Used to consume not produce
Used to consume not produce
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This has been a worrying trend in education. Parents assumed kids just knew how tech worked so they stopped teaching things like typing, office, or how to use the basics. Now we have people graduating who know how to use iPads and Xboxes, but have no idea how to manage a file structure (many honestly just use "recent"), or make a PowerPoint, and a lot don't know typing.
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Typing is irrelevant. Office software is irrelevant. There is one thing, and one thing only, that determines whether a person is computer-literate or not: whether the person can put together a custom workflow to solve a novel problem.
I don't mean "programming," per se, and I don't mean "scripting," per se, and I don't mean "piping together commands on a text command-line," per se. But I do mean being able to (a) understand the task you want to accomplish, (b) break it down into its component steps, and c) instruct the machine to perform those steps, while potentially (d) reading documentation and/or exploring the UI to discover how to do said instructing if necessary.
A computer-literate person can be sat down in front of a computer running an OS and/or other software they've never used before and (eventually) figure out how to use it via trial-and-error, web-searching for tutorials, RTFM, or whatever, without shutting their brain off and giving up or demanding that some other person spoon-feed a list of steps to memorize by rote.
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I need to store my emails for later reference, so I print them out.
But I don't want to keep stacks of printed emails around, so I scan the prints and save them as pictures because that's what the scanner does automatically.
But I need to search through the emails, so I found a browser plugin that can scan a picture for text and give me a summary in a new file.
But my company computer won't let me install browser plugins so I email the scanned pictures to my personal address and then open them on my phone and use the app version of the browser plugin to make the summaries and then I email those back to my company address.
But now I want to search through the summaries, which are Word documents, but Office takes forEHver to load on my shitty company computer so I don't want to use the search in it, so I right-click -> Print the summary files and then choose "Print to PDF" and then open them in Adobe Reader so I can search for the information I want that way. I usually have 200 tabs of PDFs open in Reader so I can cross-reference information.
I have a great custom workflow. I'm the most computer literate person in my office.
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Reading this felt like the computer version of whatever the SAW movies are.
Torture porn? It's so repugnant but I want more.
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I had someone take an email they received about a technical problem someone else was having. They then printed it out, highlighted the important part, then scanned it back in as a picture all offset and grainy, then used that picture in a web chat to request help for that third person without direct contact
They were an IT Manager
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Hopefully they were fired.
Out of a cannon.
Into the sun.
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It actually takes more delta-V to fire someone into the sun as it takes to fire them out of the solar system. We like efficiency.
They'll meet up with Voyager II for a close flyby in about 156 years. They're the universe's problem now.
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The worst sentence is the last sentence, when you really think about what it implies.
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Nah. While the text does successfully destroy the notion that "if it works it isn't stupid", I still see this as an improvement over so many people who are incapable of anything...
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Okay, I guess there's one more criterion for computer literacy: being able to distinguish between a reasonable workflow and a batshit-insane one. (That might even include a little bit of understanding of complexity: not enough to be able to classify an algorithm using "big O notation," but maybe enough to avoid a basic "Schlemiel the Painter" situation, for example.)
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When you don't understand the tools, every possible solution that reaches your end goal seems equally valid, no matter how convoluted. Unfortunately, the design philosophy that attempts to make every tool as compatible as possible with every other tool enables this sort of Rube Goldberg-esque nonsense (and creates development hell and permanent legacy dependencies).
It's... difficult for someone who does understand the tools to even imagine being in the mental space of someone who doesn't, which is why IT people frequently come off as arrogant, judgy, even rude - they expect other people to understand things the way they do, when they've been taking computers apart since high school. What seems reasonable to you is perfectly opaque to them. Also... sometimes people who are technically literate are the hardest to pull out of their batshit processes (doctors are the worst patients).
When you are trying to help someone, always keep the XY Problem in mind. They've arrived at a solution which seems insane to you, not because they're unreasonable, but because they ran into an obstacle and bounced off of it in a path-of-least-resistance direction and they have shit they need to get done. Try to solve the real problem, not the problem that is presented.
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Please tell me this is sarcasm meant to push the limits of their statement.
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Get out more. This is entirely realistic in my experience.
The worst one I ran into was early in my career. This was back during the XP days.
The lady who who did the job before had a certificate e-mailed to her from a lab. She printed the certificate off then slipped two certificates front and back into a plastic sheath and put them into a 4" 3 ring binder.
She then deleted the labs e-mail and electronic copy to save space in her mailbox.
There were around 4,000 of these certificates every year for 5 years when I started. So around 20,000 pages. We had ONE physical copy of a legally required certificate.
Around 15 shipments per year required her to find around 300-400 specific certificates She then had to pull them out of the plastic sheaths, make 3 physical copies and scan one PDF to load to the government agencies webpage.
She would then delete the PDF, and laboriously refile the certificates back into the the plastic sheets.
Oh the binders were also ordered in a way that nobody but her could find anything. It was about as close to random as you could get.
The 15 shipments took around 50% of her time every year.
I hired two temps and gave them a few very boring days. When we were done the certificates were all organized in a logical numerical order and in long-term secure storage. I had a folder on the server with 20,000 PDF files all with a unique name. It took me around 15 minutes to locate, print, and upload the required files for each shipment.
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I remember reading a story where the persons job was literally copying data from one program into another, may have even just been between two excel files
New hire came in and wrote a script that did it, and automated that person's job out of existence
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And the new hire made less than the person they fired. Efficiency is supposed to save us but if the benefits aren’t shared with the workers, we end up where we are headed today.
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I can kind of see the reason though. If she's old enough then digital storage space was a really big issue. I can totally see someone having been told 30 years ago to make sure they leave nothing in memory and never updating that knowledge. I don't know what to say about the rest of it though.
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Poor workflow management sadly is quite normal, not the exception. She was in her early 20's at the time, just completely computer and workflow incompetent. I have seen similar issues with people of all ages. It's not a generational thing, it's an aptitude and interest thing.
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oof, yeah there's no reason for even the deleting stuff then.
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Man I think this is just ensuring job security. Until you hired the interns and ruined it!
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Corporate IT is fun!
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Oof, I hope they pay your bar tab.
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You're like a real-life xkcd comic.
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Rube Goldberg machine of office workers
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It's shocking how few people know things I consider using a PC like organizing, customizing, automating tasks etc.
I always have to hold myself back and think I am not going to tell you how exactly to do this.
And expecting a list they can work off instead of thinking? Infuriating! These people are not old, it's a mentality.
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I wish this were the case, and in a world where software was perfectly documented and there was clearly one (or maybe 3) ways to accomplish a task I could see this being the case. Unfortunately there really is an intuition that needs to be built up over years of the underlying logic of how the most prominent software packages work and how to efficiently accomplish some basic workflows. There is no chance that someone with zero prior knowledge of excel is going to reach the same level of competency on their own as someone with 5 years of supervised experience.
I hate that Microsoft products are the de-facto standard in every workplace, but what I hate more is that they have shaped how we expect software to operate: the underlying logic (or lack thereof), where to look for tools, what keystrokes/operations result in what actions, etc. In this way they've also monopolised software design in a way that prevents innovation, since we all already understand how to use Microsoft's products (at least to some extent) it makes breaking that mould a really dangerous proposition for competitors. It also means that someone with a really deep knowledge of the M$ suite is going to be far more valuable to most businesses than someone with less experience but a better grasp of how to acquire knowledge.
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Grown up in Microsoft-contorted concept space, hard to think of anything better. Thinking limited incremental, starting from a bad place.
Free yourself, unlearn, wash eyes, air the brain, make a clean slate, pure design, intuitive for a new generation of children, helping all life.
The sick sad history of computer-aided collaboration
https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen
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I think knowing something like office software helps since that novel problem. Knowing how to do a pivot table can get you an outcome you need in a fraction of the time if you don't know how to do one. You need to know how to use the tools to create a solution.
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To be fair, file structure navigation became more of a pain in the ass when Microsoft decided to rework their start menu to feed into their fucking store/web browser. It's not a hard fix but tablet natives wouldn't know any better. At work I still end up accidently searching the web sometimes when im searching for a file that wasn't important enough to pin. I know basic file structure the modern UIs are just trash and not designed for local users.
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Granted, but the inability to learn what isn't "intuitive" is staggering.
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With the search Powertoys can help, it is really good. Plus the other features it has is just amazing, windows without it is pure trash.
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On windows the best search is https://www.voidtools.com/ by voidtools.
And by far, it hooks up right into the mtbr in the drives and knows instantly where all files are at all times. Copy 100.000 files? They are already "indexed"! Clean GUI too.
One of the few tools windows has that's better than the linux ones. Or if you have an equivalent please let me know!
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On iOS for example it’s also hard. Every app has its own silo of files and then there’s a shared file system. The file manager app is far less capable than Finder on macOS.
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Fuck Microsoft. I'm out on my build coming up.
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i've said it time and time again, the second you simplify an interface, it lessens the bar for entry, we've only done this over the last 20 years in tech, it should be no surprise that people who never have to use C drives, don't know what the fuck a C drive is.
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Graduating? These people have been in the workforce for years now. Many of them are teachers.
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I blame the education system, not the parents. Most parents can hardly work a computer themselves, much less teach it to a kid who will ask 20,000 questions
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363 comments