Hey Ken, As a GenZ myself who finally landed a job in a fab after looking for ages, I definitely agree with a lot of points you raised in the video. Even though I'm 23, I'm old enough to remember the pre-cellphone days and the later stages of the 90s Internet. Thinking about all the services where Netflix/Video Game companies would just mail you a disk, before the shift of many in-person spaces to an online atmosphere, Saturday morning cartoons etc... It really shows you all the shifts that have happened in such a short period of time and just how much more competitive the world we live in has become. I worked ever since I was 18 (tried getting hired as a teenager, but the fast food / retail outlets wouldn't hire me!) and was in 5 different labs since then. The amount of skills that an emergent worker is just expected to be minted with, AND, to put up with a salary that pays peanuts, it's an unfortunate scenario. There's definitely a lot to learn once you start working at a company. Advocating for one's salary, knowing the range one should expect, and how to stick up for yourself when someone may be mistreating you are definitely part of the wool pulled over young peoples' eyes because some employers recognize the naivity. Troubleshooting is a dying art in many younger people because of how refined and regular the way they interact with the world. It feels like a lot of their socialization is containerized on platforms like Instagram, Reddit, RUclips, and most computing technology people get works just out of the box. I come from pretty humble beginnings, so I had to work with whatever we got in terms of hardware. Many young people also seem to have forgotten that not all useful media is audible. Yeah, sure, one could put the entire text of a book into a synthetic voice generator and listen to it as an audiobook, but I think comprehension in that domain has gone down. Google searching the question is a wonderful benefit of the modern era though. My mom is a boomer, and although she's not tech literate in the sense that she knows programming or the ins and outs of all the machinery in the house, but she was interested in having me learn about computers and technology which definitely contributed to that. Hoping to get more into developing software as a hobby. Awesome content! -Dylan
Hey Dylan, Congratulations on the new job! There's definitely some things I miss from the older days of the internet. The demo discs were awesome. Getting a selection of new games to play every month was something to look forward to. It was also a good way to find full games to buy. It's a shame that companies moved away from doing things like that. Netflix's DVD option was also really nice to have. There were great movies that a person could get that weren't available for streaming. It sounds like you're quite a ways ahead of your peers with how you see the job market. I see a lot of people fall into the trap of being taken advantage of. Maybe this is a morbid way to look at it, but if an employee passed away, many employers would have a job announcement posted in a couple days and people would forget. There's also something interesting in that when someone stands up for themselves, they tend to be treated a lot better. I was fortunate enough to have mentors that told me there's a lot more to life than living at work. And I do agree that the internet in turning into just a few large platforms. Forums were really common for a long time and most of them have just withered away. I don't think it's good for the health of the internet to have a few platforms have almost all the attention. This is something that would need a video to fully explain, but I think blockchain is going to be important for the future of the internet by decentralizing it. Also, if you decide to take up doing some software dev as a hobby, it'll open a LOT of doors for you. Thanks for supporting the channel!
When I grew up it was commonplace to get blue screens and viruses which meant a complete reinstall of windows, dealing with driver issues and installing antivirus software etc, upgrading RAM, etc. I hadn’t even considered that this rite of passage has gone away for kids now because tech is so good and so stable. But kids are learning to code instead, I’m not sure how much utility that has.
Rite of passage is a good way to phrase it. It was a great way to get people to want to learn more. Coding seems a bit precarious these days. I think AI is going to take most of the coding jobs before other IT jobs. @bobjason7540 Generally speaking, I'd say things have improved a lot. And as much as I liked W95, it had issues that required some learning. W11 has been simplified a lot, to the point an average home user can just let Update install drivers for them.
@@misterkite oh it most certainly can. I use it to do exactly that while coding. It is exceptionally good at interpreting a massive wall of error text and identifying how the code resulted in the error and suggesting solutions. All at a speed way faster than I can even read the error.
A lot of employers/managers use their underlings like their own therapeutic punching bags or emotional supply. I think that's one of the main timeless issues. Others have a tendency to care more about the money machine like we're NPC in a game sim than the economic altruism of creating a company.
I'm Gen Z (20 years old) and I recently got an internship for software maintenance and python programming mainly. I started out not knowing much about tech and the first major introduction to it for me was when I wanted to know how to make a videogame so I went on RUclips and C++ was recommended (of course) and I grabbed a "For Dummies" like book and started studying how to use it. Then the second biggest one after that was when I switched from Windows to Linux, I probably tested out 5-6 different distros before settling down for Arch Linux, and it benefits me currently since most ssh servers and Docker containers for server connections come with the Linux terminal. Anyways, I can see how most of my generation didn't get such a good opportunity to learn about tech, since the older generations kinda expected us to know most of this stuff assuming that we learned it somewhere else. I do have to say, without Google I wouldn't be able to do coding today and I would have probably fallen off from the tech learning curve, at most the hardest manual I had to read was the Arch Linux wiki and even that is stored on servers for mass access to the internet with a forum nearby if the wiki doesn't immediately resolve your question. All in all, it's not necessarily harder, in fact it's much easier with all of the information out there, but considering the fact that companies like Apple and Microsoft push accessibility and ease of use everywhere combined with choice overload (when there's so many choices or opportunities that you get overwhelmed) then I'm not surprised that a big percentage of Gen Z got left out.
I learned on a Commodore 64, so BASIC was required to do anything and eventually you learned about memory addresses so you could PEEK and POKE, and then you wanted real speed and got into assembler. Nowadays I occasionally make a program in Free Pascal or Delphi but, programming is pretty far removed from being the actual OS these days.
Of course there is a gap, I am 28 I have been messing with computers since I was around 12. My first learning experience was when my mother got me my first PC and I dealt heavily in "free software 🏴☠" I would constantly break my PC and have to learn by myself how to fix it. I also remember when software was run locally and I have to figure everything out myself. Now today everything is an app, web app, or a subscription so kids have no idea about the underlying structure of their systems or applications because of the amount of abstraction there is. We cannot blame these younger techs, hell I didn't touch a CLI until I was 19 in college doing an intro to scripting class, now I prefer to use a CLI to installing and update things because of its simplicity. While I have a CS degree I don't lean to heavily into that because while it taught me a lot the one thing I took away from it was how to research and I use that to teach myself new concepts, and the best way to learn is to mess something up that's critical and then have to fix it.
Exactly. Going and turning everything into a simple to use app took away a lot of the learning process. And using a CLI is one of the best ways to understand an OS from under the hood.
Gen Z & Alpha: I thought we were working on the Google Chrome Operating System? Why do we ever need to care about Windows this, Linux that, Mac OS X nonsense?
I have been saying this exact thing. I'm 39. I used Windows 3.1, 95, 98. And that shit broke all the time. Computers sucked. And it was glorious. When you fired up Wolf3d and could actually hear the sound, it was so rewarding. And now I'm a software engineer. Would I have still ended up as one if I didn't have to figure out what a sound card IRQ is? If I just had to press an icon on a screen and the shit downloads in 30 seconds and then I can play online multiplayer while riding in a car, I never would have learned to troubleshoot. The old stuff was worse, but it was also better in an important way. A way that impacts human beings. It hurts us when we don't have to work for anything.
Those were the gold old days. I think all the bugs and issues made it more fun, although I probably wouldn't have said the same if I was working in IT back then. But yeah, having to go through that was a good experience for people.
Yeah, the job market for IT right now is trash. I think some of these companies want less people to do more work, and post openings give the impression they are trying to hire and not piss off the current employees more.
I think the illiteracy comes from the mental shift of computers being magic black boxes, where the user doesn't have to understand anything about how it works. Much of Gen Z and Gen Alpha has no clue what a "Byte" is, or how a file system works. The abstractions from the underlying hardware have gotten so large that it's impossible to learn about how it works without really diving deep. In contrast, using a computer in the 90's and early 2000's meant you would inevitably pick up some knowledge just by using it. In some ways this is great as tech is more user-friendly than ever, however, I fear for the future of these technical fields and the lack of technical skill from domestic populations, though I'm sure governments will work around that by increasing visa quotas for these kinds of positions.
(Sigh...) IT in the '80s and '90s was such fun for me. While the cutthroat employment side of things today is awful enough, I am even more surprised to hear that a Gen Z or Gen Alpha (that term is new to this old man...) are thought to be tech illiterate. For instance, I'd be shocked to hear a young'un had less "Google Fu" than even myself! What jobs are available now that Americans want to do? I've always assumed all the kids would be infinitely smarter and quicker than I! Indeed, that was expected of ME back in my day. That said, have a great weekend, Ken! Aloha.
I learnt many things about computers by getting a 10 year old trash computer that I didn't care about. Then I went insane and wrecked files and had fun. All power or pro users need a trash computer.
@@musicalneptunian Yes! I LOVED doing that! I learned more about computers...by breaking them sometimes! Even today, I install a Linux distro, run a few VMs, let the VMs catch a virus or ransomware, then figure out how to deal with it. I'm in my 60s...but that shouldn't stop me from having fun learning just as you are doing. Aloha.
I definitely miss the mid and late 90's. I think that was the golden era for the internet and computing. The tech these days is nice and all, but a lot of it just lacks soul and most websites just seem really generic. I was testing W98 recently. I miss being able to easily customize how it looked. The Dangerous Creatures theme was great! Have a good weekend, Jim! @musicalneptunian I agree 100%. One of my early computers was from the trash and it worked great. I don't know why someone threw it out. I used it for a long time though and learned a lot about computers with it.
I'm borderline Gen Z and saved a few people from social engineering. I also did the old LFS (Linux From Scratch) thing, it was fun and kind of dumb time wise, but a nice experiment none the less. Well I'm not surprised there was more tech literate people back then. You guys had to program stuff litteraly to get what you needed back then. Yes I remember coding magazines my older brother had some. Every time I wanted a new PC I built it because I got the best parts for the best price. Now kids play with a fisher price OS (Not XP lol) and on a fissher price device called a tablet. I hate phones and tablets, they are locked down pieces of S***. Pardon my French. I have met an executive lady who didn't even know what a start screen is and she use the damn tablet every day. WTF and she's about 5 years younger than me.
The job hunting issue is nothing new. My boomer father ran into this a lot over the last several decades as an embedded software dev. What he found is often HR would reject his resume but the individual who would be his supervisor if hired thought his resume was amazing. Also ever since the 1990s at least the majority of "job postings" haven't been for real jobs but head hunters trying to harvest potential workers.
I am gen Z and know my way around in comSci, my younger siblings and cousins do not know how to type out a word document anymore, they do not know what a flash drive is and that you can take it to the copy shop to make copies. Maybe it is a good thing or maybe they will be doomed. Who knows?
I still remember floppy disks, you young'ns missing out. Also, zip drives. I was born when Bill Gates wizard jizz hit the market with that so called start me up song and DOOM was all the RAGE. Well the rest is what they call history.
If you're concerned about "not having the drive of a 30 year old" maybe they just need to wait till they are 30 and more driven? Idk, it's what worked for me lol.
Not to hate on your video. But if you are gonna talk about youngsters and critisizing their tech skills, wouldn't you need to stand an example, and perhaps create a powerpoint you can show instead? I thought the NotePad was a joke, until you used it for the entire video lol
No problem, I didn't interpret it as hate. Notepad is a staple for my videos and something I prefer to use over other options. I don't see this as a generational issue. Some of the articles that I see talking about the different generations seem like they try to pit people against one another. Learning tech skills is about having the desire and the opportunity. If you took two people in their 20's, and gave one an iPad and the other a PC with a blank drive and a copy of FreeBSD, the second person will develop way better skills.
Just lurking into tech forums/communities and getting attacked for promoting old school methods are quite fine examples to me. And the youngster's behaviors spilled over into some older generations. A great example is the aversion to microsd cards or any means for local storage. They can't differentiate between local storage and the cloud (Drive). They think they're the same thing. Till shtf and they lose access to their files. Same with storing data only on phone's internal memory. That it flies over their heads when they say 128gb is more than enough but forget that future system/security/OS updates will eat thru that. Nevermind that they will have to babysit their remaining storage with third party apps and personal files. That removable batteries have no place in the current world because of waterproofing but they shut up when they get shown a Samsung Xcover/Active product with ip68 AND removable battery. And should I also mention that someone in our local group asked for help on how to install Tiktok app... on his Windows laptop. 😂😂😂 I could post more but seeing how you attacked Ken's notepad method (best of both worlds since it's a video AND text guide), you might just reply with Kek, CAP or any one liner quip that zoomers throw at me. 😅
You do not work in the real world. I am NOT being critical, just making an observation. Young people want everything done for them. They are unwilling to learn how stuff works and expect to be paid to play on their phones and have no concept of what really hard work is. They do not know much about anything. Schools make them feel good, but they are no longer competitive and willing to hustle. They are also very poorly grounded in many areas. For example a young college student recently told my wife (an employer) "Paris is a country in Italy." As a biology student, she also said she "does not have to know anything ...she only has to know where to look it up." This is the result of poor education. I DO AGREE with your point that less friction with technology yields fewer technologically savvy users. But the fact is, younger people do not want to work hard and are unwilling to think for themselves and figure out how stuff works - they expect plug-n-play everywhere. As for pay ... employers 1) cannot afford to pay big money for low quality output, and 2) wages MUST go down as we are fighting a global economy, and can no longer pay big money for any employee without big value return on investment, because third world tech labor is becoming very good, and very low cost. While wages rise elsewhere, wages will fall in the US because we now compete globally, not just within the US. So, yep, that $20 an hour tech job is what is really worth in a global setting. Get used to the fact we cannot maintain our previous high wage economy in face of global competition. Look at how many apartments are springing up - meaning young people will not have equity in homes, but always pay rent - so I am investing in big rental developments because that is where the cash will flow - and younger people will be slaves to low paying jobs - but that is OK, they don't wanna work for it, anyway. My wife and I see this daily as an employers and business consultants. GREAT video - but there is more to it. Just my take - your mileage may vary. I enjoy the channel. TT
No worries, I didn't take your comment as being critical and I appreciate the support. I actually do agree with your points, with some nuance being added in there. I don't think the narrative being pushed by the media is helping anything when it comes to the young generations. This is something that has been going on well before our time. Socrates had said this about the kids in his time: "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers." The education system (at least in America) is a garbage dump, and that is creating a lot of the issues that we see now. I've seen plenty of videos of street interviews where Americans are incapable of naming and placing other countries, much less anything that requires more levels of thinking. That said, I've also come across plenty of Gen Z/Alpha that are hustling their asses off and trying to make something of themselves. I think a lot of the younger generations aren't aware of the opportunity and/or don't have the mentorship to get there. It takes proper education to learn about. A 5 minute YT video isn't enough to made that happen. And I certainly wouldn't have gone anywhere in life if it weren't for my mentors.
@@KenHarrisio YES AND YES. Unfortunately, it is as complicated as it seems, so it will be difficult to resolve - the best thing is some folks get it and there is beginning to be dialog about it - your post helps. TT
@@KenHarrisio not only the hoops but we design for whom !? People are human and you can't copy the human brain by hate ....so what !? we end in a repetitive cycle that never ends and people lose interest like I did I don't think people need more designs anymore nothing is entertaining nothing is funny nothing is motivating......
@@JamilaJibril-e8h It's a good point. Many things in general these days just feel bland and lack soul. A lot of stuff now just feels like it was corporatized. Gaming is a good reflection of this and is mostly why I don't play anything new. Most of them don't have the feeling that the older ones did. I think Red Alert and Fallout 1 and 2 are examples that are better than much of what gets made now.
I am gen z and I will tell you that I am not tech illiterate and I am good with tech too good that people around me ask me to help them with tech issues maybe I am a minority because my sister and two younger brothers barely know how to use the tech that they have grown up with it all the their life. I feel like it's because of the easification for me I got into tech when my dad was playing around the pc and he made me help him fix up the PC and he was still using windows xp when I was a kid I am 20 and I am learning alot about computers and such I got into linux and I am learning coding.
i mean, it depends on where you look honestly, my brother, even though my brother, is only moderately tech literate, because he just doesnt involve himself in tech at all.
No we are not. My dad taught me how to type and how to troubleshoot computers. Lots of people my age don’t know how to even check the size of a file. I’ve seen people barely be able to use google lol. I watched a kid when I was in highschool type out entire question into google with a question mark at the end.
NO we aren't the most tech literate. Just because you can smudge your finger on a tablet and move crap around doesn't make you tech literate. That's like saying someone who played NES back in the day, is some video game wizard and should test games.
as a gen z myself, i can vouch for the tech literacy of the involved. Myself and a number of other individuals around my age are highly invested in tech are arguably linux enthusiasts. There is a significant problem with tech literacy in general, i think. People not understanding how to use CLI for instance, i think that should be a fundamental skill everyone knows, because of the sheer uniformity of CLI across systems. Also when it comes to modern UI, we seem to have this weird idea of "make it usable at first sight" or intuitively usable. Which i've always found to be weird since you can't just pick up a welder and start using it effectively. It's just counter intuitive to many principled design choices. I've been using i3wm as of late, and i think it's the perfect example of this. Explicitly minimal, while still providing the MVP in terms of productivity. That way it puts as little as possible between you and getting work done. And as a result has some really nice features. Configuration? Basically universal across systems, you could even develop a centrally maintained config system for use in multiple different systems if you wanted. This is where my personal opinion sort of crawls into frame. I think floating window managers were a mistake. They should' not have been invented.
You're right about being involved. That's what it comes down to at the end of the day. I don't see this as a generational issue. It's more of how things became simplified over the years. If tech right now was where it was at in the 90's, the younger generations would have a lot more tech skills. The need to understand it has been removed for a lot of people that don't want to be a power user.
@@KenHarrisioyeah thats definitely true. While not everyone needs or wants to be a power user, i think it's also doing a disservice to not provide something that makes it very accessible, even though it's not immediately obvious. With something like i3wm there is so little complication you can read the documentation in like half an hour, and refer to it in a few seconds. Where as with something like KDE i've once looked at the documentation because i know it would've been a complete nightmare. Combined with the fact that it never really pushes the end user to do any of that since it just "works well enough" I hope to see more things designed like i3wm in the future. It's a very well put together piece of software and has a well curated experience. While not being in the way of the user all that much.
secondary comment as im actually watching through the video now: one thing i've noticed with things like android and windows trying to smooth the user experience over, is that it becomes much more on rails. Android for example. Unless you're running android 12 or newer, you dont get access to zeroconf (mdns) type networking. On windows for example. Windows 10 now forcibly installs razer synapse onto my system everytime it updates, even though that software is utter garbage and doesnt work. (yet another reason i use linux) While these things might be really nice for the average user, for the experienced user like me, these things can be EXTREMELY frustrating, because the system just fights you at every step of the way. another particularly annoying issue for me now that im getting into self hosting more properly, is a lot of services are designed right off the bat for working with a reverse proxy into a domain name, again fine for the average person. But i don't want that. To my understanding, this shouldnt exactly be an inherent limitation of the software, it should just work maybe? I dont know enough about that type of web hosting in order to understand it fully, and as a result i tend to just ignore those kinds of things. Primarily because if they do that there, they're likely to do it elsewhere. or secure site hosting, you can use self signed certs if you're self hosting a local service, but modern web browsers HATE that, and for good reason. But they just aren't designed to work nicely with something like that either. Firefox ik lets you add your own certs, but that's never ideal. Chrome i have no idea. And i know you need to enable a special flag for it to even consider self signed or http sites exist, i forget which one. A lot of modern tech is just highly abrasive these days IMO. A lot of this stems from what i consider to be feature creep (security creep) or over engineering. Take microsoft security certificates for example. It prevents unsigned apps from being run, seems like a solution to malware right? Nope, turns out malware just uses whatever key from whatever vendor that happens to work that week. And since it's entirely invisible to the end user, they have no idea that those even exist, let alone that datastealer.exe signed by oracle is being run in the background. A lot of modern web security is in the same boat as well IMO, it's why web browsers are so bloated, shitty, and there are only two of them. Firefox and its derivs, and chrome and its derivs, everything else is either not feature parity, or experimental. A lot of this stuff is the reason i use things like LXC and i3wm, lxc containers are literally a filesystem in a folder, some cgroup shenanigans, and filesystem mangling, and a config file. It hides none of that, it's all immediately obvious. It gives me peace of mind that i can move away when needed, or fix things when they explode, or tinker with it in some significant capacity.
It's interesting that you mention that. I've noticed the same issue with my Razor mouse. I also have an ASUS mobo that does the same thing. As soon as they get an internet connection through Windows, they try to install bloatware. It pisses me off that they try to force it on the user. This is why I block almost everything in Windows from being able to access the internet. As far as hosting, are you looking at trying to host a site for yourself or one that would be available for everyone? I started using private GitHub repos a while back and really like them (GitLab is also an option depending on what a person is trying to do). There's quite a few options that work with this - 11ty, MkDocs, Astro, Hugo, etc. I used to use platforms like Wordpress and Webflow for the longest time before switching and I'm glad I did. Webflow is the best I've used of all the site builders, but it didn't quite have what I wanted. If you want something more straightforward regarding hosting and the features that come with it (i.e. SSL certs), there's some good options available. Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, GitHub pages, etc. There's some differences between them, though they largely accomplish the same thing. When I make a change to one of my sites, I push it to the repo, which then automatically goes to the host, who then updates the site.
@@KenHarrisio personally i consider any self installing software to be malware, as far as im concerned thats rule number one when it comes to software, don't auto install. As for web hosting, if i ever get into it seriously for hosting a blog or something i'll definitely do something pretty typical. I have the hardware and capability to self host but i'll probably publish through something else just to keep it isolated. When it comes to the application side of this stuff im almost never worried, as it seems there is usually a wealth of options, and they tend to be pretty flexible. It's mostly the established methods that things tend to use that bother me. I'll likely just find one i don't immediately hate and that won't kill me in my sleep and go from there. Currently though i self host convenience services, so it's not a huge problem for me, a handful of servers that run various things, voip, game servers, media libraries, etc...
Windows 11 I get crackly audio and hard locks, in Linux I can push the audio to super low buffer sizes on my onboard stuff and my USB interface. On Windows 11 I just disable onboard audio since MS latest OS is junk and it likes to reinstall OneDrive on me from time to time. I just made a powershell script to shut it up. I have moved from GTX 1070 to an RX 7900XT so I can't wait to nuke Windows duke style soon. Windows 12 with that AI junk baked in will take a super computer to run at this point. 😂 I just want something simple with a taskbar at the bottom that runs lightning fast and without glitches. Hate to break it, Linux is the way to go even though most see it as some dumb toy. Now if Adobe could catch the memo.
Hey Ken,
As a GenZ myself who finally landed a job in a fab after looking for ages, I definitely agree with a lot of points you raised in the video. Even though I'm 23, I'm old enough to remember the pre-cellphone days and the later stages of the 90s Internet. Thinking about all the services where Netflix/Video Game companies would just mail you a disk, before the shift of many in-person spaces to an online atmosphere, Saturday morning cartoons etc... It really shows you all the shifts that have happened in such a short period of time and just how much more competitive the world we live in has become.
I worked ever since I was 18 (tried getting hired as a teenager, but the fast food / retail outlets wouldn't hire me!) and was in 5 different labs since then. The amount of skills that an emergent worker is just expected to be minted with, AND, to put up with a salary that pays peanuts, it's an unfortunate scenario. There's definitely a lot to learn once you start working at a company. Advocating for one's salary, knowing the range one should expect, and how to stick up for yourself when someone may be mistreating you are definitely part of the wool pulled over young peoples' eyes because some employers recognize the naivity.
Troubleshooting is a dying art in many younger people because of how refined and regular the way they interact with the world. It feels like a lot of their socialization is containerized on platforms like Instagram, Reddit, RUclips, and most computing technology people get works just out of the box. I come from pretty humble beginnings, so I had to work with whatever we got in terms of hardware. Many young people also seem to have forgotten that not all useful media is audible. Yeah, sure, one could put the entire text of a book into a synthetic voice generator and listen to it as an audiobook, but I think comprehension in that domain has gone down. Google searching the question is a wonderful benefit of the modern era though. My mom is a boomer, and although she's not tech literate in the sense that she knows programming or the ins and outs of all the machinery in the house, but she was interested in having me learn about computers and technology which definitely contributed to that.
Hoping to get more into developing software as a hobby. Awesome content!
-Dylan
Hey Dylan,
Congratulations on the new job!
There's definitely some things I miss from the older days of the internet. The demo discs were awesome. Getting a selection of new games to play every month was something to look forward to. It was also a good way to find full games to buy. It's a shame that companies moved away from doing things like that. Netflix's DVD option was also really nice to have. There were great movies that a person could get that weren't available for streaming.
It sounds like you're quite a ways ahead of your peers with how you see the job market. I see a lot of people fall into the trap of being taken advantage of. Maybe this is a morbid way to look at it, but if an employee passed away, many employers would have a job announcement posted in a couple days and people would forget. There's also something interesting in that when someone stands up for themselves, they tend to be treated a lot better. I was fortunate enough to have mentors that told me there's a lot more to life than living at work.
And I do agree that the internet in turning into just a few large platforms. Forums were really common for a long time and most of them have just withered away. I don't think it's good for the health of the internet to have a few platforms have almost all the attention. This is something that would need a video to fully explain, but I think blockchain is going to be important for the future of the internet by decentralizing it.
Also, if you decide to take up doing some software dev as a hobby, it'll open a LOT of doors for you.
Thanks for supporting the channel!
When I grew up it was commonplace to get blue screens and viruses which meant a complete reinstall of windows, dealing with driver issues and installing antivirus software etc, upgrading RAM, etc. I hadn’t even considered that this rite of passage has gone away for kids now because tech is so good and so stable. But kids are learning to code instead, I’m not sure how much utility that has.
"Tech is so good and stable." In my experience tech has only increased in malfunctions with the same amount of processes over the past 20 years.
@@bobjason7540 can you give me an example?
Rite of passage is a good way to phrase it. It was a great way to get people to want to learn more. Coding seems a bit precarious these days. I think AI is going to take most of the coding jobs before other IT jobs.
@bobjason7540
Generally speaking, I'd say things have improved a lot. And as much as I liked W95, it had issues that required some learning. W11 has been simplified a lot, to the point an average home user can just let Update install drivers for them.
@@KenHarrisio "I think AI is going to take most of the coding jobs before other IT jobs." Hahahahhaa.. AI can't modify software or debug a problem.
@@misterkite oh it most certainly can. I use it to do exactly that while coding.
It is exceptionally good at interpreting a massive wall of error text and identifying how the code resulted in the error and suggesting solutions. All at a speed way faster than I can even read the error.
Heard someone else explain it as an attitude shift: computers went from a tool that people did things with, to something that does things for people.
A lot of employers/managers use their underlings like their own therapeutic punching bags or emotional supply. I think that's one of the main timeless issues. Others have a tendency to care more about the money machine like we're NPC in a game sim than the economic altruism of creating a company.
I need to explain what an "operating system" is to my friends 😭
I'm Gen Z (20 years old) and I recently got an internship for software maintenance and python programming mainly. I started out not knowing much about tech and the first major introduction to it for me was when I wanted to know how to make a videogame so I went on RUclips and C++ was recommended (of course) and I grabbed a "For Dummies" like book and started studying how to use it.
Then the second biggest one after that was when I switched from Windows to Linux, I probably tested out 5-6 different distros before settling down for Arch Linux, and it benefits me currently since most ssh servers and Docker containers for server connections come with the Linux terminal.
Anyways, I can see how most of my generation didn't get such a good opportunity to learn about tech, since the older generations kinda expected us to know most of this stuff assuming that we learned it somewhere else.
I do have to say, without Google I wouldn't be able to do coding today and I would have probably fallen off from the tech learning curve, at most the hardest manual I had to read was the Arch Linux wiki and even that is stored on servers for mass access to the internet with a forum nearby if the wiki doesn't immediately resolve your question.
All in all, it's not necessarily harder, in fact it's much easier with all of the information out there, but considering the fact that companies like Apple and Microsoft push accessibility and ease of use everywhere combined with choice overload (when there's so many choices or opportunities that you get overwhelmed) then I'm not surprised that a big percentage of Gen Z got left out.
I learned on a Commodore 64, so BASIC was required to do anything and eventually you learned about memory addresses so you could PEEK and POKE, and then you wanted real speed and got into assembler. Nowadays I occasionally make a program in Free Pascal or Delphi but, programming is pretty far removed from being the actual OS these days.
Of course there is a gap, I am 28 I have been messing with computers since I was around 12. My first learning experience was when my mother got me my first PC and I dealt heavily in "free software 🏴☠" I would constantly break my PC and have to learn by myself how to fix it. I also remember when software was run locally and I have to figure everything out myself. Now today everything is an app, web app, or a subscription so kids have no idea about the underlying structure of their systems or applications because of the amount of abstraction there is. We cannot blame these younger techs, hell I didn't touch a CLI until I was 19 in college doing an intro to scripting class, now I prefer to use a CLI to installing and update things because of its simplicity. While I have a CS degree I don't lean to heavily into that because while it taught me a lot the one thing I took away from it was how to research and I use that to teach myself new concepts, and the best way to learn is to mess something up that's critical and then have to fix it.
Exactly. Going and turning everything into a simple to use app took away a lot of the learning process. And using a CLI is one of the best ways to understand an OS from under the hood.
Gen Z & Alpha: I thought we were working on the Google Chrome Operating System? Why do we ever need to care about Windows this, Linux that, Mac OS X nonsense?
I have been saying this exact thing. I'm 39. I used Windows 3.1, 95, 98. And that shit broke all the time. Computers sucked. And it was glorious. When you fired up Wolf3d and could actually hear the sound, it was so rewarding. And now I'm a software engineer. Would I have still ended up as one if I didn't have to figure out what a sound card IRQ is? If I just had to press an icon on a screen and the shit downloads in 30 seconds and then I can play online multiplayer while riding in a car, I never would have learned to troubleshoot. The old stuff was worse, but it was also better in an important way. A way that impacts human beings. It hurts us when we don't have to work for anything.
Those were the gold old days. I think all the bugs and issues made it more fun, although I probably wouldn't have said the same if I was working in IT back then. But yeah, having to go through that was a good experience for people.
there is NO MORE "Jr Sys Admin"
they want the Sr Sys Admin on paper on a entry Cust Service salary...
or
The job does exist.. the posting is fake
Yeah, the job market for IT right now is trash. I think some of these companies want less people to do more work, and post openings give the impression they are trying to hire and not piss off the current employees more.
I think the illiteracy comes from the mental shift of computers being magic black boxes, where the user doesn't have to understand anything about how it works. Much of Gen Z and Gen Alpha has no clue what a "Byte" is, or how a file system works. The abstractions from the underlying hardware have gotten so large that it's impossible to learn about how it works without really diving deep. In contrast, using a computer in the 90's and early 2000's meant you would inevitably pick up some knowledge just by using it.
In some ways this is great as tech is more user-friendly than ever, however, I fear for the future of these technical fields and the lack of technical skill from domestic populations, though I'm sure governments will work around that by increasing visa quotas for these kinds of positions.
(Sigh...) IT in the '80s and '90s was such fun for me.
While the cutthroat employment side of things today is awful enough, I am even more surprised to hear that a Gen Z or Gen Alpha (that term is new to this old man...) are thought to be tech illiterate.
For instance, I'd be shocked to hear a young'un had less "Google Fu" than even myself!
What jobs are available now that Americans want to do? I've always assumed all the kids would be infinitely smarter and quicker than I! Indeed, that was expected of ME back in my day.
That said, have a great weekend, Ken! Aloha.
I learnt many things about computers by getting a 10 year old trash computer that I didn't care about. Then I went insane and wrecked files and had fun. All power or pro users need a trash computer.
@@musicalneptunian Yes! I LOVED doing that!
I learned more about computers...by breaking them sometimes!
Even today, I install a Linux distro, run a few VMs, let the VMs catch a virus or ransomware, then figure out how to deal with it.
I'm in my 60s...but that shouldn't stop me from having fun learning just as you are doing.
Aloha.
to befair, i think the google fu thing is more a result of google than anything else, google sucks now.
I definitely miss the mid and late 90's. I think that was the golden era for the internet and computing. The tech these days is nice and all, but a lot of it just lacks soul and most websites just seem really generic. I was testing W98 recently. I miss being able to easily customize how it looked. The Dangerous Creatures theme was great!
Have a good weekend, Jim!
@musicalneptunian
I agree 100%. One of my early computers was from the trash and it worked great. I don't know why someone threw it out. I used it for a long time though and learned a lot about computers with it.
I'm borderline Gen Z and saved a few people from social engineering. I also did the old LFS (Linux From Scratch) thing, it was fun and kind of dumb time wise, but a nice experiment none the less. Well I'm not surprised there was more tech literate people back then. You guys had to program stuff litteraly to get what you needed back then. Yes I remember coding magazines my older brother had some. Every time I wanted a new PC I built it because I got the best parts for the best price. Now kids play with a fisher price OS (Not XP lol) and on a fissher price device called a tablet. I hate phones and tablets, they are locked down pieces of S***. Pardon my French. I have met an executive lady who didn't even know what a start screen is and she use the damn tablet every day. WTF and she's about 5 years younger than me.
Google-fu for me partially is replaced by asking llm, like chatgpt. I’m still a black belt google user, but llms are slowly taking over.
They actually do a pretty decent job at finding answers on things that would take longer with Google.
The job hunting issue is nothing new. My boomer father ran into this a lot over the last several decades as an embedded software dev. What he found is often HR would reject his resume but the individual who would be his supervisor if hired thought his resume was amazing.
Also ever since the 1990s at least the majority of "job postings" haven't been for real jobs but head hunters trying to harvest potential workers.
I am gen Z and know my way around in comSci, my younger siblings and cousins do not know how to type out a word document anymore, they do not know what a flash drive is and that you can take it to the copy shop to make copies. Maybe it is a good thing or maybe they will be doomed. Who knows?
I still remember floppy disks, you young'ns missing out. Also, zip drives. I was born when Bill Gates wizard jizz hit the market with that so called start me up song and DOOM was all the RAGE. Well the rest is what they call history.
If you're concerned about "not having the drive of a 30 year old" maybe they just need to wait till they are 30 and more driven?
Idk, it's what worked for me lol.
I guess you're either a 90s kid or you're not ...
Not to hate on your video.
But if you are gonna talk about youngsters and critisizing their tech skills, wouldn't you need to stand an example, and perhaps create a powerpoint you can show instead?
I thought the NotePad was a joke, until you used it for the entire video lol
No problem, I didn't interpret it as hate. Notepad is a staple for my videos and something I prefer to use over other options.
I don't see this as a generational issue. Some of the articles that I see talking about the different generations seem like they try to pit people against one another.
Learning tech skills is about having the desire and the opportunity. If you took two people in their 20's, and gave one an iPad and the other a PC with a blank drive and a copy of FreeBSD, the second person will develop way better skills.
Just lurking into tech forums/communities and getting attacked for promoting old school methods are quite fine examples to me. And the youngster's behaviors spilled over into some older generations.
A great example is the aversion to microsd cards or any means for local storage. They can't differentiate between local storage and the cloud (Drive). They think they're the same thing. Till shtf and they lose access to their files. Same with storing data only on phone's internal memory.
That it flies over their heads when they say 128gb is more than enough but forget that future system/security/OS updates will eat thru that. Nevermind that they will have to babysit their remaining storage with third party apps and personal files.
That removable batteries have no place in the current world because of waterproofing but they shut up when they get shown a Samsung Xcover/Active product with ip68 AND removable battery.
And should I also mention that someone in our local group asked for help on how to install Tiktok app... on his Windows laptop. 😂😂😂
I could post more but seeing how you attacked Ken's notepad method (best of both worlds since it's a video AND text guide), you might just reply with Kek, CAP or any one liner quip that zoomers throw at me. 😅
@@KenHarrisio No problem man, I enjoyed your video nontheless!
You do not work in the real world. I am NOT being critical, just making an observation. Young people want everything done for them. They are unwilling to learn how stuff works and expect to be paid to play on their phones and have no concept of what really hard work is. They do not know much about anything. Schools make them feel good, but they are no longer competitive and willing to hustle. They are also very poorly grounded in many areas. For example a young college student recently told my wife (an employer) "Paris is a country in Italy." As a biology student, she also said she "does not have to know anything ...she only has to know where to look it up." This is the result of poor education. I DO AGREE with your point that less friction with technology yields fewer technologically savvy users. But the fact is, younger people do not want to work hard and are unwilling to think for themselves and figure out how stuff works - they expect plug-n-play everywhere. As for pay ... employers 1) cannot afford to pay big money for low quality output, and 2) wages MUST go down as we are fighting a global economy, and can no longer pay big money for any employee without big value return on investment, because third world tech labor is becoming very good, and very low cost. While wages rise elsewhere, wages will fall in the US because we now compete globally, not just within the US. So, yep, that $20 an hour tech job is what is really worth in a global setting. Get used to the fact we cannot maintain our previous high wage economy in face of global competition. Look at how many apartments are springing up - meaning young people will not have equity in homes, but always pay rent - so I am investing in big rental developments because that is where the cash will flow - and younger people will be slaves to low paying jobs - but that is OK, they don't wanna work for it, anyway. My wife and I see this daily as an employers and business consultants.
GREAT video - but there is more to it. Just my take - your mileage may vary. I enjoy the channel. TT
No worries, I didn't take your comment as being critical and I appreciate the support. I actually do agree with your points, with some nuance being added in there.
I don't think the narrative being pushed by the media is helping anything when it comes to the young generations. This is something that has been going on well before our time. Socrates had said this about the kids in his time:
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
The education system (at least in America) is a garbage dump, and that is creating a lot of the issues that we see now. I've seen plenty of videos of street interviews where Americans are incapable of naming and placing other countries, much less anything that requires more levels of thinking.
That said, I've also come across plenty of Gen Z/Alpha that are hustling their asses off and trying to make something of themselves. I think a lot of the younger generations aren't aware of the opportunity and/or don't have the mentorship to get there. It takes proper education to learn about. A 5 minute YT video isn't enough to made that happen. And I certainly wouldn't have gone anywhere in life if it weren't for my mentors.
@@KenHarrisio YES AND YES. Unfortunately, it is as complicated as it seems, so it will be difficult to resolve - the best thing is some folks get it and there is beginning to be dialog about it - your post helps. TT
Nah Kan its not worth it anymore...
That's fair. I wouldn't hold it against anyone to not want to deal with the hoops involved with IT.
@@KenHarrisio not only the hoops but we design for whom !? People are human and you can't copy the human brain by hate ....so what !? we end in a repetitive cycle that never ends and people lose interest like I did I don't think people need more designs anymore nothing is entertaining nothing is funny nothing is motivating......
@@JamilaJibril-e8h It's a good point. Many things in general these days just feel bland and lack soul. A lot of stuff now just feels like it was corporatized.
Gaming is a good reflection of this and is mostly why I don't play anything new. Most of them don't have the feeling that the older ones did. I think Red Alert and Fallout 1 and 2 are examples that are better than much of what gets made now.
I am gen z and I will tell you that I am not tech illiterate and I am good with tech too good that people around me ask me to help them with tech issues maybe I am a minority because my sister and two younger brothers barely know how to use the tech that they have grown up with it all the their life. I feel like it's because of the easification for me I got into tech when my dad was playing around the pc and he made me help him fix up the PC and he was still using windows xp when I was a kid I am 20 and I am learning alot about computers and such I got into linux and I am learning coding.
Gen Z is def tech illiterate
putting gen z in the title is so insane lol. Gen z is like the most tech literate generation 🤦♂️
i mean, it depends on where you look honestly, my brother, even though my brother, is only moderately tech literate, because he just doesnt involve himself in tech at all.
No we are not. My dad taught me how to type and how to troubleshoot computers. Lots of people my age don’t know how to even check the size of a file. I’ve seen people barely be able to use google lol. I watched a kid when I was in highschool type out entire question into google with a question mark at the end.
NO we aren't the most tech literate. Just because you can smudge your finger on a tablet and move crap around doesn't make you tech literate. That's like saying someone who played NES back in the day, is some video game wizard and should test games.
using ipads and iphones doesn't mean you are tech literate. that's like saying being able to drive a car makes you great car mechanic.
as a gen z myself, i can vouch for the tech literacy of the involved. Myself and a number of other individuals around my age are highly invested in tech are arguably linux enthusiasts.
There is a significant problem with tech literacy in general, i think. People not understanding how to use CLI for instance, i think that should be a fundamental skill everyone knows, because of the sheer uniformity of CLI across systems.
Also when it comes to modern UI, we seem to have this weird idea of "make it usable at first sight" or intuitively usable. Which i've always found to be weird since you can't just pick up a welder and start using it effectively. It's just counter intuitive to many principled design choices. I've been using i3wm as of late, and i think it's the perfect example of this. Explicitly minimal, while still providing the MVP in terms of productivity. That way it puts as little as possible between you and getting work done. And as a result has some really nice features. Configuration? Basically universal across systems, you could even develop a centrally maintained config system for use in multiple different systems if you wanted.
This is where my personal opinion sort of crawls into frame. I think floating window managers were a mistake. They should' not have been invented.
You're right about being involved. That's what it comes down to at the end of the day. I don't see this as a generational issue. It's more of how things became simplified over the years. If tech right now was where it was at in the 90's, the younger generations would have a lot more tech skills. The need to understand it has been removed for a lot of people that don't want to be a power user.
@@KenHarrisioyeah thats definitely true. While not everyone needs or wants to be a power user, i think it's also doing a disservice to not provide something that makes it very accessible, even though it's not immediately obvious.
With something like i3wm there is so little complication you can read the documentation in like half an hour, and refer to it in a few seconds. Where as with something like KDE i've once looked at the documentation because i know it would've been a complete nightmare. Combined with the fact that it never really pushes the end user to do any of that since it just "works well enough"
I hope to see more things designed like i3wm in the future. It's a very well put together piece of software and has a well curated experience. While not being in the way of the user all that much.
secondary comment as im actually watching through the video now:
one thing i've noticed with things like android and windows trying to smooth the user experience over, is that it becomes much more on rails. Android for example. Unless you're running android 12 or newer, you dont get access to zeroconf (mdns) type networking. On windows for example. Windows 10 now forcibly installs razer synapse onto my system everytime it updates, even though that software is utter garbage and doesnt work. (yet another reason i use linux) While these things might be really nice for the average user, for the experienced user like me, these things can be EXTREMELY frustrating, because the system just fights you at every step of the way.
another particularly annoying issue for me now that im getting into self hosting more properly, is a lot of services are designed right off the bat for working with a reverse proxy into a domain name, again fine for the average person. But i don't want that. To my understanding, this shouldnt exactly be an inherent limitation of the software, it should just work maybe? I dont know enough about that type of web hosting in order to understand it fully, and as a result i tend to just ignore those kinds of things. Primarily because if they do that there, they're likely to do it elsewhere.
or secure site hosting, you can use self signed certs if you're self hosting a local service, but modern web browsers HATE that, and for good reason. But they just aren't designed to work nicely with something like that either. Firefox ik lets you add your own certs, but that's never ideal. Chrome i have no idea. And i know you need to enable a special flag for it to even consider self signed or http sites exist, i forget which one. A lot of modern tech is just highly abrasive these days IMO.
A lot of this stems from what i consider to be feature creep (security creep) or over engineering. Take microsoft security certificates for example. It prevents unsigned apps from being run, seems like a solution to malware right? Nope, turns out malware just uses whatever key from whatever vendor that happens to work that week. And since it's entirely invisible to the end user, they have no idea that those even exist, let alone that datastealer.exe signed by oracle is being run in the background. A lot of modern web security is in the same boat as well IMO, it's why web browsers are so bloated, shitty, and there are only two of them. Firefox and its derivs, and chrome and its derivs, everything else is either not feature parity, or experimental.
A lot of this stuff is the reason i use things like LXC and i3wm, lxc containers are literally a filesystem in a folder, some cgroup shenanigans, and filesystem mangling, and a config file. It hides none of that, it's all immediately obvious. It gives me peace of mind that i can move away when needed, or fix things when they explode, or tinker with it in some significant capacity.
It's interesting that you mention that. I've noticed the same issue with my Razor mouse. I also have an ASUS mobo that does the same thing. As soon as they get an internet connection through Windows, they try to install bloatware. It pisses me off that they try to force it on the user. This is why I block almost everything in Windows from being able to access the internet.
As far as hosting, are you looking at trying to host a site for yourself or one that would be available for everyone?
I started using private GitHub repos a while back and really like them (GitLab is also an option depending on what a person is trying to do). There's quite a few options that work with this - 11ty, MkDocs, Astro, Hugo, etc. I used to use platforms like Wordpress and Webflow for the longest time before switching and I'm glad I did. Webflow is the best I've used of all the site builders, but it didn't quite have what I wanted.
If you want something more straightforward regarding hosting and the features that come with it (i.e. SSL certs), there's some good options available. Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, GitHub pages, etc. There's some differences between them, though they largely accomplish the same thing.
When I make a change to one of my sites, I push it to the repo, which then automatically goes to the host, who then updates the site.
@@KenHarrisio personally i consider any self installing software to be malware, as far as im concerned thats rule number one when it comes to software, don't auto install.
As for web hosting, if i ever get into it seriously for hosting a blog or something i'll definitely do something pretty typical. I have the hardware and capability to self host but i'll probably publish through something else just to keep it isolated. When it comes to the application side of this stuff im almost never worried, as it seems there is usually a wealth of options, and they tend to be pretty flexible. It's mostly the established methods that things tend to use that bother me. I'll likely just find one i don't immediately hate and that won't kill me in my sleep and go from there.
Currently though i self host convenience services, so it's not a huge problem for me, a handful of servers that run various things, voip, game servers, media libraries, etc...
Windows 11 I get crackly audio and hard locks, in Linux I can push the audio to super low buffer sizes on my onboard stuff and my USB interface. On Windows 11 I just disable onboard audio since MS latest OS is junk and it likes to reinstall OneDrive on me from time to time. I just made a powershell script to shut it up. I have moved from GTX 1070 to an RX 7900XT so I can't wait to nuke Windows duke style soon. Windows 12 with that AI junk baked in will take a super computer to run at this point. 😂 I just want something simple with a taskbar at the bottom that runs lightning fast and without glitches. Hate to break it, Linux is the way to go even though most see it as some dumb toy. Now if Adobe could catch the memo.