this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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It really is just Gen Z. Millenials were programming shit and bashing everything together with hardware and software adaptors as kids. Gen Z grew up in the world of the slick interface that just works.
This misconception comes from the fact that gen X were basically the first crowd to be the bulk of the Internets at the dawn of it, and all of them were technically proficient enough to do it, so there is a bias: you had to know something about computers to be on the internet. Nowadays you don't need to know anything, the barrier is virtually non-existent and basically anyone can do internets with their phone and some "app" without knowing anything at all about how it works or how to setup a connection or even type an address.
Most of us were and are pretty dumb when it comes to technology or even problem solving, nothing changed in that regard.
I switched to 8 effortlessly, because ever since Vista I've been typing in first couple of letters of a program instead of looking it up in a structure of installed applications, so nothing changed for me: something like press Win, type "visual" and press enter.
Not all the time, some stuff is still built fixable and some disassembly, diagnostic, and some soldering if any at all, and then reassembly is all it takes to make thing work again. Some failed contact, some blown capacitor, those are easily fixable, but we lot don't even try to look inside.
But a bunch of stuff is made that way you can't reasonably fix it if it breaks. Static kills the mainboard of your TV? You are stuck without another mainboard (finding a new TV CPU and resoldering BGA is out of my scope). Car manufacturers stopped making small parts and started providing large chunks. Oh, something wrong with a bearing in your RWD joint? Well, order a whole RWD module for $1000, who would want to change a bearing? Ugh.
I think there are two reasons behind all that: malicious planned obsolescence and less blatantly malicious trying to reduce costs by manufacturing bulk parts (like using an IC controller instead of a bunch of transistors and caps on a board) or molding plastic cases that are quickly and cheaply snapped together instead of screwing them.
But some stuff shouldn't be thrown in trash as soon as it stops working. Reawaken your dormant childish curiosity by disassembling it like you did with your toys, and try to diagnose the fault, you may end up fixing it.
I don't want to go backwards. As much time as I spent doing stuff the hard way I like that windows downloads all the codecs and drivers for me. I like that I can just swipe. But there is an inherent difference in people who have computers between the generations. It may also be because more people have computers and tech savvy people make less of that pie chart anymore. But one anecdote is Excel. I have yet to meet anyone my age who doesn't know the basics of Excel up to creating macros and charts. They may lack the institutional knowledge to create useful data but we simply grew up with it as the spreadsheet app to do anything more complicated than a calculator or list. We won't admit it in regards to work though because we all hate it with a passion rivaling the fires of hell and we know if anyone knew, we'd be assigned to the excel stuff before we left that room. Likewise many of us kept mum about tech support / IT stuff or purposely stopped staying up on it for the same reason. In the 2000's it was really easy to get shoved into that role without any extra pay.
At the end of the day I'm sure it's a gestalt of all of these factors along with tech becoming so mainstream. but in years past you didn't get to just play music on your phone. You had to buy the MP3 player, find music files, convert them, and manage the playlist on your computer with the really crappy program. Many people just stuck with CD's until ipods hit. So yeah at a certain level we are comparing people willing to overcome tech barriers to people who didn't have to.
No, we grew up on Vista and 8.
Ouch! That's a good one. But as bad as you think Vista was, it was still a GUI. I will admit though that anyone who suffered through Vista probably learned at least a bit.