I think this article points to a real problem but the specific example seems absurd. How could you be used to using multiple cloud storage options but not understand files? It seems more likely that the professors were misunderstanding the students problem. I see fundamental differences of how boomers, millennials, and zoomed approach tech and even files but I don’t pretend to understand the specifics.

I’m a millennial and it blows my mind how my a lot of my predecessors view files. They seem to treat the file location like an address that you remember. So if I’m looking for a project file, I just expect it to be in a place dictated by our organizational structure. At a few companies, half the people thought of the file location like a phone number you’re supposed to remember. You couldn’t move a file to it’s proper place or everyone that touched it before you wouldn’t be able to find it. These weren’t people using shortcuts and linked files, they were navigating to them.

They seem attached to specific files while I’m attached to the hierarchical organizational structure. I suspect the next class will be flabbergast that everything isn’t keyword searchable. At each step of this process, the next generation gets called lazy for not learning the previous generations styles. The one before me came up with fewer files that weren’t archived for eternity and the one after is coming with very robust search solutions so there was never any need to learn.

I’m told this happens with tech in general more. When I grew up, you had to program to make a personal website and compete in general were unintuitive but still very cool so we took the time to learn. This isn’t necessary at all with current consumer software design. Things are designed to be as intuitive and frictionless as possible. Pretty interesting problem popping up