This born in '69 53 year old right here is programming backends and frontends for websites, and PySide5/6 Qt5/6 applications.
I'm still sharp as a pin.
Like you say, there has to be some point at which those younger than I stop thinking someone in their 50's isn't as hopeless with technology as they assume.
Of course not everyone in my Gen X'er group will be like me, then again, I know of folks in their 20's who struggle with anything IT.
Quit with the ageism, people. It's getting old ;)
Some old people know a thing or two.
Your stepdad sounds awesome :)
They didn’t get it. My mum is super smart and prolific. She has a PhD in international development and has helped tens of thousands of disadvantaged kids go to school.
It’s not that she’s not smart enough. She just doesn’t care about the technology. She’s not going to spontaneously get comfortable with the terminal and learn rsync. But she can install Dropbox no problem. If a kindle just works and has all the books in easy reach, that’s what I’ll recommend to her. She’s too busy to bother with software that’s not user friendly.
That’s not ageism. I think about her a lot when I build software because I respect her. She deserves to spend her day thinking about her job, not thinking about stupid tech problems.
It looks and acts like it was designed/coded by idiots; additional popups to remind me to rate the app (already did and it was very negative!), a popup with an "okay, got it" prompt - the only prompt - which instead of setting that yes, I actually did get it, just pops up again the next time reminding me to use some feature I don't want to use.
And so on.
That's obviously the fault of the people involved in vomiting out the abysmal application(s).
But yes I agree, most people simply don't care about the technology, they just want a Thing to do the thing they want it to do, no muss no fuss. This situation has always been the case and I can't envisage a time when it will change.
DRM free content consumed legally or illegally on the same device is simple as netflix.
But in answer to your question, I suspect the cliche will slowly die out when most of the 60/70/80 year olds we meet are tech savvy.
- Your first computer given to you was probably a Chromebook at school. It is your browser. Every app is a web page. Docs, Sheets are all web pages. If you were rich or privileged you might have gotten a Macbook at school instead. But nearly everything is a web page. You use Google Docs with your friends and for group projects. I can count the people that had desktop versions of Word or Excel on one hand. You upload your videos to YouTube, presentations to Canvas or Google Drive, you don't bring in a flash drive. If you plug in a flash drive it might just show up as "External Storage (128 GB)" and not /sdcard or /media/USB0 or whatever. Even then, you don't really folder it up. You might use it to copy one file or a ton of images from one thing to another, then you format it when you're done. You don't just keep one around to build stuff up on, why bother, it's on The Cloud.
- You grow up with no hierarchical file organization. Imagine mobile. You have a "Pictures" tab I guess, and a "Downloads" tab? What else is there? You don't have album folders with FLAC files or anything; all your music streams, all your content streams, none of the apps that serve that content allow you to download them into the filesystem, if anything they do their best to prevent that. You don't have a filesystem path on iPhone. You have maybe tags and categories on Google Drive and you don't keep anything on it other than Sheets and Docs stuff that is listed by name, sorted by recent usage, and do not physically exist as files on the filesystem. Tap to select by thumbnail and Most Recent do an insane amount of work to hide what a folder is, nearly nothing but F/OSS f-droid apps on Android will expose things like /sdcard/Something or /sdcard0/emulated/Downloads. You get a selector of thumbnails.
- Mobile is first, always. Phones are cheaper than computers. Every kid has a phone, whether it's for legitimate use or for parents to abusively track them and monitor and record everything they do. Internet is always just kind of around you in the air, magically. You've never really had to think about how continents were connected, there never was a time in your life where the internet wasn't just magically all around you apart from during no signal areas. If you go to a location you ask for the wifi login. You don't ask where you plug in your ethernet cable. When you sign up for internet, unless you are specifically an enthusiast, your ISP gives you mesh wifi pods/gateway/whatever as the default. When you travel, hotel, coffeeshop, class, library, you get a wifi login. If you don't have wifi you use your phone or tether your laptop to your phone wifi.
- Rarely have a printer. If you print in class you weren't allowed to resolve paper jams yourself, and pro-tier laser printers almost never jammed even if you were doing 50+ pages at a time. When was the last time I had to print something? Your presentations are on Google Classroom/Google Drive/etc. Your homework is turned in online. Your concert tickets are on your phone with a moving barcode to prevent screenshotting (hope you have mobile service and it isn't too contended). Amazon returns are just dropped off and show them QR code, you don't print a label and they actively discourage you from choosing an option where you have to print a label.
You have to very actively seek out these things and want to learn, you can't passively pick it up like presumably in the past you had to tinker at least a little - tablets and phones are meant to force you to shut up and consume, not know about it. Chromebooks are intentionally locked down as hard as possible. Every app you use is probably a web page or a web page in a CEF wrapper.
For a long time now, they don't want typed and printed assignments; in fact some of my instructors in primary school would actually look upon these suspiciously - the default assumption is that if you are printing it out you are trying to bypass the anti-plagiarism system. That's also partially why every assignment is turned in online: your writing is run through one or more anti-plagiarism systems (and saved for later use against yourself and others).
Nowadays the most common use for my printer at home is making Amazon return labels.
It sounds like you're the person who could be the one to teach them this stuff, is that not an option?
Most younger people are also really bad at using computers.
No, not because they're ruined by smartphones—because most people seem to find most current operating systems and computer systems in general unintuitive and hard to understand. They always have and seemingly always will, unless/until UIs and core metaphors in computer interfaces change significantly.
The typical experience of most non-nerds using a computer, no matter their age, is repeating some steps they memorized and hoping the right thing happens. They don't make connections between functionality (say, thinking to try copy-pasting a file, not just selected text), they don't experiment because it usually gets them in some state they don't know how to get out of without help, and any change to UI layout or any kind of pop-up notification confuses the hell out of them. Desktop computers are mysterious, frustrating things. Observe some workers in a non-tech office using their work computers for a while and you'll see what I mean.
Bill Gates is 66
Jeff Bezos is 58
I think they're doing ok.
As an aside, I work with many folks around 50 and most of them are functionally technologically illiterate. It doesn't seem like such a strange assumption to make from where I'm sitting.
If you're talking old enough to be, say, a college student's grandma, then obviously your 70-90 estimate is much more likely.
(Bigger picture: I've been professionally programming for three-and-a-half decades. I find myself more and more annoyed by the user-unfriendliness of tech as I age. As an on-topic example, earlier this month Amazon's mail-to-Kindle feature rejected an EPUB I sent it, and when I used Calibre to convert it to MOBI and sent that instead, lectured me that MOBI was obsolete. I guess this is especially annoying because it seems like they're replacing a service which basically never failed with one that is failing like 10% of the time I try to use it...)
To a reasonable approximation:
- Grandmothers of infants are between the ages of 40 and 80
- Grandmothers of HN commenters are between the ages of 55 and (dead for decades)
Most people of all ages are functionally technologically illiterate.
Many people around 50 are functionally literate in different technologies than you are. Those may be less relevant, or merely invisible to you as a user.
Honestly the grandma example is starting to feel dated. When I was born in 1980 a 50 year old grandma was born in 1930 and probably didn't own a TV until they were raising their own family.
The same 50 year old today was born in 1972 and would have been 5 when the Apple II hit the scene. At what point do we realize that eventually old folks will be those that only grew up with iphones and stop assuming that anyone with grey hear needs to be assumed to be technically incompetent.