I’ll be upfront and say that as a millennial, I was a shithead in my 20s. I never put my best foot forward and my work ethic was questionable at best, especially when I found the job to be bullshit. I think this is common for every generation growing up, so the amount of Gen Z hate I see constantly is staggering. Everywhere you look it is Gen Z being berated for not caring about work and how tech illiterate they are… But honestly I don’t really see that at least in the White Gen Z men. They seem fine and not anymore phone-addicted than Millennials and Gen X’ers, and if they did have a “lacking” work ethic, I don’t really blame them since they are still so young and living in a damn clown world and being constantly reminded of how much of a clown world they live in.
I don’t see a group of failures, I see a group that has been failed by whatever vestiges of a society we have left, and everybody seems to be more interested in keeping them down than bothering to lend a hand in any meaningful way.
The issues I see with gen z is that in many ways (thanks to public education mainly) they are much dumber than previous generations. Most gen-z I interact with have trouble adding and subtracting. They are far less tech savvy than millenials and gen x, and personally I think they're far dumber with their money as well.
That's one of the things that surprises me about working with the youngest hires at my company. The stereotype is that kids are great with computers, but from my experience almost none of them know how to use MS Office suite, which I remember being about the only thing that was taught to me in computer lab classes. You really can't do much in a business space without Word, Excel and Outlook at the very least.
On the other hand, they all far outstrip me when it comes to doing things with their phones, because that's what they were raised on (I straddle the line between Millenial and Gen Z, for reference). I asked one kid to edit a video for me, and the first thing he did was download it to his phone rather than open it up in Adobe Premier or whatever.
The word processing and document editing shift in expertise probably has a lot to do with Google docs. Well that and how Microsoft and other companies have adopted the "product as a service" model and royally paywalled a lot software that's supposed to be the industry standard.
And that's not to mention how much more obnoxious it might be for youngsters to learn how to pirate that shit than it was 10-20 years ago.
I can't entirely blame zoomers or public schools for not wanting to deal with a lot of that. Granted, there are open source options that are pretty solid but sometimes they can be a pain to work with.
Who taught them? People love to pretend the failures of society fail on their own. It allows us to absolve ourselves of responsibility to our community.
Could be that there's some environmental factors at play with some of the learning disabilities. The massive spike in plastic and disposable goods starting right before they were born and onward as they grew up is kind of insane.
Otherwise though, smartphones. So many tools available in such a small and portable package. Yet a lot of it's designed to be spoon-fed to the user. Both because of the limited UI and because apps were designed for maximum simplicity to appeal better to normies and elderly sorts. And also due to what used to be limited by weaker hardware.