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Older Workers Are Better At Adapting To New Technology, Study Finds (cio.com)
"Don't let the millennial buzz fool you. Older workers handle and adapt to new systems better than younger people," writes CIO magazine. Slashdot reader itwbennett writes: A survey by London-based market research firm Ipsos Mori, sponsored by Dropbox, found that older workers are less likely to find using technology in the workplace stressful and experience less trouble working with multiple devices than the younger cohort.
Millennials "are used to using tech in their personal lives that's pretty darn good," suggests one Dropbox executive, "and that raises the expectations of what tech can be in their professional lives... So younger people will feel frustration at tools that are not up to snuff." Out of 4,000 information workers who were surveyed in the U.S. and Europe, 37% of the 18-34-year-old group reported trouble with multiple devices, compared to just 13% of respondents over 55.
Millennials "are used to using tech in their personal lives that's pretty darn good," suggests one Dropbox executive, "and that raises the expectations of what tech can be in their professional lives... So younger people will feel frustration at tools that are not up to snuff." Out of 4,000 information workers who were surveyed in the U.S. and Europe, 37% of the 18-34-year-old group reported trouble with multiple devices, compared to just 13% of respondents over 55.
Any "interpretation" of the results is coming from some high-up blowhard at Dropbox, who likely pulled it from his nether regions.
My experience has been that some people are more adaptable than others, and that spans generational lines. But younger people are less likely to have a mental block simply because some new task just happens to involve a computer.
#DeleteChrome
My dad's generation had computers, telephones, and lots more that previous generations didn't - he bought our ZX Spectrum for us.
However, my grandfather was baffled by car seatbelts, anything no wired to a wall, and changing the channel on the television
It's no surprise now that, compared to twenty years ago, the older generations are better with technology. It's not their father's generation, who struggled to keep up, they grew up with all this stuff.
As we go on, the next generation are growing up being taught on iPads, with Kindles in libraries (what are those places?!), mobile phones from the day they are old enough. They won't have trouble adapting.
I call it the "old-people's home" fallacy. My grandmother would have been quite happy playing bingo for the rest of her existence once she retired. But I'm going to need a full-on Internet connection, a bunch of freedom and technology, to operate into my old age. There's no way I'm going to end up in a corner, dribbling, and watching Match of the Day, and it's not even a personality thing.
But are old-people's homes of today actually taking account of that? Not that I've seen. There are 60, 70, 80 years olds out there that are tech literate, can shop online, watch iPlayer, and all the other stuff we younger people do, because they were pioneers and that's stayed with them into old age and now they are the ones being put into homes that still cater only for a previous generation.
Time's change. I have no idea about allotment gardening or crochet or mending mechanical machines. Previous generations did but can't operate a mobile phone. As we go further on, the newer generations will be VR-addicts or whatever and they'll be surveys saying that not enough old people are getting the benefits of VR-space and still cling to their old WWW ways.
First is the data: older workers are better at adapting to new technology.
Second is the guesswork: "Millennials "are used to using tech in their personal lives that's pretty darn good," suggests one Dropbox executive, "and that raises the expectations of what tech can be in their professional lives... So younger people will feel frustration at tools that are not up to snuff."
"one Dropbox executive"...
Never spent a second thinking that it might be that older workers are more patient. Or older workers are more focused. I wouldn't be surprised if older workers could also do a better job than "one Dropbox executive".
You are welcome on my lawn.
We were better than our parents, who couldn't fix the flashing 12:00 on the VCR. Our cohort (plus those within 10 years of our age range) went from dealing with BASIC on Apple II, ZX Spectrum, QuickBasic, etc., DOS, earlier versions of UNIX, all the Windows-es, etc. all the way to the abomination that is Windows 8.
To play Doom, I had to download 6 ZIP files over a 2400 baud modem for a week, unpack everything, and learn how to hack the Config.sys file on my 4 MB DOS machine to free up just the right amount of the right type of memory.
When I bought my first scanner, it took 2 days of resolving IRQ conflicts by flipping DIP switches whose meanings I did not understand at the time to make sure it didn't conflict with my sound card.
Mice required their own drivers.
The current generation is just as smart as we are, if not more so. But they always had UIs that made sense. They did not live through an entire 2 decade long information technology revolution. It shouldn't come as a surprise that they are surprised by alien (and to them, non-sensical and inconsistent) interfaces developed for a captive audience.
Add to this that enterprise software is always purchased during golf games by people who will never use it, and you have a world in which our skills of adapting to horrible and inconsistent interfaces are still useful.
I will now press Alt-H to disconnect :)
Things haven't changed nearly as much in the past twenty years as they did the twenty years before that. Of course they can't work with change because they haven't had to.
Most 20 somethings are really good at using their phones, but most have no idea how it works - nor should they have to. People keep calling them 'tech savvy' but it's really a bad phrase. They're highly effective app USERS. You do have those who are really brilliant and actually tech savvy and build their own devices from scratch, but they chose it, or it chose them.
On the other hand, if you grew up with Windows then you either developed some problem solving skills or you were completely baffled all the time - the learned helplessness people. Macs were only relatively better because they narrowed the amount of things that could go wrong by reducing your choices, but there was still plenty that could go wrong. In my office, for instance, you have highly nerdy types of all ages (19 to 62) who have no problem with dealing with anything. On the other hand, outside that group the device problem solving skills seem strongest in the 40 year olds.
So yes, we grew up with shitty tech and because of that when something goes wrong those who learned to deal with it go into problem solving mode instead of bafflement mode.
Getting off track here, but tech problem solvers are really easy to spot - step 1: try it again paying closer attention, step 2: check the options (or man), step 3: [search engine of your choice] it. That solves 99.9% of all issues, and anyone who's actually tech savvy knows those, so I can categorize people pretty fast that way.
TFA doesn't present any evidence that millennials are better or worse than oldsters at adapting to tech. It is just that they self-report having more problems. So an obvious alternative hypothesis is that millennials just complain about things more.