Anyone here work with Zoomers? Junior devs? Marketing interns? junior BDRs? Even retail associates? There is a SEVERE drop in skillset, a significant gap in simply being able to work.
This isn’t “old guy who doesn’t want to or is a shitty trainer” talking - we’re talking missing fundamental skills of being able to perform tasks. Some used to say the “Gen Z stare” was just the same as an “ok boomer” eye roll, but I’m pretty sure that blank look is indicating there isn’t a whole lot going on behind those eyes, after watching them at work/in workplaces…
about the dystopia… if you heard how excitedly the ayn rand worshiping 0.5% talk about Snowcrash, you’d want to throw bricks through their Cybertrucks too. They want to bring it about, to make the stratification permanent in irreversible ways.
Hi, I’d figure i add some fuel to the fire from a patreon discord perspective. So why was it that making certain channels age gated important. From my understanding once age gated there are certain thing discord wont get mad at you for thus ending in a discord ban. Making it not age gated, sure bypasses the verification but leaves the server owner open to having everything nuked becasue scripts or links to videos werent in a age gated channel. I have already went through it with patreon, subcribestar is awful at getting back to people and now this.
This always is an equal ratio to the quality required.
When you needed skilled people to build something, there were more of them, and the payment was generaly higher. But as a result its higher quality.
Obsolete skills do slowly get purged away, and the remainders are usualy filled by either the older people who are too lazy to study for something new (cant disagree with those). Or young people that just want a simple job to get some money.
If this balance isnt there, its either because there are just not enough people skilled enough, pushing the costs upward, or its because it recently got obsolete. You notice this with a lot of jobs that computers are able to do.
And even google faced this. Their search count went significantly down because of chatgpt. Because classic searches are far less needed now. You ask the AI for the rough idea, you get a usualy decent answer, but if you want to be sure or need more, you do the classic search.
(on that, google did help it by making their search result a huge bloated mess of advertised links)
Google is now desperately trying to fix this by going into the AI bandwagon (and tbh, what they do here is very logical for their business - hence i dont see them collapse when the bubble would collapse)
But yeah, this happens at any market, any agraric thing that became doable through a machine, has been replaced by a machine. Humans instead are now using those machines and learning how to use those instead.
This felt very natural, because the production just increased a lot, while prices dropped a bit. But because it became cheaper, they sold more. Its a cycle that is natural and healthy.
The reason i say idiocracy and dystopian, is because there is a big chance that at some point humans are not needed to run an entire factory. With future AI, you can easily get a group of 100 people to make enough video content for a 24/7 stream for most major preferences of people. Those 100 people therefor can do the job that now would still require over 10000 people at the same quality level
Do note, future can mean 100+ years here
However, once that point is reached, people are very likely going to become more critical about what they want, and humans being humans, that will change. But as a result, you can get the situation in which more people are needed to refine the generated content.
So even there, jobs can still be generated. But the problem remains: those people are very likely possible to be replaced by an AI that becomes even better at understanding it.
Its a cycle. So dont blame the unskilled for being lazy. Society simply doesnt demand more from them, so they dont.
I’m talking about things like “write legibly”, “add and subtract for change at register”, “approach and greet a customer”, write a coherent reply to an email, pick up a phone and answer, fill in an expense report… and workplace functions like “report to a supervisor”, be accountable for workload in a project, ask when you don’t understand, seek help from a senior/advisor, and interact with workplace peers in the setting.
Soft skills. The machines don’t always work the way they should - and human error comes in as well. Like the checkout register… “Oh, wait, I have a quarter” after they punched in $21.00 for a $20.25 purchase shouldn’t trigger a 3 minute panic and require a calculator or voiding a transaction. While this isn’t exclusive to Z, it’s been a noticeable increase over time.
Yes, progress happens. A huge part of my work (retail/wholesale consultant) involves dragging business owners, buyers, and managers into the current year and current technology (or “machine”) options. Updating or even implementing a CIMS to work with industry B2B software, mobile checkouts, new POS, training everyone how to use… in addition to training associates on product F&Bs in-location, generating fill-ins from cycle counts onto preset report templates. In the last 3 years I’ve had to shift to first-week basics, from discussing features and benefits of specific products. Last Q3, I gave exactly 3 F&B clinics across 120 accounts… the other 117 were absolute entry level, “how to talk to strangers walking into the store”. This? This is a soft skill that shouldn’t have to be - and hardly ever was - trained.
There is a very severe skill gap going on, and the newest generation of entrants into workplaces are the most obvious targets, sure… but this alarm is far more widespread than a single, slightyl jaded late-40’s ops consultant’s perspective. And not all workplaces can make the kinds of adjustments to suit the new gen’s “needs”, especially when the younger new hires are <20% of the staff churn. What are you doing in a customer-facing job if you can’t talk to a customer?! Calls and in-person clients aren’t all going to possess the SEL skills and emotional intelligence to cater to some of this crowd - just Friday I had an account with an associate walk off the job because a Karen raised their voice, and the supervisor stepping in to run interference and de-escalate wasn’t enough. Another account: the buyer interrupted our meeting because the associate on duty “doesn’t answer the phone”. Because they’re busy? No… They are too afraid of making a mistake on the phone that they just don’t answer it. Not because the manager or owner will reprimand them, or there’s some weird culture that punishes minor mistakes… this isn’t Uline…
The other issues go on. While I firmly believe a business should be accommodating and accessible as they possibly can to new hires and newcomers, there absolutely has to be a midpoint where the employee comes to meet the business’s needs too. But the larger picture of late stage capitalism is working against both ends here, and as much as the issues I identified above are along generational lines (in no small part due to the timing of a global pandemic more than any failing in education or by businesses in training), they are also indicating a very alarming systemic failure that has the potential to decimate small businesses and homogenize marketplaces into functional monopolies. And this is no good for anyone.
But I’m way off topic here - discord changes. I see this like a lot of other people do: continued enshittification in the name of corporate profits. Much like hiring warm bodies instead of being selective and paying more, or having to trim payroll somehow and training gets cut because “they’ll learn as they go” (no, they just quit instead!) - this is all symptomatic of Big Fish Eats Smaller Fish and the crabs-in-a-bucket culture we’re forced into unless we have the deepest pockets. It’s shortsighted and ends with one person on top of a mountain of ashes. If Discord didn’t need to chase IPO to stay afloat (or shareholders didn’t feel like they needed a bigger 3rd yacht), I don’t think this policy would be happening.
The language these days is just as bad as it was 25y ago. The words themselve just changed. It only got more noticed and widespread because the internet has standardized a lot of these.
And the reason was because at that time, you mostly had to rely on books to learn it. Books had a very critical spelling requirement.
However, science proofed this standard isnt needed. You can misspell a huge amount of things, and still get the message through without any hassle. And some words got famous misspellings as well, because they are misspelled so often.
And even with perfect spelling, some combinations just dont work well. Read and read can mean 2 things, when spoken, they are clear, but when written, it can be confusing.
“You read this” can mean several things. Punctuation can do 1 of these: “You, read this”. But it wont distinguish between whether you are done reading, or are reading it.
It gets worse when words can mean 2 very diffirent concepts. Or you get mixed dialects. Fag being a famous one for causing offended americans in great britain. Because fag is what they use to describe cigarette.
The internet is standardizing this by simply not caring. And plenty deliberately are making it worse.
25y ago, this just wasnt accepted, because there was no global standard that people used, if at that time you made such garbled text, there was a high chance people would just not understand. But even 25y ago, during the MSN era. The netherlands already had breezer language as internet standard.
Language is dynamic.
The only times when this strict writing is truly important, is when you are making contracts which have to set very strict rules. These demand you to do the spelling and grammer perfect. But most people never face this. They can surely read it, but writing it is just never asked.
Speaking as someone who is between millenials and zoomers (Zillenial if you will)
This is predominantly a failure of the education system, the government and the rapid technological advances in communication/information gathering.
The issue is there have been no legal guardrails to prevent youths from subsidizing critical thinking skills to various places on the internet. Doomscrolling an algorithm that spoon feeds you whatever your cognitive dissonance wants has completely destroyed the idea that your ideas should be challenged.
LLM has quickly become thinking by proxy and people have even less original thought than they used to.
The issue as well is this is not just youths. People who are susceptable to propaganda (everyone who lacks media literacy and internet literacy) are vulnerable to hive-mind cult think. See trump derangement syndrome. Political messaging aside, there is real cult-like behavior from sufferers who are unquestioning of DJT due to them vs us psychology.
I am a professional in SysAdmin/Cybersecurity, so I know those domains and I have seen 2 instances of a skills gap.
Older folks that think 20 year old advice still applies
Entry level IT that don’t even know how to use a computer from a user perspective
In the case of 1. I’ve noticed this is because people in management positions were certified, never updated their certs and they call the shots and even when questioned, they use AI or their own cognitive dissonance to justify bad advice see NIST password recommendations
In the case of 2 it’s often because the tools youth use take away all the friction for them. I’ve once asked someone to bring me to the folder where they store a file. Because it was a SMB share they couldn’t find it. They relied on fuzzy search to get the files location on the local machine. Many youth don’t even know what a folder is because of fuzzy search.
The core of the problem is from providing tools and features that don’t encourage critical thought and problem solving skills. People who had the skills, lose them, and people who never had them, don’t develop them.
Discord implementing this is short sighted because they don’t realize that this will inevitably get them in serious trouble (From a data collection standpoint this is actually illegal in many places)
I don’t think this is due to a skills gap. This is just corpo overlords trying to avoid compliance issues with the UK government and trying to make more money. Management doesn’t want to invest in talent. That stopped being a thing a long time ago. These days they’ll cut whoever and replace them with AI because it’s “good enough” to bring in the dollars without the overhead cost of hiring real talent.
To address the off-topic aspects:
I see the point 1 all the time. I’m a “Xennial” - laaaaate X, much more in common with Millennials socially and culturally, my parents were early tech adopters and we had a computer in the home very early on. That I didn’t pursue work in tech, was a bit of a shock to my career programmer/analyst mother.
I am one of the younger set among my professional colleagues, usually much younger than my accounts’ leadership, and work pretty hard to be as current as I can be in my field. Because I have to be the functional bridge between folks with AOL account emails, and the Digital Sales and Marketing teams at my brands - staffed by recent grads who never saw a cassette tape outside a museum. To point 2, then… a junior BDR or intern in that department writing emails with chatGPT to the outside and consultant team ought to be a fireable offense. It’s not as if these skills weren’t necessary to get through school!
Your comment here is BANG ON my points well above:
I really don’t think reading communication from and writing to other humans is a skill that will eventually be unnecessary. And certainly not in this lifetime. The widespread use of summarization tools combined with a lack of teaching critical thinking skills is setting us up for a nightmare of a future, where humans might be able to read, but definitely not comprehend any complex thoughts being expressed. Ripe for authoritarian picking… No wonder techbros led by billionaires are pushing AI so hard, and why blatantly obvious propaganda pumped through social media is currently fucking the world.
Regarding Discord… I’m the same age as a lot of execs in my industry, and maybe a few years older than the average in Tech. Most of these folks my age? They failed upwards, can barely write emails themselves, and reading comprehension skills atrophied over decades of assistants or everyone in an organization adopting 3-5 sentence email structure (because the leaders can’t fucking read). They’re money-grubbing assholes, like 90% of my generation was trained to be.
There are some really talented Zoomers out there, who didn’t fall into the easy pit, and aren’t buying the bullshit from C-suite. I fear the same for them as happened to some from my own peer group - upper levels not retiring or moving on, not making room for the newer ones to develop, and a scarcity of workers because most went off to do something more satisfying as an individual.
Ask any Millennials who made it to Director or upper management or senior administration roles in pharma, medicine, or tech how they’re doing right now. Bet a ton are unemployed in the latest rounds of cuts… while the execs at their company are preparing to retire early in luxury from the coming IPO.
I’ve been banned from Fanbox, banned from Patreon twice, had an OnlyFans but wasn’t allowed to post scripts, and was ignored by Subscribestar about getting approved for literal years on two separate accounts. Discord is where all my early-access subscribers’ scripts are, and while I don’t know if I’ll abandon it, if this happens, it will never be the same…
My parents also werent the earliest adopters, but during the 90s we already had a pc.
And yet, my parents have no struggle reading most of what is written on the internet, including memes. Sure, memes like E and 67 are something else, but acros all ages these memes are not realy understood. But this is exactly why they are a meme, and that is what they do understand.
Communication is critical for our species, so some forms of it will always stay, but there is a good chance that in the next 500 years this changes so much, we cant even imagine the concept.
Very early on, people also didnt know how writing worked. It was also some form of witchcraft, and being able to write could result in you getting killed.
Communication changes, and so does the language. Who knows, maybe at some point we dont even use normal words, but something encoded like base64 (which our brain then can translate back somehow - and no, not in the way of it just converting to words, but realy like transmitting the entire concept).
And if we get this base64 method, you can be sure that normal language will be mostly forgotten. Sure, words could still be used, but grammar might not be needed as its ‘visualy’ represented.
Thats what you get in a capatalistic system. Money is power. And its that bad, that if you are rebelous, you are just going to end up poor and powerless. The entire social system is based on being greedy. And sadly, its very easy to fall for it because for millenia this has been our default survival system. Your own food is always more important than someone elses.
The utopia for some of being a hivemind will not work as long as this behavious is cooked into our dna. It will always result in a dystopia instead where you will have a leader that controls all. And once they have that power, will use it for their own greed.
Our species is just not designed for a hivemind, thats why we have relatively short lives (if we dont use medication or other tools). A hivemind needs a system that is effectively eternal, and can always recover without damage. A human replacing a human will cause undesired change.
Our closest system to a hivemind that we have is currency. You can trade A for B. Value is a made up system, as its always situational. Just being able to trade, and this naturaly happens even without any teaching.
When it comes to ID verification, there isn’t a single agency I consider truly “reliable.”
In my country, I even refuse to share information with police stations if possible after discovering that ID card photos were being sent via email, even to uncertified personal addresses.
I dont trust any corporation that is aiming for profit on that. Privacy is almost never a key selling point in those, so you can be sure that it will never be properly handled.
No matter how many certificates they wave with. In fact, the more they have these and use them to show off, the less i trust them. These nearly always are just a case of investing money to get that certificate, checks are rarely performed. And even if performed, they are trivial (the real vulnerable parts are kept hidden, so avoid getting tested).
US based companies are on that often far bigger offenders, because unlike the EU, which demands certain privacy standards, the US lacks these. Even if they operate in the EU, they neglect a lot here, or just dish it out to a 3rd party that has the certificates to wave with towards governments. No responsibility gets taken, if anything goes wrong here.
Discord isnt any better than facebook on that, both shouldnt be trusted in an equal way.
If a multinational doesnt show of they care about privacy as a selling point, that company is untrustworthy by default. This is why despite all its flaws, google, microsoft and apple are generaly the only ones that have enough trust.
Even though google mines all your data as much as possible, they deem it extremely important that it never leaks out. And that already puts them above discord in trust of privacy… and thats not a good baseline…
