Students are currently arriving at the university without any basic understanding of file hierarchies (folders containing folders and files). And they have no clue what a zip file is. Nor do they know what to do with it.

I used to be able to just say “please download the materials from [learning platform] and organize them so you can work with them before class” and that would be fine. Nowadays I have to give step-by-step instructions that involve things like “create a folder”, “navigate to your download folder” and “cut (ctrl-x) the files and paste (ctrl-v) them into the new folder” unless I want half the students to get lost.

Some don’t even have a concept of downloading a file. They’re so used to streaming and mobile UIs that they seem to think that a downloaded file is simply gone once you close it (and needs to be re-downloaded).

dude we have to do the same shit with people

literally step by step instructions with screenshots and they sometimes still don’t get it, and usually it’s not because the instructions were unclear, they simply did not follow what it clearly said because they fundamentally lack understanding or something I don’t fucking know

I used to think it was an unreasonable challenge just to get people to paste values and not formats in Excel. it seems like that’s going to be even more difficult going forward. I fucking hate it when I’m looking at a table with a half column of cells with a border on the bottom because my dumbass coworker doesn’t give a shit about quality and just dragged the first row cell down. like it takes no extra effort to do it cleanly, that shit pisses me off. and it’s not for lack of knowledge, they’ve been taught this and shown it explicitly and told that it’s the expectation to have cleanly formatted files. I couldn’t imagine handing in work that just had a giant shit stain on the front and thinking that’s okay.

I wonder if it is the IT magic. Recently I needed a group to fill a table with values from a test that produced a radar chart. Click on the point, get a numeric value, not too hard. The only complication was that it was “totally legally disctinct” so translated differently and truncated from the proper test. So I worked out translations and a table in order.

My instructions was that you start at 9 o’clock and fill in the table clockwise.

Cue constant question regarding translations and where whatever value should go, while I had done the work and all they needed to do was follow a simple instruction to fill it out as directed. I did that work for them, I don’t even remember, that’s why you should follow the simple instruction.

Group of all ages, most