You make it sound like all older people knew. I work in IT and most users, regardless of age, do not know anything about computers. They don’t know how to navigate file systems, they don’t know where they saved anything, they don’t even know what the recycle bin is sometimes.
I once had a user plug a power strip into itself and then didn’t understand why there was no power.
Hell, they don’t even know how to read. I lost track of how many times I had this conversation:
This was painful to read. I’m a developer and have colleagues who can’t read. “It failed! It says that I need to clear all changes before I can branch, how can I fix this?” “Well clear the changes and then branch”. It’s just learnes helplessness, people want to sit back and let someone else do the thinking.
I work in IT, and nothing against you, but a bunch of devs do write horrible, useless error messages. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an error message that just says “an error has occurred” and you’re left to figure out what error.
For example, I have a smart air purifier that absolutely refuses to connect to my WiFi for some reason. You have to do the stupid ad-hoc/direct connection from your phone’s app to the device, then the device connects to WiFi. I follow all the steps on the app, it fails and then just says " an error has occurred, please try again.", it worked fine on my parents WiFi though!
I have a Canon printer that is WiFi enabled (also has USB) and it’s the same thing. I tried using their damn app on Android, OS X, Linux, and Windows and it would just be like “An error has occurred”.
I work in IT, and nothing against you, but a bunch of devs do write horrible, useless error messages. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an error message that just says “an error has occurred” and you’re left to figure out what error.
If the error message is that stupid, I’m 100% with you. I suspect that’s the result of a direct instruction to developers to dumb down the messages to avoid creating distress in users, which is idiotic.
However, final users in a corporate environment should be taught that if they get a message with a lot of information, and they don’t understand that information, it’s not for them, and they need to leave it alone or take precise notes of what the message says, so somebody from IT who does understand it can act on it. But most users act like the error message is radioactive or they’re participating in a competition of who can dismiss the message faster: when support asks about the error, they say hey don’t know because they have dismissed it.
Almost every finished product I’ve seen has a generic error message like that which makes it extremely frustrating when you’re technical and actually want to attempt to fix the problem. I had the same issue with a WiFi connected Canon printer. As a dev myself, I know how difficult it can be to write a useful error message for every edge case, but it’s not that difficult to be a bit helpful lol
Regarding users hatred of error messages: when I worked in my University’s computer lab about 15 years ago a student complained that she couldn’t download a file. I went with her to see what the issue was and had her show me what she was doing. She’d attempt to download the file, quickly dismiss a pop-up, and then angrily say “see?! It’s not working!!”. I told her to do it again, but not dismiss the pop-up so quickly so I could see what it said. Of course, it was asking for permission to save the file to the HDD and she kept clicking “no” 🤦♂️
I told her to do it again, but not dismiss the pop-up so quickly so I could see what it said.
I shit you not, I’ve had a user do worse.
I’ve done the same exact scenario as you with one difference. I told her the same thing you did. And then. She closed the message again. While I was pointing at it, and asking her to read it out loud.
I.
Pointed. At the screen. And said read this out loud.
Or for some, like my mom, it’s learned helplessness. She always misplaces her phone and keys (not because of dementia or something like that, just lack of attention) so my brother bought her one the Bluetooth tracking tags (air tags, but for Android). Since I work in tech, I’m always the one to set everything up. She said “Set it up for me, I don’t wanna know how to use it…” as if it required zero user input after I had set it up 🤦♂️ I just looked at her and said "… if you lose you keys and need to track them down, how do you expect to find them?!”
She has helped me out with stuff (school wise, life wise, financially, etc…) more times than I can count so I seem and feel like an ungrateful asshole if I just flat out say that.
You’re in the same boat I am. I’m doing IT support and one user couldn’t navigate their file system to save their life. They almost exclusively used “file open” dialogs to get to their files. They seemed to have zero understanding that using word’s open file dialog to open a PDF file with Adobe, was strange.
It broke my brain for a minute watching it all unfold. So much so that I didn’t even try to correct their methods. I was just like, “okay”, and moved on.
It’s not like the person was new, or a temp worker or anything. They were middle aged, and had used that exact system for years in this manner, and saw nothing wrong with how they did things… Look, if it gets the job done, okay, and that’s probably the main reason I shut up about it, but the way they were doing it was so backwards and slow… They definitely were not stupid, they at least had some level of university and they were working in a legal field. They just did not “get” that there’s a much better way to accomplish the tasks they were doing and had no interest in figuring it out more than they already had.
Definitely one of the more painful moments of my career, but certainly not the only demonstration of how people are willfully ignorant when it comes to computers and technology.
I hate hearing “I don’t know computers” or “I’m not very good with technology” … You use it every day. There’s some fundamental that you should have picked up by now. Being “bad” with technology is not an excuse. An infant is bad at walking, then they learn and figure it out, which is more than I can say about you Janice.
Well, my computer knowledge extends back to some form of MS-DOS when I was 4 years old. Back then, you either knew how to operate a command line interface or you didn’t know how to actually use a computer to do anything on your own.
Now the entire world uses computers for almost every single job. And yet, we live in a time where people are not proficient with the tools they are using to live and work.
If your mechanic said, “I’m not much of a wrench person” you’d take your car elsewhere.
If your typical office worker said, “I’m not much of a computer person” , 90% of their colleagues would nod, grin, and say “I know right! Computers are so dumb! So hard to use!”
You make it sound like all older people knew. I work in IT and most users, regardless of age, do not know anything about computers. They don’t know how to navigate file systems, they don’t know where they saved anything, they don’t even know what the recycle bin is sometimes.
I once had a user plug a power strip into itself and then didn’t understand why there was no power.
Hell, they don’t even know how to read. I lost track of how many times I had this conversation:
“There’s an error message on my screen.”
“What does it say?”
“I don’t know.”
This was painful to read. I’m a developer and have colleagues who can’t read. “It failed! It says that I need to clear all changes before I can branch, how can I fix this?” “Well clear the changes and then branch”. It’s just learnes helplessness, people want to sit back and let someone else do the thinking.
I work in IT, and nothing against you, but a bunch of devs do write horrible, useless error messages. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an error message that just says “an error has occurred” and you’re left to figure out what error.
For example, I have a smart air purifier that absolutely refuses to connect to my WiFi for some reason. You have to do the stupid ad-hoc/direct connection from your phone’s app to the device, then the device connects to WiFi. I follow all the steps on the app, it fails and then just says " an error has occurred, please try again.", it worked fine on my parents WiFi though!
I have a Canon printer that is WiFi enabled (also has USB) and it’s the same thing. I tried using their damn app on Android, OS X, Linux, and Windows and it would just be like “An error has occurred”.
If the error message is that stupid, I’m 100% with you. I suspect that’s the result of a direct instruction to developers to dumb down the messages to avoid creating distress in users, which is idiotic.
However, final users in a corporate environment should be taught that if they get a message with a lot of information, and they don’t understand that information, it’s not for them, and they need to leave it alone or take precise notes of what the message says, so somebody from IT who does understand it can act on it. But most users act like the error message is radioactive or they’re participating in a competition of who can dismiss the message faster: when support asks about the error, they say hey don’t know because they have dismissed it.
Almost every finished product I’ve seen has a generic error message like that which makes it extremely frustrating when you’re technical and actually want to attempt to fix the problem. I had the same issue with a WiFi connected Canon printer. As a dev myself, I know how difficult it can be to write a useful error message for every edge case, but it’s not that difficult to be a bit helpful lol
Regarding users hatred of error messages: when I worked in my University’s computer lab about 15 years ago a student complained that she couldn’t download a file. I went with her to see what the issue was and had her show me what she was doing. She’d attempt to download the file, quickly dismiss a pop-up, and then angrily say “see?! It’s not working!!”. I told her to do it again, but not dismiss the pop-up so quickly so I could see what it said. Of course, it was asking for permission to save the file to the HDD and she kept clicking “no” 🤦♂️
I shit you not, I’ve had a user do worse.
I’ve done the same exact scenario as you with one difference. I told her the same thing you did. And then. She closed the message again. While I was pointing at it, and asking her to read it out loud.
I.
Pointed. At the screen. And said read this out loud.
She moved her mouse to my finger.
And closed the message.
I.
Can’t.
Hahaha for some people it’s just a habit I guess.
Or for some, like my mom, it’s learned helplessness. She always misplaces her phone and keys (not because of dementia or something like that, just lack of attention) so my brother bought her one the Bluetooth tracking tags (air tags, but for Android). Since I work in tech, I’m always the one to set everything up. She said “Set it up for me, I don’t wanna know how to use it…” as if it required zero user input after I had set it up 🤦♂️ I just looked at her and said "… if you lose you keys and need to track them down, how do you expect to find them?!”
The only proper answer to this is Then I won’t do it. We’re done. Don’t ask me again.
She has helped me out with stuff (school wise, life wise, financially, etc…) more times than I can count so I seem and feel like an ungrateful asshole if I just flat out say that.
You’re in the same boat I am. I’m doing IT support and one user couldn’t navigate their file system to save their life. They almost exclusively used “file open” dialogs to get to their files. They seemed to have zero understanding that using word’s open file dialog to open a PDF file with Adobe, was strange.
It broke my brain for a minute watching it all unfold. So much so that I didn’t even try to correct their methods. I was just like, “okay”, and moved on.
It’s not like the person was new, or a temp worker or anything. They were middle aged, and had used that exact system for years in this manner, and saw nothing wrong with how they did things… Look, if it gets the job done, okay, and that’s probably the main reason I shut up about it, but the way they were doing it was so backwards and slow… They definitely were not stupid, they at least had some level of university and they were working in a legal field. They just did not “get” that there’s a much better way to accomplish the tasks they were doing and had no interest in figuring it out more than they already had.
Definitely one of the more painful moments of my career, but certainly not the only demonstration of how people are willfully ignorant when it comes to computers and technology.
I hate hearing “I don’t know computers” or “I’m not very good with technology” … You use it every day. There’s some fundamental that you should have picked up by now. Being “bad” with technology is not an excuse. An infant is bad at walking, then they learn and figure it out, which is more than I can say about you Janice.
“I just clicked it off. But I need this to work, I’m late on my project. Can’t you just fix it without asking me all this technical stuff?”
that’s a thing we see with gen z especially nowadays, because of the advent of tag-based file management in iOS.
To be fair, there has been people unable to navigate file systems at all times.
Well, my computer knowledge extends back to some form of MS-DOS when I was 4 years old. Back then, you either knew how to operate a command line interface or you didn’t know how to actually use a computer to do anything on your own.
Now the entire world uses computers for almost every single job. And yet, we live in a time where people are not proficient with the tools they are using to live and work.
If your mechanic said, “I’m not much of a wrench person” you’d take your car elsewhere.
If your typical office worker said, “I’m not much of a computer person” , 90% of their colleagues would nod, grin, and say “I know right! Computers are so dumb! So hard to use!”