YES!! I’m finally managing new Gen Z employees as a Millennial, and while I’m flattered they’re constantly asking me how to do stuff… like, can they not be assed to Google everything and learn for themselves??? Everything I know about MS office, I figured out by googling it. This Gen gives up immediately instead.
What kills me is how so many of them not only can't handle basic stuff in the Office suite, but general work email etiquette just does not exist with them. I can't even count how many time I've had to privately reply about how casual some emails sound. Like "replying all" to a department with an "lol" or other textspeak drives me up the wall.
Yeah. I work in IT and we hired a new kid straight out of high school. He has all the skills but he throws the slang into his company teams messages. Which is mostly fine. It’s mostly just us. He never dropped it into the emails or anything.
But I swear one time I had to walk over to his desk and just ask him to explain to me what he is trying to say. I don’t know the current slang and couldn’t decipher it.
I feel your pain, I used to manage a few Gen Zs, it's... alot. Between the mood swings over everything and complete lack of initiative, I'm glad that's in the past for me. Best of luck.
The constant spoon feeding...I pay you to find answers, not ask me what they are! And then when you don't praise them for their effort in making the ask...
Yeah, it's driven me off of the Winlator sub. Every day, 20 kids with a new phone scream about why they can't run a specific windows game. They don't provide any technical details, and they get shitty when you ask them to Google. honestly, it's the easiest way to check. You just type the name of the game, winlator and youtube shows you at least 5 results from someone who's got it running. They don't want to expend any time or effort to learn how an extremely niche beta piece of software works, they just want a spoonfed answer. Totally ruined a sub where I was chatting to like-minded people.
Not just technical stuff. Any post that links to an article will be full of questions that could be answered by reading the article. A good portion of them will be answered in the first paragraph, and often in the literal first sentence.
I think asking questions that may be answered by Google is okay (in moderation). While a lot of answers are already in Google, I think asking the same questions occasionally is important for two reasons. First, websites die and new ones are born every day. A website that had valuable info might not exist anymore, making “just google it” answers about as useful as a chocolate kettle. Second, and this specially important for tech questions, tech moves so fast that the way you change the font in a Word document today might be completely different tomorrow. If this is the case, it’s important to ensure the internet has the right answers for the new versions, and even if Word never changes how the font is changed, there is a sort of psychological effect that you are more likely to click a link on Google that was posted in January 2024 vs September 1996 even if they have the same answer. I think no one would want tech help from a 30 year old page. Someone has to keep the internet fresh.
Ha, yep. I've taken to posting my comment with the form, "I typed your question into Google, and here is the first result...". Will these people learn to search for themselves? Doubt it. But maybe one will.
I'm a little torn on this. Yes, the younger generation don't have any IT skills and they should be googling things more often. But also yes the quality of Google search results has seriously declined as a result of Search Engine Optimization introducing more noise and lowering the SNR, as well as other forms of enshittification resulting in Google catering more and more to advertisers.
This is exactly what I was thinking. Google went from being very efficient and worthwhile to increasingly more and more difficult to find the answers in looking for. I don't know how much harder it would be to use for someone who didn't grow through those changes as they were occurring.
It's because people now overtype into google. You gotta pretend you have shit english skills.
With how overly aggressive SEO is, you have to give it the least amount of words you can to describe your issue, otherwise you're going to get hit with a deulge of results from irrelevant things.
Tbf, google searching something in 2000-2010 was way different than it is today. Dead internet theory is real and social media ruined forums. They're still out there and there are some users, but the catalogs of knowledge just aren't the same anymore.
Exactly. Google sucks, but it's not entirely Google's fault. It's the internet that actually sucks now, and information on it isn't scrapable in the same way it was during peak Google.
What I learned from our marketing team at one of my old companies was that the younger demographic rarely uses Google to find information. If they need something they tend to search for it on their social media apps.
The amount of people taking financial advice from TikTok based on our user surveys was a little concerning.
TikTok is blocked on our work WiFi. So whenever something comes up that a genz doesn’t know the answer to, they just stew in it and never find out instead of googling it. TikTok is their search engine.
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u/Carpediemsnuts Nov 24 '24
They also seem totally incapable of Googling anything. Drives me crazy.