PDFs

Our front desk person, on the computer all day, barely understands how tabs work.

It's scary.

gen z or boomer?
- I don’t like dishing on generational rants, but OMG the mobile device generation is every bit as lost as Boomers are when it comes to the actual functioning of their device or using a PC as an actual work device.
  
  My kids have had a PC since they were four, they’re teens now and they still don’t get a lot of it, but when their friends come over they are absolutely clueless. Use an Xbox or Playstation? IPad? Sure! No problem! Anything beyond that they just give up.
  
  Technology needs to be actively taught and actively learned! If their school isn't teaching it, maybe try subscribing to some online tech literacy courses?
  
  That is absolutely an answer, but getting teens to take more classes after being done with school…? Good luck. The kids are issued chromebooks, that’s as much tech as they get.
  
  I had my eldest help putting together her PC after she wanted to upgrade parts for her birthday. That’s promising, I think?
  
  It should be part of elementary/highschool, like it was for me and most gen Y.
  
  I suffered through word editing, excel, ppt, email setup, etc. on 10 year old machines, and it gave the foundations for my studies and life later.
  
  It seems to be a per-school kind of thing. I am late millennial/early Gen Z, and my school had computer classes where we learned how to use Windows and Microsoft office, how to touch type, the meaning of computer terminology, and what the functionalities are of basic computer parts (eg, "CPU is the brain of the computer"). And later on we started learning how to use Photoshop and Illustrator.
  
  I'm always surprised when I hear that other people don't have that sort of in depth tech learning in their schools, and worse so, that some people don't even have computer class. It just always felt like what we learned in computer class was an essential skill
  
  I feel like I'm about as computer savvy as most gen z. Born in 91, but we was poor, so it was the family dell (that I wasn't allowed to do much with*) until 2008, got my first laptop in 2009**, it broke almost immediately because poor and cheap, and then got my first smart phone (T-Mobile G1) in 2010, and basically didn't touch a laptop again until I started school 2020. I basically started over from scratch at that point, but now I run fedora full time and made myself learn some basic stuff, but I would consider myself pretty tech illiterate.
  
  *Because my brother was caught looking at porn, so computer time was severely cut back. Then I was caught sending sexy messages to someone. And then the final nail in the coffin was when I tried to dual boot it with some Linux distro, I don't remember, borked it, and we had to wipe the hard drive
  
  **Technically I had a netbook before this, in like 07/08, that I used Wubi to install Ubuntu on, and I loved that. But never got more than browser level into it.
  
  Coding-wise I’d hazard that younger generations are on-par or better than my generation. But “jack of all trades” is probably more our wheelhouse.
  
  Nope. We shed a lot of mentor-types in the great layoffs after Y2K, and a generation of nerds ran without any oral history and then taught that to their successors.
  
  What they don't know they don't know is not only What best-practice is, but Why best-practice is. And there's little demonstrated effort to adhere.
  
  I look over installation docs that do Very, VERY bad things, for instance. Build processes with no artifact validation, a toxic cargo chain, builds in prod, and so much more.
  
  I can't blame the devs, as they didn't learn better. I blame the c-suites who canned the pricy experienced nerds who were also raising their successors properly.
  
  Now we get to re-learn all that at great pain and hope to regain some of what we had before the next board of defectors guts another carefully-rebuilt culture of adequacy.
- I'd argue the Boomers are a fair cut above Gen Z. We Gen X folk are the greatest!
  
  Seriously though, we straddled the digital divide. We went from nothing to having to figure it all out. All when we were young and able to learn quickly. FFS, we couldn't play a simple video game without understanding drives, IRQs, CLI, all that.
  
  Millennials got it best born just when tech was easy to learn but before it was overly obfuscated
  
  The iPhone really screwed Gen Z.
  
  X and Millennials had to do everything manually that our phones now do automatically for us.
  
  We are the generation that learned how to use wireless mesh networks to text off Nintendo DS's.
- Boomer.
  
  As a gen z will echo that I've also seen some tech illiteracy from people my age as well.

Literally every single browser can open a PDF.

Is she admitting that their organization only uses discontinued, insecure Internet Explorer to use the internet? Is she also opening word files in Microsoft word 2005?

I recently found an ad requiring knowledge of win2000/XP
- Depending on the job itself, this actually makes sense for legacy support. My job requires "passable experience with Windows 98SE, XP, and 2000", but the network-facing computers are all 10 and 11.
  
  Military and medical too.
  
  It was for an electronics rework technician role, though. Outside of a wave/reflow oven's interface, (which should have its own GUI) it didn't really make sense.
- I met a company that still has a machine in their production line, that uses 5.25" floppy discs and an amber monochrome display. "Why?" I hear you ask. Because it still works, it isn't networked, and the floppies next to it are the only ones it'll ever interact with.
  
  The biggest problem with these dinosaurs is when they stop working. Sourcing parts is getting more difficult.
  
  If you think about it though, it is actually easier to find replacement parts for 70s-90s systems because there is now a small industry around it as well as collectors and there was a differrnt culture around it.
  
  Replacing things from 2000s-2010s systems is the bigger issues. They were all taken over by giant corpos with all repair parts, manuals, and software restricted and hidden in the name of "profit" and "protecting corporate IP" and now it is not profitable enough for them to spend resources keeping stock of old parts or driver installers, so into the trash they go, never to be able to be seen again, and reproducing them also is note challenging with increasing system complexity.
  
  The difference is that you can use new parts in computers from 2010s. You can also replace them easily without much difficulty, as the standards haven't really changed that much.
  
  But computers from the 80s and 90s are not compatible with modern platforms. Standards have changed, and new hardware thar uses standards like 32-bit PCI, ISA, MCA (for expansion cards), IDE are no longer manufactured. Even the CPU architecture had big changes between early x86 CPUs.
Nah she’s talking about the ATS systems that filter through all the applicants’ resumes looking for the ones with the highest amount of matching keywords so they can get the number of applicants down to a more reasonable number to interview.

They don’t care if their bots don’t work for your PDF resume because they get so many applicants it doesn’t matter.

I’m surprised this isn’t common knowledge for jobseekers.
- It is common knowledge.
  
  Bots can scrape PDFs.
  
  I had about 50 applications of proof where bots scraped the information from my PDF and auto-filled it into the next forms which are again simply re-typing in all of the information from your resume again (which most medium or large companies use anyway which makes the entire point moot). They can scrape PDFs unless you hand-write your resume with bad handwriting so the OCR can't pick it up.
  
  Unless they got their ATS system from aliexpress, it can scrape PDFs.

Fuck them for not putting the requirement on the application and wasting everyone's time though