Zoomers are starting to remind me of the Eloi in the original movie version of The Time Machine. It's like nothing is possible to do unless it's provided as a clickable menu item.
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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This is me now, except the clouds are aws, azure, and gcloud.
They told me I'm at an age where people have to ask their kids how to rotate a PDF.
I told them if none of the tools I would use for that were available, I could just write my own. In a number of different programming languages.
When did Millennials get Boomer Brain anyway? If you took Boomers at their word thirty years ago, nobody under the age of 70 would know how to fix a car today .
Now these "Young people don't understand technology" memes are spreading like a nasty STD. Just endless posts of the most heinous ignorant horseshit.
Meanwhile, I've got kids flying homemade drones down at the park. I've got to fight through gaggles of teenagers on the way to robotics competitions and hack a thons when I'm downtown for lunch. My local Microprose is stuffed full of people under 30. All the active Linux geeks are practically in diapers, while millennials cling to Microsoft and fucking Apple.
But nobody is using the shitty VR that Zuckerberg is shilling, so Zoomers can't code? FFS, it's GenX that's forcing AI down all our throats.
Don't give me that "young people can't use computers" shit.
I mean if you work in the industry you would absolutely see a rise, a significant one, in people generally inept at the technical requirements of their jobs that’s factual not “ignorant horseshit” - it’s not that young people can’t learn this stuff it’s that young people grew up in, and are still in, an environment that doesn’t foster learning of these skills or independence at a more personal level so those learning through traditional education are being failed by the system while simultaneously being given tools to make self sabotage easier than ever before and the values that tell people to seek out and do things on your own are quickly going extinct. If someone can’t do something, especially at a wide scale not like one individual who didn’t pick up a skill or something, this is a system problem and yes there are significant systemic problems young people are being faced with in their personal and professional/student lives acting like “that’s ignorant horseshit” is just denying something is wrong, it’s advocating for the status quo, something is wrong, young people are being failed and unless we acknowledge this problem we can’t address it
The divide is that zoomers don't NEED to understand technology. They instead default to learning the fluffy user interfaces. Older users were required to know the basics of file systems, and even touch on command line operations just to get by.
Modern kids aren't required to learn that. They are perfectly able to, but no longer required to. We currently have a lot of newer "mechanics" that are perfectly good at driving, but didn't really notice there as an engine thing up front to look at.
It creates a binomial split. Many don't notice the youngsters quietly getting good. They do notice the increase in idiots out of their depth due to overconfidence.
Actually, that has always been true.
Yes the UI has become fluffier. But users have always just used first and most convenient way to do something.
- They didn't need to know how file system worked, they just put all their files on their desktop.
- Most never used a command line and never will. They would just shrug and do something else if it required it.
- If a button is even slightly moved, to them it is a travesty that fucks over their whole workflow.
The subset of tech savvy users may be slightly bigger, but the majority never learned how computers worked beyond clicking around. That is in every generation. Our vision is just skewed because we grew up in a tech heavy environment.
But if you ever worked in IT support, you'd know that not knowing how computers work is the default in every generation.
And on top of that I have enough millennial colleagues who don't know shit about anything in regards to tech.
Maybe people just reinforce their cliques in their 40s and just think everyone in their age group is like them.
And especially nerdy autists like to gravitate towards technology and ignore all the other people around them.
I work with college students all day. They are computer illiterate. It’s like working with the old. Generalizations are sometimes kinda true.
Cool, I ALSO work with college age kids all day and they navigate/troubleshoot our software fine.
I guess our two completely useless anecdotes will now cancel out into irrelevance.
I work with new hires all day and they're doing great.
I’m not sure why you find it controversial to observe that older people, who grew up without computers, and younger people, who’re also growing up without using computers, are two groups of people that tend to suck at using computers.
This kind of generalization matters. For instance, when designing education policy.
why you find it controversial
It's not controversial, just inaccurate.
Again, like doggedly insisting nobody born after 1980 knows how to fix a car.
You've bought into a dogmatic piece of online propaganda. You're not living in the real world.
Perhaps you’re right and the widespread use of iPads and smartphones isn’t interfering with computer literacy. My impression as someone who works in education is that it’s interfering with computer literacy.
I also want to point out that my generation, millennials, were indeed much less inclined to fix their own cars (understandably).
widespread use of iPads and smartphones isn’t interfering with computer literacy.
I see that hypothesis, but it glazes over the more glaring transition - widespread adoption of cheap electronics, generally speaking.
The iPhone premiered in 2007 at something like $300-500. Most people couldn't afford that. It was another five years before you started seeing rudimentary budget brand smartphones.
We've got far more tech literates today thanks to the abundance of cheap hardware. The expectation for tech literacy has risen with this proliferation.
my generation, millennials, were indeed much less inclined to fix their own cars
And that's why auto shops no longer exist or are run exclusively by geriatrics? :-p
Quite a few millennial age auto mechanics exist today. Quite a few GenZ/Alpha aspiring mechanics exist.
You just don't find them in the upper class suburbs or state university campuses.
Simplification of UI. Or abstraction of the system via apps.
I work for a MSP and we genuinely had a junior tech not know how to use file explorer. I get they are junior and don't know Active Directory or group policies but not knowing explorer sould make them unhireable as a tech worker.
we genuinely had a junior tech not know how to use file explorer
Microsoft's done an infuriating job of hiding it to the point where you increasingly need 3rd party tools to manage your desktop.
But the solution is for GenX/Millennial managers to get their enterprise applications off Windows and onto Linux. Not to just get mad at the least sophisticated entry level staffer and blame an entire generation for not growing up on DOS.
The dude didn't know how to get the size of a folder or get the file count in a directory.
So sit him down and teach him.
Should take five minutes.
They really are terrible. They grew up in the age of apps and don't know how to actually use or maintain tech.
What blew my mind was when I had a teacher telling me about their experiences with Zoomers and indicated that they seem to have a near universal inability to grasp the concept of a file structure. They just apparently can't wrap their heads around the fact that when you save something that it has to actually go somewhere on their device.
Yeah, the only zoomers who really understand computers beyond the surface are gamers, especially ones who played stuff like modded minecraft before there were dedicated launchers for it
I remember being flabbergasted the first time I had to explain this to some of the boomer teachers and admin staff with my part time college job. The secretary had no idea how to find documents outside of word recent list.
The idea that young people are even worse than that secretary is scary.
I had the exact observation. It's crazy
It’s crazy how GenX/Millennials developed the app culture to make computers and phones easier to sell to boomers, but then it was when GenZ was coming up, so they didn’t learn the ways of yore.
Yes but that's normal. If I hadn't switched to Linux at a younger age for pretty random interest reasons I would always have been a Windows user that games, nothing more.
It's never too late to start and you can just buy a raspberry pi and follow a few tutorials for a start.
How does he know? Because he's that 35 yo pedophile NEET that lives in his mom's basement
From what I've seen. They have zero patience to actually learn anything. They can't even watch a ten minute YouTube video without skipping parts and missing key information
Bro, I can't be assed to watch a 10 minute video where a third of the content is intro/outro/ad read/filler, even at 2x speed. The information density of a ten minute video by a typical growth hacking youtuber is like aerogel. Why would you want to watch a shitty video, SEO'd to the top of the search results, that will take so long to get you the information you need? That's the behavior I see from the zoomers. They will actually choose to watch these shitty infotainment videos instead of doing real fucking research.
A YouTube video is absolutely the worst possible way to deliver information. It's fine for entertainment, whatever. But if I'm troubleshooting something, the last fucking thing I want to do is stop what I'm doing and watch ZzZl0rp89 blather on for 8 minutes about his merch, patreon, his other channel, read an ad for Factor, and spend 3 minutes with pointless set up before he gets to the actual problem.
Even IF your specific problem has been blessed by somebody who's made a simple 2 minute video tutorial, it would still be faster and easier to digest that information in text. I can scroll to the point where I'm already at and start from there, rather than watch this guy open 2 dozen windows first. I can search within the tech to see if my problem is actually addressed here in about 2 seconds.
It's infuriating that YouTube has become the primary method for delivering troubleshooting information when you end up searching for it.
I rest my case
I'm a millennial dumbass.
How about instead of ragging on kids these days we see that there is a very serious problem brewing, regarding how we're expecting to maintain this high tech society we've built going forwards. I would posit that it was the planning done by generations prior that have left society in a state where youth are not gaining skills that will be needed simply to maintain the status quo, let alone improve anything.
Congratulations. You've reached the point.
As far as I'm aware millennials are only just now gaining the power to affect kids education on a broad scale. And even then it's still mostly in the hands of Gen x and boomers on school boards and various state and federal offices.
This problem is vastly greater than anything a school board could meaningfully impact alone.
Once again, GenX gets ignored. Whatever.
your arbitrary age based discrimination bracket got removed. you will be reassigned according to the following criteria.
not tech savvy: boomer
tech savvy: honorary millennial
tech savvy and poor: millennial++
greed fueled hate goblin: boomer
Best I've heard it said, we straddled the digital divide. We went from 0-100, fast. And if you wanted to do anything with a computer, you had to have a good deal of understanding. I'd add early millennials to our group, maybe most?
Also, the boomers aren't as dumb as they're made out. While we kids were figuring shit out, they had new tech to figure out in the workplace.
Zoomers? Hopeless. My kids are Alpha, they're even worse.
Maybe if they had parents who did anything but whine about how no one pays attention to them they'd be better at using technology.
If you want recognition for being the generation that raised the zoomers to be that ignorant. /S ;p
Oh, whew, okay good. Anon’s complaining. For a solid minute there I thought he was about to do some seriously stupid shit like offer to teach those less savvy than himself, but thankfully anon isn’t that fucking stupid. Stay goat, based anon.
To be fair, a lot of them seem to have been taught to hyper-specialize into their given niche, and they will actively refuse to learn. The attitude of "that is not explicitly my job, and therefore I will actively refuse to learn anything else" is far too common from what I've seen, and is the actual problem.
I feel I have a special perspective on this, being at the cusp of millennials and zoomers. It's not so much that "it's not my job" it's more "I've been so conditioned that anyone and everyone will take advantage of me and I refuse to give them any sort of foothold to do so."
I love learning, and I do plenty of things outside of my job scope, and see the benefit of learning those skills. However, I absolutely see where they're coming from and have learned that the hard way too that allowing yourself to be trained on other things usually doesn't mean you now do those things, it means to management that you now do your job plus those things, and get paid the same.
Coffee is $5 a cup if you want cream and sugar, I can understand looking out for #1
I'm always happy to learn new things. Whether or not I bring that knowledge to bear depends entirely upon my compensation.