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Are Gen Z And Gen Alpha Tech Illiterate?

There's been an increasing amount of articles talking about how younger generations are lacking tech skills, which employers have said is causing issues with hiring. This video covers the employment and the skills gap aspects. Timestamps: 00:00 Overview 00:32 Employment Aspect 02:02 Lack Of Pay 04:53 Unrealistic Expectations 08:26 Devil's Advocate 10:42 Tech Changes Through The Years 13:36 Generational Differences/Growing Up With Tech 15:55 Mass Adoption 18:35 Pros And Cons Of Easy Technology 22:58 Skill Verticals 26:27 Future Of Tech 28:54 Casual Use 31:15 Using Or Being Used By Tech 33:34 Article 36:38 Outro Link To Article: https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z

Ken Harris

5 days ago

Hey, welcome back to the channel. Today we're going to be talking about this recurring theme that I see coming up asking if like Gen Z and Gen Alpha are really tech illiterate. And there's a lot of nuance that I see that's missing when I see this kind of stuff come up. Now, I know some of the people that follow my channel are actively trying to get into tech, get some sort of a tech job. If that's something you're interested in, I'm going to drop some stuff in here that'll help you out a little
bit and give you some perspective. And then if you're just here for some general entertainment, I guess, we'll we'll cover a few different things here. So the first thing that I'll cover real quick is the employment aspect. That's not what this is about, by the way, because I know there's this is a completely separate topic here. I'm not going to cover that for this video, but I'll just briefly talk about it, because there is some relevance is the so not the employment aspect. So what I mean by
that is there's a lot of articles that I see going around right now. And it's this is in regards to the job market in general right now of employers saying that, oh, we can't find any good help. We've had all these open jobs. No one's applying. We can't get people hired. There's not qualified people. But then you listen to the other side from people who are looking for a job who said, I've applied for literally 100 plus jobs. And this is especially common in tech. I don't know how it is for some
of these other fields, but in tech specifically, one of the things you can see if you go to any of these technology subreddits, like CS career questions is an example of one. People saying that they have a few years of experience and they are going and applying to one or two hundred different jobs. They're lucky if they get one or two interviews. So there's definitely some disparity between what we're hearing from employers and what we're hearing from employees. So I'll just briefly cover that
aspect of it, because there is some nuance there. Now, as far as the employer side of things goes, when you see those kind of articles, really what it comes down to at the end of the day, all this other stuff is kind of secondary. But the biggest thing that it comes down to when I'm seeing a lot of these employers, not all of them, but when I see a lot of them saying, well, we just can't find any good workers, we can't where we can't find anyone that has any system administration experience. And
we need sys admins, for example. What a lot of this comes down to is the pay is absolute garbage. They there's this there's this meme that I've been seeing floating around on the Internet now for the past couple of years anyway, is that a lot of these employers are expecting a 20 year old with the health and drive of a 30 year old with the experience of a 40 year old, the wisdom of a 50 year old, but they're fine being treated like a 10 year old or something to that effect. And I do think there
's a lot of truth to that. The thing is, is that a lot of people are just I've made videos on this top talking about this a little bit in the past, for example, like a software engineer. You need to have six years of JavaScript experience and you need to know PowerShell and Rust and all this other stuff. But we're actually only going to pay you 20 bucks an hour. That's a little maybe a little bit of an exaggeration. But that stuff has become very prevalent. And a lot of people are just there's t
here's a lot of people that are really good with tech, but they think, you know what? I know what my worth is. And I'm not going to go work for someone that's going to pay me like that, because it's starting. By the way, like I said, there's going to be these bits of career things sprinkled throughout this video, along with this stuff that we're hearing about the lack of tech skills or the gap of tech skills between generations when it comes to that kind of stuff. And especially for those of you
that are younger and you're looking to get into tech or just get into jobs in general. The thing with that is, let's say you are going and looking at trying to take a job that normally you would get paid. Let's say it's an entry level job, some doing something in tech. Let's say a junior system administration job. And the starting pay would be between 30 to 40 dollars an hour. If you were to take that role for, let's say, 20 dollars an hour, there's subtext to that. And what a lot of people mis
s there is that employers will take advantage of you because they think, well, this person, we really underbid this person. Therefore, they don't know what they're worth or they don't really value themselves. And they're going to use you as a doormat. I don't recommend doing that. I realize there's some people in positions of desperation and sometimes you do what you got to do. But I will also see people saying, well, why would someone not take a job like that? And it's like, well, they have com
e to realize from working for past employers that when you start letting an employer disrespect you, then they will continue to do that. And it's not just employers. This applies to every aspect in life where once you start allowing someone to treat you poorly, they will continue to do that because then they feel like that's acceptable to do that. Talked about this one a little bit already was the unrealistic expectation. So, for example, is they will want someone that's 20 years old and they'll
say, oh, well, you don't have 10 years of programming experience. Why should we hire you? Ridiculous stuff like that. And this stuff there used to be memes made about this years ago and for a while anyway, they were mostly considered memes. But now this stuff has become very commonplace. You go check out Joshua Fluke's channel. I've got him recommended on my recommended channels list on my channel page. If you scroll further down on the list of channels, you should find it. The other thing is,
this is a big one right now, is a lack of training that's being offered by these employers. They're whining and complaining about how they can't find anyone, but they are unwilling to hire someone with either no experience or let's say someone that wants to get in as a junior system administrator. They need some training to be able to do well. But these employers, they're not paying enough and then they don't want to train people. Well, that's going to cause a serious issue with being able to em
ploy people that are qualified. I mean, that's just how it is. And then as far as workplace issues, there's so if you go watch Joshua Fluke's channel, he made a video talking about this. This was one of the most asinine things that I have ever seen an employer do to their their employees. It was a video about a month back talking about how CEOs there will have CEOs in the title. But these two, these these two people that ran this company, they were like co founders, what they did is so they had
all these people working for them. What they did, they didn't tell their employees about this. They went and said they contacted all of these employees, parents. They took this camera. So they did this. They made this YouTube video and they traveled to all of these employees, parents, houses, and they were talking to the parents and interviewing them and talking about their employees, childhood, growing up and things of that nature. And it was just completely out of line. That was absolutely off
base. That should have never been done. It was a piss poor look. I don't know what the hell was going through their mind when they made that video. They were definitely playing with some legal fire when they made that. But that kind of stuff is a lot more pervasive these days than people think. And what it is is they try to break their employees down mentally and get them in a bad mental state where then they can continue to push their employees and be unreasonable. And by the way, because I kn
ow a lot of older people watch my channel and I've mentioned this briefly in the past, I've worked my off. I'm no stranger to hard work and I still work a lot. And I will continue to work a lot. I am absolutely not allergic to work. But one thing that a lot of people are becoming allergic towards these days is employers. They're figuring out that a lot of these employers are being extremely misaligned with how they are treating their employees. They are intentionally trying to degrade their emp
loyees and just use them. They use these people up like they're their toilet paper. They wipe their es with them and then they they throw it and flush it down the toilet. I mean, that's what when you go in. And you're experiencing some of this stuff, you'll you'll run into it. So for those of you out there that are looking to get into IT, just be aware that you're you're going to have to know how to look for that kind of stuff. Now, I'm going to play devil's advocate because that's what I do on
my channel. I try to cover as many different aspects as I can to make sure that I'm fair to everyone. There is another aspect to this. So also, if you are looking at getting into IT, you've never done it before. There's something that's really important. And I see this recommended in some places. Most people know that this is a bad idea, but some people still do it anyway. I see this come up a lot is people will go and they they get pissed off because they think that. And to be fair, these some
of these employers are completely off base with the way that they talk to people. The this interview process of trying to do eight different interviews. A lot of this stuff is just absolutely unreasonable garbage. But I'm going to play devil's advocate here and say that there are a lot of people that will go and try to falsify things on their resume, for example, and say, oh, well, I've got 10 years or five years, 10 years of experience working on this specific programming language or whatever t
his whatever specific thing that it is. And then when it comes time for the interview is these people will ask, oh, OK, well, tell me more about that or some specific projects that you worked on. And they'll ask them questions like coding questions or whatever it is that was put on the resume and then people can't answer it. And there's a surprising amount of people. So for the people that work in cybersecurity specifically or the people that want to get into cybersecurity, one of the things tha
t you'll see come up a lot. You can just search around for this or you'll run into it in real life as well is people that will say, oh, well, I've got a security plot certificate or I did a couple of years of experience working at this place. And then you ask them, OK, well, tell me about the CIA triad and just give me a basic explanation of it and the the purpose of it or explain something like an EDR, for example. And these people, they don't know what the hell is this CIA triad is or they can
't explain what an EDR is. I mean, that's just really basic stuff, but that comes up quite a bit. Anyway, I'm going to move off the employment stuff because that's not really what this is about. There's a lot of articles talking about the employment aspect. This is really a separate video that I'll talk on some at a later point. But let's get more into like the actual tech skills, picking up the tech skills and all of this generational stuff in particular. Now, a lot of this comes from all of th
e changes that have made in tech that were made in tech throughout the years and how things quickly become outdated. And I'm sure people, if you look at just the recent history, Google has a quite a track record with this of dropping things. They'll work on something for a little bit and then they drop it. Google Stadia, I think, only made it three or four years, something to that effect. There is the Google Glasses that was kind of around for a little bit. Never really took off. They ended that
project. There's all of these particular these particular products and services that will come out over time, and then they become outdated really fast. And it's this constant game of you always have to evolve if you want to be able to stay up to date on things. So, for example, Windows 98, for example, is quite a bit different from Windows 10. And even Linux has changed a lot from back when I started using Red Hat and I think it was Red Hat version 5.2 to where things have come today. There's
been a lot of changes that have been made on Linux. Then there's obviously all of the hardware aspects of all the things that have changed. Now, the big thing here, the 80s and 90s were a pretty big point for technology, especially Windows 95. I'm sure people probably be again, a lot of my channel is in the older age demographic. I think it's like last time I checked, it's like 65 to 70 percent. People who watch my videos are 45 plus. So a lot of you that were interested in tech, remember back w
hen Windows 95 released. That was a huge thing. And I ended up using Windows 95 for years, even after like Windows XP came out, also because I just kind of preferred it. Always had that nostalgic feel to it. But the thing was with a lot of the technology back then is you had to know how to troubleshoot stuff because stuff more frequently back then had issues like Windows 95, for example, or Windows 98. Things started to improve, improve quite a bit with Windows 2000. That was actually a really g
ood operating system. We had to know troubleshooting and especially for me in particular, like I couldn't rely on Google. Now, I had some tech books lying around the house, but for the most part, I wasn't even like didn't even have Internet access. So a lot of times I had to figure stuff out if something broke. Well, OK, I've got this book here on Windows 95 or I've got this book here on Red Hat. Well, OK, I'm going to figure this out. So this era here really created a lot of power users. These
were people that if you wanted to really do anything with computers, you either had to know someone that could help you through stuff when something broke or like I said, you just had to figure it out. Windows 95 was great, but there were a lot of things that, you know, if you broke something, well, you had to fix it. You had to get out the floppy disks and reinstall Windows 95. And this is a really important aspect right here, because I see a lot of people bring up generational stuff. But like
I said, there's a lot of nuance to that. Really, what it comes down to is this is heavily influenced by the tech that you had around when you were growing up. So like I said, I started using Windows 95 and then in 1997, started using Red Hat Linux and then it was around 2003 or 2004. I started using FreeBSD. Basically, I stopped using Linux almost completely and then switched over to FreeBSD for quite a while. I had a couple of the Super Micro server racks, which by the way, you can buy used Sup
er Micro server racks off of eBay, but not as cheap as they used to be. You used to be able to get them for like 100 bucks ish. Now they're to have one that's actually set up and wasn't stripped apart. It's about 300 bucks, but you get something with a couple of Xeon processors and 64 to 128 gigs of RAM. If that's something you're interested in, these are actually pretty nice servers. I really like using Super Micro. But for example, when I was learning how to use computers was, you know, I had
these Super Micro servers and then I had this absolute BSD. So this book came out in 2002, which is an excellent book, by the way. There's a more recent version, the third edition released probably five or six years ago. If you're if you have never used FreeBSD and you want to learn it, I really like the operating system. But being around that kind of tech was really the only reason that I got tech literate. If I would not have grown up with this stuff, I sure as hell would have never been liter
ate using tech. And I absolutely would not be making these videos right now. And I likely would have never got into it work. So there is that. And I don't. So like I said, I don't think it's really so much generational. It's more if you had that tech route, whether you're growing up or you decided to go out and spend some of your money to buy some computers. I don't see this as being so much generational because I have come across people who are Gen Z that are good, really good with computers an
d some are not. Just like I've worked with plenty of people that are older than me that were really good with computers and others that were not. It's just how things go. I don't really see the generational aspect to to it. So that's probably kind of like the answer for some of this video anyway. But now, as far as kind of why things have got up to this point, a lot of it is is because friction is getting taken out of the process and there's things are being geared towards mass adoption. One of
the big points towards getting this to move this way was like Steve Jobs, when if you remember back when the iPhone first released, the marketing for the iPhone was really just top tier marketing. But that was a really a mass adoption. That was an event where people really got pulled in. They thought, oh, well, I've got a phone. I need a phone anyway. Can carry it around in my pocket. I can make phone calls with it. I can browse the Internet, send text messages. I can download apps. Things like
that were geared towards getting people to mass adopt things. But the thing is, when you add more friction, when there's more friction to be able to use something. So Windows 95, for example, if you were not willing to learn tech, you were not going to have as good of a time of using it as someone who took the time to learn how to use it. And the issue is when you start trying to move towards the path of mass adoption, which is natural, companies are going to do it because they want more custome
rs. And the way you get more customers is to take the again, it's taking the friction out of it. So more people you make it more friendly towards getting people that are they don't they just don't use tech on a regular basis. They don't have those tech skills. So what it is is the what it comes down to is the user experience. Now, the thing is, like with iPhones, for example, user experience. For iPhones are good. I mean, the phone and the androids are the same way. The phones typically, unless
you get a crappy phone, maybe a fifty dollar piece of garbage Android, that's generic. But all the ones that I've ever used, the user experience is just really straightforward. They're really easy to use. The thing is, is that starts taking away learning some of the finer points. So like I said, learning how to troubleshoot. Well, I'm having driver issues. I'm going to have to go fix that. And so like Windows 10, for example, or Windows 11 now that we're on Windows 11 now, someone could go insta
ll Windows 11 and the system really is just plug and play. If you pick it up at the store and everything happens in the background now. And I know this isn't the optimal way to do it, but there's plenty of people that do this where now the way Windows Update works is you don't even have to install graphics drivers anymore. That was the thing for the longest time in Windows. Now, just whether you have an AMD or Intel or Nvidia graphics is it will just grab drivers off of Windows Update automatica
lly. It's taken all of that friction out of the process and made it so easy to get people in and using it, which does have its pros and cons to that. So the pros. So, you know, I'll give you some examples of each. So, for example, you people need to learn how to use tech, at least basic basic tech skills. For example, pretty much everything is done online now. You have to the vast majority of jobs these days require you to do things online. Your employment stuff might require you to be online. T
he way you communicate with a lot of people might be online. And so with how much society has moved towards out, well, people really need to be able to learn this stuff and you have to take that friction out for them to be able to learn it. So I don't see that as a bad thing. And the other aspect. And here's so here's the business aspect of things, because business moves a lot of things and business relies heavily on tech and a lot of businesses, business owners, employees, so on and so forth. T
hey are not interested in having to become power users in order to be able to do stuff. They need this stuff to be able to work smoothly and efficiently so they can focus on running the business. And here's like here's an example of that here. So just a couple of days ago, I was doing a consultation with a business owner and we were going through things like client communication and project management. And we're really trying to get the the process dialed in from a technological standpoint. And
after two hours of sitting down with this person, we got all this stuff ironed out. And now after doing that, they are going to make tens of thousands of dollars in net profit as a result of doing this, because what originally was something where there is like a let's say a 10 step process with them doing client communication, for example, is I said, OK, well, we can get rid of these steps and we can get rid of these steps. And now you are cutting down a whole bunch of stuff and now you can focu
s more on running your business and closing deals and doing work that matters to you. So those are some good pros. The cons of it is obviously there's a lot of people that when something does go wrong with tech is a lot of people have lost the ability to be able to kind of troubleshoot their way through things. And Google's out now, so it's not like that big of a deal. A lot of people have learned how to use basic Google stuff. And a lot of people are willing to take the initiative to learn some
basic stuff to fix issues with things. But it is a con nonetheless. And then the other con of it is when people are not familiar with tech, it makes them easier. It's easier for people to be able to scam them out of stuff. And it's one of the reasons that social engineering has become so popular here in the last few years. And it's a reason that a lot of these cyber criminals, these hackers have figured out that, hey, it's easier for us to figure out social engineering than it is to write malwa
re. We will just convince somebody to hand us over ten thousand dollars instead of us trying to figure out how to hack into a bank account or install malware on someone's computer. And obviously that stuff still happens, too. But again, the social engineering aspect has become very common. And here's an example of that. Just within the last couple of weeks, I have had a couple of targeted fishing scams that were aimed towards me and they were moderately put together, moderately well put together
. I definitely had suspicions about them from the get go and I somewhat quickly figured it out. But I thought and I was looking at how these these fishing scams were set up and I thought, you know, if I hadn't have had all of this experience with tech and someone had sent this to me, they were put together well enough that most likely I would have ended up falling for it. And the thing is, is that a lot of people fall for this stuff. It's again, it's why social engineering has become so common.
But I'm sure there's people like if you were online back when Windows 95 like Windows 95 and 98, three point one, all those were really easy to get viruses on. And the other thing is, I don't know how many people watching this video used to play RuneScape, but, you know, RuneScape was a really common way to get scammed out of stuff. Oh, hey, I like this weapon or I like this piece of armor. Can I try that on? You know, they get to convince you to do that and then they steal it, run off with it.
And then you think, OK, well, I'm never going to fall for that scam again. But the thing is, when people aren't exposed to that kind of stuff, it makes them easier to take advantage of. So again, there's cons to it. Now, the thing is, I'll explain these verticals here. The gap between these verticals is going to increase for there's going to be a bigger divide between things. So let me explain to you what I mean by verticals. So let's take the older days back when like Windows 95, 98, Windows NT
, the old Macintosh, Linux back when FreeBSD came out. So all of these operating systems in order to be able to comfortably use these and fix issues and all that kind of stuff. Like you had to have some you were you had to be somewhat of a power user. And so back in those days, when that kind of stuff was starting to really take off, is there were a lot of people that figured out, OK, well, if I really want to be able to use this stuff well, I'm going to have to learn how to use computers fairly
well. It's one of the reasons that I in particular, one of the reasons that you see is a lot of the older millennials and a lot of Gen X became really good with computers is because things started to really gain a lot of popularity during that time. But again, you had to have some decent skills in order to be able to use stuff. And of course, back then you had some people that were more casual users and then you obviously had people that were the working more and like the professional side were
just like home users, but they were really, really good with computers. And there's been kind of a shift that I've noticed. And from what I can tell, it seems like it's a lot of other people have noticed this as well. There are still a fair amount of power users out there, but there there's becoming a lot more of like the home users, for example. By the way, I know these are really high tech drawings here. I wasn't going to do anything super fancy. I figured this to get the point across. But so
, for example, so let's take casual home users, people that just have like basic Windows 11 and they just know how to navigate around basics. They know how to open up Word, make Word documents, browse the Internet, that kind of stuff. And then the people that use iPhones, iPads, the Android tablets, all that kind of stuff is just really basic. And most people are not going to dig further down into that. And then on the professional side, so when I say power users, this would be someone who spend
s maybe one or two hours a week learning tech stuff there. And it doesn't take much to be a power user. Some people probably think that this is super advanced. If you know how to install Linux and you can navigate through Linux in even just a basic fashion, you're a power user. People might try to say otherwise, but it really doesn't take much to be a power user these days. Pro, this would be more of someone, even if you don't work in IT, this is someone who has, let's say they spend about 10 ho
urs a week. They're setting up like a home NAS. They're running some virtual machines and they're constantly testing stuff and they've got five different computers laying around the house doing five different things. Those are more of like the professional side, the pros, the people that really know what they're doing. And so likely what we are going to see here is that the power user base is going to dwindle down further. The home users are likely going to increase even further. And we'll proba
bly see some more of a rise in the people that are really good with tech. But that gap has really become a lot, a lot bigger because back then he couldn't just rely on Google to be able to just instantly pull something up and get an answer. Required a little bit of those troubleshooting skills. And the new tech is going to take things even further. I'll give you a perfect example of this. For those who haven't been keeping up with all the new tech developments, Apple just recently it was a few w
eeks ago released something called the Apple Vision Pro. It's an augmented reality headset. I didn't buy one myself because it's new tech and I wasn't going to drop $3,500 on it. For the people wondering, Apple charges that because they don't want just anyone buying it. They want the people that are really serious about it so they can figure out, get all the bugs ironed out. It's going to become a lot cheaper over the next few years as they get it refined. But for the time being, it's just reall
y expensive. But I was looking at some of that tech. I've been looking at user reviews and looking at what people are saying. That is going to open up an entirely new world of opportunities. So for example, the way apps are getting developed, if things like augmented reality headsets really start to take off, which there's a pretty good chance that they will, the way app development is done is going to change quite a bit. And what you are eventually going to see is videos on YouTube, for example
, of there's at some point it may be five or 10 years down the road, but where you can have this camera set up where a person can put on an Apple Vision Pro, a normal like a person using a normal screen will be able to watch the video. But if someone has an Apple Vision Pro, let's say you're out in the wilderness, is they can put that on and with camera tech and advancements and all that is they'll be able to look around and see everything as they're watching the video. That's the way things are
eventually going to go. It'd be kind of similar to like virtual reality. If you've ever used a VR headset and you've watched VR videos on YouTube, it's pretty cool if you haven't tried it out. I wouldn't recommend spending money on a VR headset just to do it. But augmented reality, I could see that's going to do something similar. And there's going to be a lot of things coming out that over the next 20 years are going to be things that we would have never thought possible. So that's going to in
crease the gap even further because then the people that want to do this more in like a professional aspect or the people who want to go really deep on this stuff are going to become even further entrenched in and the people that just really want the experience, the only one to experience it. They don't want to have to learn all this stuff. There's going to be sharp growth in people that do that because they're like, well, I'd rather just put on an augmented reality headset and experience what i
t's like to be in this city and drive around or something like that. And this is something that's just an observation coming from me, something that's kind of surprised me a little bit. YouTube is basically replacing TV at this point. And it's TV. The traditional sense of TV is dying off. Now, 45 percent of the people that watch YouTube videos watch from a TV. And so my analytics. So you might think when you watch my videos that people that come to this channel are watching from a desktop becaus
e a lot of the stuff that I do, like setting up a desktop browser, for example, we're setting up Configure Defender on Windows or doing web design. Those are things that typically you would think a person would watch from a desktop and work along as they watch the video. Now, I do have a decent amount of viewers that watch from mobile, but my videos aren't really mobile friendly. I'm not trying to target a crowd that wants to watch from a cell phone because I do a lot of tech stuff. One thing th
at's interesting that people might not consider here, this kind of plays into that, that those verticals that I've been talking about a little over 30 percent of the people that watch my channel watch from a TV. And something that's even more interesting is that mobile obviously has the lowest watch time, probably because a lot of people that watch from a cell phone are just scrolling through shorts and TikToks and all that kind of garbage. So desktop has more watch time. But what has even the g
roup that has even more watch time than desktop is people that watch from a TV. And something that I thought was interesting was, OK, well, just about all the videos that I do on my channel are focused around using a computer in some aspect, like I said, web design, for example. And so the watch time is longer on a TV than it is from a desktop. And there is a considerable amount of people that watch my videos like setting up Configure Defender or setting up a website. And they will watch from a
TV. And I thought and some people might think, well, they're they're probably just have the TV on in the background and then they're working on their computer. And it's like, well, maybe wouldn't really make a whole lot of sense because it'd be easier to have it up on the computer rather than having to pick up a remote and pause it as you're working along stuff. But that like I said, it's just more of a that casual use seems to be growing even further. So just something that I thought would be i
nteresting to throw in there. Generally speaking, the people that use tech, there's two different types of people that use tech. There's people that use tech or they get used by it. So going back to the cell phone example, someone that spends five hours a day on their cell phone and they're watching YouTube shorts and TikTok videos, that's someone that gets used by tech. Then there's the people that use tech that figure out how to make it work for them. So like a home user that is trying to figu
re out the best way to cut as much of the process out and be able to use a computer, do what they want with it. Or someone like, let's say they are trying to figure out how to set up a website and they're trying to figure out a system to be able to add stuff without having to go through this big, long process. So as so for the people that watch these videos and are trying to build tech skills, this is really important. And then the other thing that I'll add, I don't know how this skill seems to
be getting lost with time is there's so there's this thing called Google Fu. And I think this has been a phrase for quite a while now. I don't know like exactly how long. Been around for quite a while, though. This this is heavily underrated. And I'm not talking about just being able to browse through Reddit because a lot of people will just use Reddit to get answers to questions that they have. But there's times that Reddit is not going to give you a good answer or someone's you're just not goi
ng to be able to find that there. You're going to have to dig through other places. Stack overflow, for example. But having Google Fu is really important. So like for those of you that are looking to get into tech. So let me go back to this example here. If you're a power user, being able to use Google is really important to be able to find answers to stuff. By the way, a lot of tech people might not admit this. I will admit this, though. A lot of us will rely somewhat on Google if we don't know
the answer to something. Someone else has very likely already dealt with a problem and we will just go and seek out an answer from them. Sometimes you won't be able to do that and you'll have to work through a problem for hours on end and that sucks. But knowing how to use it is important. If you want to get to this status over here and really learn how to how to troubleshoot and deal with issues, this is where learning how to use Google is like just I can't tell you how important it is to be a
ble to do that kind of stuff. And then we'll just stand it on this real quick. There's just a couple of things in here that I'll point out real quick. And by the way, I know this is from The Verge. Some people might remember their PC building video, which was an absolute disaster, but whatever. I'm just going to point this out real quick. And by the way, I also know that it's a few years old at this point. This is a very common thing, though, for for people that I know some people might not migh
t think, well, there's no way if you're watching this channel, by the way, you are very likely at least a power user because you would not go seek out videos like this if you did not want to learn more about tech. And the people that are willing to learn more about tech in their free time, like I said, it doesn't take much to become a power user these days. But like this right here, so I was talking about a teacher. This is something that I've seen come up on Reddit, quite a bit of people that c
ome into these I.T. Sub reddits, and they'll talk about how they're trying to teach something to a group of people. And they just like they don't know basic computer stuff. But it says so Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they saved their project. Could they be on the desktop or rather? So just start up here, they were all getting the same error message, trying to work on this assignment, saying that the program could not find their files anyway. So she asked,
well, could it be on your your guys desktop, maybe in the shared drive? And she was just met with confusion and people saying things like, well, what are you talking about? Saying not only did they not know where their files were saved, they didn't understand the question. And it says Garland eventually came to the realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years, the concept of file folders and directories, et cetera, et cetera, is just gibberish to modern to a
lot of modern students. And like I said, that is one of the downfalls of making the user experience so smooth is that a lot of people will just they they lose the ability to be able to pick up on some of that nuance. And at this point, basically what it is, the people that really want to get into tech again, it doesn't take much to stand out because a lot of people are just not interested in this. And to end on that real quick, I know the job market for tech right now is it's pretty bad. There'
s just tons of layoffs that are happening. There's tons of people that are losing their jobs. They can't find something. They are just struggling to get through interviews. This is just one of the cycles, unfortunately, that comes through the tech world. We are probably a little ways away from seeing the tide turn and go back. But right now, what you're seeing a lot of is the executives, the suits, all the C-suite executives and these boards laying off people to look good in the short term to tr
y to puff up numbers. But they always sacrifice in the long term and then they have to come back and hire a bunch of people to come in and fix that stuff. So if you're running into issues trying to get into tech right now, just realize it's it's rough out there for a lot of people that are trying to get in. You might have a lot of competition, but also some of your competition is doing some really dumb . So it doesn't take a whole lot to stand out above the crowd these days. Hope you got somethi
ng out of this video for the people that are getting into tech. Hopefully you got some stuff out of it. And if you're not looking to get into tech, hopefully there are some interesting, entertaining stuff in here. Either way, I appreciate support as always. And I will see you next Friday.

Comments

@chrisseal1467

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.

@becktronics

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, YouTube, 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

@SmirkInvestigator

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.

@douwedijkstra4718

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.

@NikolaiCherepanov

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.

@SimGunther

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?

@RainMan52

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

@killingtimeitself

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.

@denizkirbiyik9221

I need to explain what an "operating system" is to my friends 😭

@EricYoungVFX

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.

@jimcabezola3051

(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.

@klingoncowboy4

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.

@zipkitty

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?

@killingtimeitself

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.

@paradoxical21

putting gen z in the title is so insane lol. Gen z is like the most tech literate generation 🤦‍♂️

@user-ec3rm9wr1n

Nah Kan its not worth it anymore...

@krysis6994

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

@ikamyon6

they are as tech illiterate as any other generation, i use arch btw