this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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i've supported end users in homes and small business for over twenty years. yup. for the most part, they're dumb as bricks. they can do the things they've learned through repetition or have been taught to them (often repeatedly), but stray off that well-worn path and they're completely clueless. when i ask them to look at the icons next to the clock on their desktop--a full half don't even know where the clock is on the screen, even though it's there, like, all the time. and if i gave each of them a blank pc and a bootable usb with (any) os installer, i'd guess that maybe 1 out of 50 could get it booted up and installed--and that'd only be if the pc auto-booted to that usb and started the installer after seeing no boot files on the internal storage.
Oh, absolutely. My favorite conversation to have with non-techies is
"It doesn't work."
"OK, what does it say on the screen."
"I don't know."
Like, they can read. I've seen them read. But the moment they get something on the screen with text they haven't seen before they freeze. And even if they can read the plainly written text saying stuff like "hey, we need to install something, is that fine?" they can't parse what is being said. Half the requests from help I get from people are about them getting a prompt to update something that needs manual permission and them being too insecure and scared to know what they should do.
So yeah, the bar is much lower than people think. As in, the question "Do you want to do this thing you have to do and is fine to do? Yes/No" is an unsurmountable obstacle.
And lest you think this is just end users and non-tech people: I have gotten the same sort of responses from system admins for major companies when I try to walk them through something.
I’d argue that most people, including the ones who administer systems, don’t know how computers work. They’ve learned some things by rote, sure, but beyond that they’re helpless.
Oh, but we haven't talked about the opposite thing, which is when tech-savvy user X thinks they know better than whichever IT person or team set up a process and decide to ignore it or bypass it and then they break something and nobody's happy.
I see your point, though. I mean, even if you know what you're doing there are many times where you just need to get a thing done and you just want somebody to make it so the computer does the thing, rather than understand how the thing-doing is done. We forget, but computers are actually super hard and software is overcomplicated and it's honestly a miracle most of it works at all most of the time.
The folks who know enough to know they need processes aren't the problem. If you give them instructions they'll follow them and things will be okay.
It's the folks who don't know that they need processes who are the problem. The folks who, after having walked them through something ten times, ask you to do it. They see an error message like "TCP connection timeout" and have no idea where to start looking, except to send me an email so I can tell them that they probably have network issues.
I agree: The fact that it works at all is astounding.
I find this so frustrating. It's willful ignorance at that point. They get a message and just refuse to read it
It's not, though. Some of the people I'm talking about are experts at intricate, complicated things. But for digital natives and tech-heads this language is second nature, that's not true of everybody. And for some of those people they know enough to realize that sometimes computers lie to them. Is this message telling me to press a button real or is it malicious? Yeah, I can tell pretty easily, but they can't.
There are tons of people out there, of all ages, for whom computers are scary bombs that can steal their money or their data or stop working at the slightest provocation. Thing is, they're not wrong.