this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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Yeah IMO not so much shortcuts but file management is often lost on the old and the young.
What is a file. What is a file type. What is file size. Where do files go when you download them. What is your user directory. How do you rename files. What is a file sync app like google drive.
This stuff could save so many people so much time. Every day millions of professionals are emailing clients "Thanks for sending that though, but it looks like you've emailed me a shortcut instead of the actual file."
Gen Z doesn't understand file directories
That article is completely accurate, I see pretty much everybody save their documents on the desktop but if I were to make them find it in the file explorer they wouldn't have a clue where it is. With macbook users they just use the search feature and probably haven't seen a directory in all their lives.
The people at my school call all laptops "chromebooks" or "macbooks" and only do their stuff using the Google web apps (docs, sheets, slides, forms, etc). As a degoogled and pretty savvy individual it kind of hurts my soul as I'm over here using stuff like libreoffice on my Linux machine.
Yep, that's precisly my experience from uni as well. And it wouldn't be a problem if this "alternative mental model" worked for the people applying it. But it doesn't. They keep losing stuff, working on 5 different copies of an essay, not keeping track which one is current; they just add workload to everyone collaborating and then someone has to handle this shit. And who does it? The techy "nerds", such as you or me. The iPhone, iCloud and Google Drive really fucked the people who will have to at some point work professionally with GenZs (speaking this as Gen Z myself)
I got a contract to produce some exhibits for an event at a university. These exhibits included some touch screen information kiosks that would allow guests to find out more about the exhibits. I used some software that was kind of like turbocharged PowerPoint; it could do graphical things on the screen, it could run other applications, running on a Raspberry Pi it could handle the GPIO and blink lights, run motors, whatever.
I built the exhibits themselves and rigged up this framework, a student from the university was assigned to actually generate the content. Each of 4 exhibits was to get 3 or 4 video files each. From this student, I get about 5 emails that each contain two or three video files. There is no coherent naming scheme, "video1.mp4" "hector.mp4" "version 2.mp4"
So I call up this kid and ask her how I'm supposed to know which of these videos goes where in what exhibit. "Watch them and figure it out I guess." Even if I had time for this, which I didn't, that's outside the scope of my contract. YOU organize them into something like "exhibit-1-video3.mp4" and I will put them in the places they're supposed to go.
I feel for the professors that have to deal with the work these kids turn in.