this with IT employees and the rest of the business. Maybe I’m just a salty IT guy but I do cyber security now and the tech skill levels are just bad and it causes me grief on a regular basis.
100% this.
I have even noted a huge deterioration since I have been in the IT industry, and that's just been since the mid 2000's
People have no idea how to do basic process of elimination troubleshooting anymore.
They have no ability to look at logs and extrapolate what could be going on.
They don't understand how to use a search engine effectively anymore or how to rapidly filter through large amounts of information to find answers (I have no idea why)
The ability to understand how the various bits of tech actually work together and how this is happening seems to be getting more and more lost. So then which things fail people have no idea where to start.
More and more products as you said "just work"... Until they don't and give you jack shit to go on.
Basically just "oh... It didn't work, try again later" nothing is more infuriating than something not working and also giving you no information to troubleshoot, it's why I am basically allergic to anything made by Apple in particular but this is becoming more and more the standard.
This bit, at least, may be at least as much a fault of the environment - the increasing awfulness of search results these days. It used to be you could search a specific issue (e.g., "borked.exe high CPU usage" or "how to partition a drive") and your first results would be relatively well-written sites run by actual tech people. More recently, though, it feels like:
The first 5-8 results are near-identical "help" sites that are 40% introduction, 40% basic troubleshooting steps, 15% "download our app!", and 5% actually useful tips.
There are tech site results listed... but they're from 2016, a different software version, maybe even a different OS.
"Okay, so, to fix this problem you first need... [SIGN IN TO CONTINUE READING]
If you're very, very lucky, you'll find a Reddit (or now, Lemmy) thread on the issue.
I'd consider myself pretty technically savvy, and even I find it frustrating to search for IT info or fixes these days. The newest problem is AI-written answers cooked up for you on the spot, which are frequently completely unhelpful yet pushed to the top of the results.
Exactly this.
I've been tinkering with computers since the mid 90s, and I lost count of how many I built or repaired years ago, but now, using Google to check something I've forgotten just leads to sales pages and massively out of date articles that were 'last updated' three days ago.
On top of that, you've got sites like the official Microsoft help site giving bad advice. Everything is just run sfc /scannow then dism /whatever. I genuinely saw a question recently where someone asked what to do when dism /online-cleanup doesn't work, and the top answer, marked as correct by the mods was, run dism /online-cleanup.
Online search results have been optimised for seo so much now that finding the right answer can be very difficult.
Don't forget that those first 5-8 sites are all written by a aithat doesn't know what it's doing! You can tell those apart from ones written by a person because they cram as many keywords in different combinations as they can. Like, if you searched "windows 10 Firefox connection error" the first result will be:
"How to fix Firefox Connection Error in Windows 10
Firefox connection errors in windows 10 are annoying. Luckily, there is an easy way in windows 10 to fix Firefox conne tion errors. The Firefox connection errors in windows 10 can be caused by a few different problems. In this article we will explain how to fix Firefox connection errors in windows 10."
It's infuriating, because those articles inevitably are wrong about the solution, but they're always the top results because they win the keyword battle. I use QWant for my search engine now, and while it's WAY better than Google it still serves some of those sites up when I'm troubleshooting something because the keywords are just too strong.
Hah, I think I twitched a bit just reading that! Those stupid SEO answers drive me absolutely insane.