Gen Z doesn’t understand file structures (Ep. 415)
The home team talks about Cassidy’s new role as Head of Developer Experience and Education at Remote, Ceora’s controversial opinion on mac and cheese, and why Gen Z may understand information architecture differently than the rest of us.
Episode notes
It’s not news that, as Cassidy says, “remote has grown wildly fast”—but Remote has gone from about 25 employees in March 2020 to 900 now (a 3,500% increase).
Ceora explains to Matt (oh, sweet summer’s child) what it means to get ratioed on Twitter.
Inspired by a great read, the team discusses how Gen Z, having grown up without floppy disks, file folders, or directories, thinks about information.
This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user 1983 for their answer to the question Why can I not use `new` with an arrow function in JavaScript/ES6?.
Tags: the stack overflow podcast
39 Comments
This reminds of the first time my child asked me to help them with some school work at the start of lockdown. Schools were rushing to get up to speed and I had an 11yr old who had never done anything more than used word for school work. It was the end of the first day and time to hand in everything that they had done; “I can’t find it” was the call to action. What did you call the document as I sat down at the laptop, even before I turned to look at him I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. As I pulled up google drive I was greeted with a sea of unnamed documents. No folders, No dates, No subjects, nothing that was going to help with this task. As I tried to gather more information it became very obvious that how I thought of documents and their organisation in any given storage space was a completely alien idea. Eventually the day was saved and the document found.
We had a chat about organising work, titles, even prefixing titles with subject names and how this would make life easier going forward as more and more work is added. As I got up and the 11yr old returned to the laptop to add some finishing touches to the found google docs document my help was required one more time. “How do I save it?”
We teach children to save their work as they go, we should be teaching them where to save it so that it is easy to find too. Search isn’t going to always be an option, just leaving everything in that top level of your cloud storage of choice isn’t always an option. Folders and file names are always an option and just because children/students have been failed by not including the importance of structure within educational topics doesn’t make them less important or something that is going away soon
You ever consider that it’s because he’s 11 years old that he doesn’t organize things on his computer? Next time, take a look around his room. Is it organized? this whole craze with labelling generations is so brain dead when you consider the fact that most of them aren’t even in middle school yet.
To draw contrast, I am also in Gen Z, but on the older end which means I have a job and I’m in school. I organize all of my folders because it’s actually important for me to be able to find things.
Ella, you are spot on. There’s a massive amount of things the younger generation is blamed for not knowing when it’s often outdated, useless, never was important, useful only after being an adult for a decade or more, among about 1000 other categories of information that’s not important to Gen Z right now and may never be.
The older generations also tend to ignore all the things the younger generations know that they don’t, then play the “well we never did it that way” or “we never had that as a kid”. Well, those generations have been around long enough to have access to it at some point, yet never took advantage of it. They really do end up being hypocritical for complaining about people not knowing things when they also don’t know massive amounts of useful things.
The hypocrisy shows up in work, especially when the older generations have been in the same position for 10-20 years, then complain that the younger generations don’t have the same kind of experience or job longevity. Well, it’s kind of hard to have longevity when the younger generations are always the target for layoffs as the “juniors” or they are put on a contract that never hires directly.
Your predicament isn’t unique. I’m a Xennial and I keep hearing how I should have all the advantages of Gen X. Well, my mid-generation got all the bad of Gen X as well as Millennials, without being able to take advantage of any of the benefits. It took me being late 30’s to early 40’s now to get to the same place Gen X was in their late 20’s. And I’m not the only one. It’s too bad Gen Z is looking to be even worse off due to the blocks and lack of understanding of older generations.
When did society lose the idea of leaving the kids better off than their parents? Parents and grandparents seem to complain all over the place about how the kids aren’t as bad off as they were “at their age”. {facepalm}
I Would say around the baby boomers is when it started to happen. If you look at minimum wage as an example from when the boomers were born to them beginning college. They had numerous raises in the minimum wage. around 1946(boomers are ~ from 46-64) it was 40 cents an hour yet when they started hitting 18 and going to college it was $1.25 in 1964 That is more than 3 times the amount from when they were born. It continued to increase steadily as well by 1972 it was already $1.60. The average non-supervisory retail worker though was in fact being paid more at $2.70. These benefits and increases in minimum wage came from the silent generation. As the baby boomers rose in influence and power you can see that they were decreasing the raises in the minimum wage. When I was born it was $4.25 and 30 years later the federal is only $7.25 my state Ohio is only at $9.30. The cost of all necessities has raised exponentially. The pay that the top paid employees get paid has raised exponentially. Yet if you compare the financial oppurtunities that someone born in 1950 has to someone born in 1990 then it’s a drastic difference. College could be paid off for the year in a few weeks at least to a few months at most. They could afford housing, cars, and education. But as they took power it got worse.
My mother is a boomer my grandparents were silent generation and I am a millennial. Throughout the years though I have heard that it was my sister’s generation(they are older than I am by around 15 years.) that were the hippies doing drugs in the 70s and 80s and such yet that would be the boomers. You will see a lot of blame for younger generations for ridiculous things that either as in this case are normal a child not knowing much about the organization because his parent did not teach him. To even worse where they blame and stereotype whole generations not even recognizing the generation that would have really been involved. So the generation after the boomers got blamed as the druggies. The millennials get blamed as the tide pod eaters when that would be Gen Z which really aren’t at fault either as kids have always done really stupid things (Christmas story and the damn ice pole…) but we only have all this exposure due to technology that wasn’t available in the 50s or 30s. Kids can get influenced by others on a much much larger scale. They are also being shown to the world at a much larger scale.
There are literal laws protecting against age discrimination but they generally only benefit older generations. Kids, young adults, and the middle-aged do not get any protection. It gets even worse when you speak to some of the kids that just listen to their parents I have had Gen Z kids tell me they won’t ruin the environment or economy like the Millenials did… You have to explain slowly how that makes no sense because Millenials and heck the generation prior to Millenials still arent in majority control of the infrastructure its been the baby boomers since at least the late 70s. The silent generation is partially to blame as well.
Leaving kids better off then their parents is only a dream because the last generation that did that would be the silent generation and prior.
To be fair when I was 11 I knew how to name and organise files (and I’m in Gen Z), but then again I was always surrounded by tech and at some point I knew more technology than even my dad, so I suppose the real question is how the boy was raised. Was he raised in an environment filled with tech? Was he willing to learn all the nooks and crannies of browsing the internet and doing work there? Because if not then it’s kinda obvious what the outcome would be when he actually needs to do that.
I just realised the child wasn’t referred to as a he. Sorry if I’ve assumed gender or anything.
@Orion The child was referred to as a he, “even before I turned to look at *him* I knew this wasn’t going to be easy.” So I think you’re fine there, but you may want to feel sorry about something else if you’re still looking to apologize. Though it may not be the case.
It was also mentioned, to address your comment on technology exposure, that Michael, “had an 11yr old who had never done anything more than used word for school work” which, at least to me, infers that the 11-year-old’s had up until that point in their life, was limited in their exposure to any sort of computer usage (or that type of ‘technology’ at least) aside from the intermittent need to use (Microsoft) Word for school work.
Thus, although your questions were likely, implicitly rhetorical, I don’t think it was a matter of, or a question of, why the 11-year-old reacted that way, nor that it was necessarily unexpected or less obvious as to why or how, but more so I believe (and I could be wrong) that Michael was simply sharing a memory that came to mind after hearing the podcast (or seeing the title of it or who knows?) and in Michael’s closing statement, it seems to me Michael was simply trying to highlight how even though file structures, directories, and whatnot have failed to find a place in the general curriculum of academia, it doesn’t and shouldn’t take away from its relevance, importance as a function, or as a detriment to its fundamental role and purpose that it serves. And, it will still prevail and continue to exist simply because it is a necessary. [Right, Michael? heh]
In other words, just because a user can search for something and find it, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a file structure there, it’s just hidden from the user and made more seemingly convenient by the search feature which is essentially is it’s own app or program within the operating system. So if you take that away, a user would be bound to designate a save location somewhere and if it’s their first time being exposed to something like that, then doesn’t that make it worth considering teaching or preserving?
Theoretically, if the “Search app” crashed after an update and people were left without the search capability, how would someone go about making do with a workaround if all they’re left with was a command line? I can almost guarantee you there would be widespread panic among those who aren’t taught about file folder structures and directories.
I can already hear the frantic nervous voices screaming now… “What do you mean it’s in DCIM?! What is the DCIM folder? Then I go into the camera folder? But i don’t need to use the camera I just want to find my photos, why can’t it just be tagged photos or something?!”
I am always amazed at the absolute ignorance of history in our own profession. Files, folders, and names haven’t been state-of-the-art since the 1960s. Douglas Engelbart’s NLS, Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad, the Smalltalk system at Xerox Parc, Apple’s Hypercard, BeOS’s Be File System, Microsoft Longhorn’s WinFS, Cairo, Taligent, etc.
Why would you force yourself into a strict hierarchy based on names when you can instead just search by content?
I heard stories of people who used BeOS (unfortunately, I myself only had the opportunity to play with it after it was already mostly dead, I never got to seriously use it). They said they started out transferring all their old habits to the new system, including building glorious cathedrals of deeply nested directory hierarchies with long and descriptive names. But the longer they used the system, the flatter the hierarchies became, the shorter and less descriptive the names. Because BFS allowed you to add an arbitrary amount of arbitrary metadata to any file, and search for this metadata at an instant – BFS was essentially a filesystem, a database, and a content-addressable storage all rolled into one with super-fast indexing on top. So, why would you navigate a deeply nested forest of sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-directories when you could just type two or three keywords into the search box and the system would give you what you are looking for?
I myself noticed a very similar thing happening to me five times:
I had a beautifully crafted hierarchy of folders, filters, and automatic rules in my email program for a long time. Then GMail came along, and I tried to recreate this hierarchy by using hierarchical tags. I quickly realized that a system of folders was like only allowing one tag for each email which as soon as I realized it sounded insane and I couldn’t imagine how I could ever have lived that way. So, instead of a beautifully crafted hierarchy of tags that mimics the beautifully crafted hierarchy of folders I had before, I now had many tags for each email. Except that in the last few years, I noticed that I tagged less and less with fewer and fewer tags, simply because I could find everything I needed using the search box. I finally realized that all that tagging and organizing was really just a workaround for shitty indexing and searching.
A very similar thing happened with my music collection. I used to have it organized by artist’s first letter, artist’s full name, year, album, disc, and track with file and directory names so long that I bumped against Windows’s 255 character limit more than once. Now, I don’t even know where my songs are stored any more … they are in my song library, and are indexed by artist *and* year *and* title *and* album *and* genre *and* tempo *and* mood *and* rating *and* number of plays *and* time since last play, and and and and.
Same for my photos. Started off with deeply nested directory hierarchies etc. Now, I don’t even know where they are stored, I just go into the library and they are automatically indexed by date, location, resolution, facial recognition automatically tags them with the people who are in them, AI automatically tags them with their content.
I also used to have a large collection of bookmarks. First in text files, then I wrote my own database, when del.icio.us came around, I wrote an exporter for my databases which uploaded everything, when Magnolia came around, I moved everything over there, when Magnolia died, I was first very annoyed but then I realized that Google was much better at finding stuff than I was and I never used bookmarks again.
And lastly, thanks to Spotlight, I now see a similar happening with my files as well, just like those folks who used BeOS in the 1990s told me.
Files are so 1950s! Why is an OS like Windows 11, released in 2021, even using them any more? Why does it still have a file system?
For *me*, the takeaway here is that Gen Z seems to have finally progressed to the technology of the 1960s.
You are right that many modern applications don’t encourage, or even actively discourage, hierarchical organization. For example, newer versions of Sharepoint purposely removed the ability to display folders and documents in a “Tree” structure. Instead, the trend is to having a flat structure and relying on tags or simply powerful search capabilities to be able to find things. However, personally I believe that a hierarchical structure is often still the best way to go.
Personally, I’m not a big fan of “tags” and “metadata”. For document collections these are pretty much useless, because they are impossible to maintain. They work better for things like music libraries, where metadata like Artist, Song Title, etc. are relatively easy to standardize and maintain. (Except when they aren’t.)
A really powerful search cabability (e.g. Google) is really useful. But weak search capabilities such as those built into Windows or Mac, simply does not cut the mustard.
Bottom line: Hierarchical structure IS worth teaching. (Whether it’s reasonable to expect an 11 year old to use it is another question entirely.)
Great points!
If I remember correctly, already in the 90’s Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines talked to how the filesystem is an alien concept to most users and suggested ways to avoid / hide the pain – with things like autosaving.
Since then, Apple has kept working on abstracting away the filesystem (from the iPhone to all their apps – music, photos, everything). Even Microsoft at some point also tried implementing a database-based filesystem that would mostly do away with paths (WinFS).
Blaming GenZ for not getting files and folders is so hilariously backwards, upside-down, inside-out.
Alan Kay said something like “computer sciences is a pop culture because we don’t learn our history”. So, so true.
Exactly that. I’m Gen Z and was able to do those things at that age, but my dad taught electronics for a living, and I had an interest in it.
“this whole craze with labelling generations is so brain dead”
IMO the hallmark of the millennial generation has been stereotyping based on age, race gender, orientation, ethnicity etc. Many many millennials love to make all kinds of assumptions about millions and millions of people they have never (and will never) meet. They love to stereotype their experiences and plight based on singular/anecdotal evidence, and this is one of the biggest problems in western society today and has led us down all sorts of terrible paths as a society the last few years. Expect it to get worse before it gets better, but I’m hopeful Gen Z brings some sanity to society today.
Now, am I doing what I just accused millennials of doing? Perhaps (I’m a millennial of course) but I do stand by it and contend it is one of the biggest issues in society today and something I see in the media constantly.
wait what I am in the middle bit of gen z I got a school distributed computer back in 4th grade. All it took me was some looking around to figure it out. combine that with me having messed around with windows on the school’s normal computers the year before and my dad helping me learn about them when I was 7 you can learn quite a lot by just looking around. Now I should really get back to work because I got work for my AP class I have to do.
My 65 yr old wife has exactly the same problem. Maybe because the original Mac would save files by default in the dir (oops – folder) that the application that created it was in. Or on the desktop. Bit in any case — it’s not just a cloud storage issue.
Where can get the transcript?
It is in one of the `untitled` files in the root.
ironic that the transcript is so hard to find, given the topic of the conversation about “the kids” not respecting file hierarchy and naming
Hello,
Is there anywhere I could find a transcript of this podcast?
Yeah; if you can remember a fragment of a complete sentence that occurs in the podcast, you might find it. It’s in a file called raU1k9gj+k5gy76n7VH085cAuoTBeeNV.mp4 … somewhere in the cloud. I found it yesterday, don’t know if I can find it again. Maybe I will ask my dad.
I’ve heard the phrase “It’s saved in Word” too many times to believe this is a new phenomenon.
Interesting episode, though I’m not convinced that the issue with not understanding directory structures is exclusive to or even present in that much of Gen Z. Isn’t it more likely that we expect them to be tech savvy and as a result skip some of the more fundamental lessons on this stuff?
We had to teach older folks a lot about technology from a very basic level, but now that kids have interacted with a lot of tech on the front-end, we expect them to already have an innate understanding of the back-end structures. There doesn’t seem to be much to say this isn’t just another case of “grumble grumble kids these days”…
It’s easy to blame the GenZ’s, but this is really a result of especially Microsoft but also Google hiding the file system from the user.
To a Windows or Android user, the computer *is* just a big unorganized bucket, since all paths and localities are intentionally hidden, and it’s completely rational for the user to respond by placing everything on the desktop: that’s the only way they can reliably find anything.
People having to search for stuff by content plays into Google’s hands; you can be served ads and your search terms can be collected and all that.
While I agree that the way we find objects is different with search and that may be affecting how students think about hierarchy, I don’t think the name file has anything to do with anything. ‘File’ could be any arbitrary name, and we usually have arbitrary names that become apart of our shared vocabulary in any given field that don’t necessarily map to anything in the physical world.
I agree with Aleks, with Gen Z we already expect them to know about these things. I’m Gen Z also, I have seen firsthand how many untitled documents people have, one of my teachers has files named like ‘Mission copy 1 copy copy copy 1..gslides’ in his drive.
Still not clear about how to use huge stack of files to be organized subject wise
Newbies are pain, often. They don’t respect the naming conventions. They don’t respect casing. They litter and vandalise the infrastructure. And when senior guys complaint about all choppy work they do, In the name of Agile, they complaint about being micro-managed. This is what happens when too many hordes of poor experience people get easy jobs.
Welcome to cheapskates.
Old people: We’ll get rid of the notion of file structures in for usability
Young people: Ok, whatever we don’t have a choice anyway
Old people: OMG GEN Z DOESNT GET FILES STRUCTURES
Young people: …
I see some clouds coming maybe y’all can get out there and shout at them.
Downside of casual use of cloud and search? First, you don’t know what valuable info you have that can’t be searched (lost or mislabelled), and you don’t know what is safe to delete, or what should be deleted.
When you decide to organize stuff, it’s nice to know that animals/mammals/humans come pre-equipped with a big chunk of brain which is super-good at organising relationships. It keeps track of your relatives, aquaintances, food colours, smells and tastes, and your enemies. It has limits: it prefers 7 or less members in each ‘family’, but each member can have 7 members and so on, all the way down, with no known limit to how deep you go. So if you respect that family-of-seven with your files and folders, your brain can effortlessly keep track of which family ‘tree’ anything belongs to, and remember it as easily as you know your own immediate family.
With 49 members in layer 2, 343 in layer 3 and 2401 in layer 4 it can handle all your needs. Curiously, when using this system on a computer the ‘families’ acquire their own personalities, quite unconsciously. It is a challenge keeping the members in a folder down to 7, but the process of thinking about this makes it easier to label things more meaningfully. You can always tip 2000 similar files into a folder, but then think about how you would split them up into 4-5 layers so they could live together better (and you could remember where they are).
Try it with your photos!
Just for the meme:
“ok boomer”
Great topic, you should teach kids file systems, even if many software are leading us to other direction. Many data storing services (in engineering systems at least) have come back to showing a traditional folder structure rather than tag/search based system.
I don’t think the main headline is file systems going out of vogue. It is that young people simply have no way of retrieving things they saved more than a couple of days ago. Mainly because at some point software development just started pretending that problem doesn’t exist or is not important.
The key feature of the hierarchical file system is not that it is particularly good at classifying anything. It is that (1) it does a tolerable job at classifying almost everything, and (2) every application can understand and display this structure. And maybe (3) applications today can still read directory structures created 25 years ago.
It’s not a new Gen-Z thing – Microsoft never understood basic computer science filesystem structure when they designed Windows. Complete lack of thought and organisation. Hence the massive dumping ground /windows/system32 😉
First of all, there are some computing platforms and projects which require an understanding and use of file structure. Second I find it hard to argue for disorganization: would you really jumble all your clothing, summer & winter, casual & formal, in one giant bin and search through it every day? Hmmm, here’s a black sock, I wonder where the mate is? Finally, although one comment blames Microsoft, I think that Apple is far more to blame: Windows makes the file structure clear, while Macs obscure it.
_Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World_ 9781408706763
“…the human inclination for tidiness … can mask deep and debilitating fragility that keep us from innovation.”
I find many of these comments weird. I wrote my first programs more than 50 years ago (a summer job at a research institution; no home computers then). I was never a computer professional, but I have been around computers since that time. I don’t remember now how files were organised on magnetic tapes (and I don’t care). Currently I have a mass of material for some cross-disicplinary personal projects I am working in in my retirement, and I am reconsidering how to organise things. For a long time I have put things in deeply nested hierarchical folders, because that is what there was, and I could make it work well enough to get by. But now some of the “personal knowledge management” software is offering associational cross-linking as well as tags, search and, yes, folders. I think that my previous reliance on folder hierarchies is now getting in the way, and a freer and less siloed structure is the way to go. So I support Jörg W Mittag’s comments.
The newer ways require constant background indexing and little daemons watching things like files that change names or locations; that was much less practical when I was younger, and of course the cloud didn’t exist. Now all computers can do that stuff: the tools are here: why not use them? I agree that some fields require understanding of files and folder hierarchies, but I was struck by the comment in the article that as the students who entered higher education in 2017 reach the stage of writing tools, the folder mechanisms will recede further from view. Maybe one day dealing with folders will be like assembly language programming today; obviously someone needs to know how computer chips work at low levels, but even most programmers can ignore assembly language, and most users have never heard of it. (That summer job involved adding assembly language routines to Fortran.)
I don’t disagree that search is more convenient than trawling through a folder structure. But also, I will believe it when I see it.
One domain where this has been the case for a long time is music players, grouping music by artist, album, playlist, etc. You don’t get to whip the Llama’s ass by displaying file system folders. Ironically, more recently Android reintroduced a strict hierarchical structure of artist / album / song, which leaves it unable to display compilation albums with various artists (and play them in one go).
Meanwhile I am typing this, right now, on a Windows 10 box where I can put a few files in a folder, say “apple pie.txt”, “chocolate cake.txt” and “pancakes.txt”, and if I search for “apple” in that folder it finds nothing. Maybe I should enable some setting but it should at least be able to look by filename. Windows 95 could do this 25 years ago and it certainly couldn’t afford a search indexer.
Windows 7 could search in the start menu, which was an improvement over the hierarchy that we had before. Then Windows 10 came along and we couldn’t. What a pain. (it turns out this search now only works if you use a “supported locale”, whatever it means). This seems to have been solved now, but to this day it only searches the application name, and nothing else.
Finally, I don’t know how proprietary that knowledge management software is, but if I use something to group a large pile of items, I would sure hope it doesn’t get discontinued. A major trend these days is to obstruct interoperability to achieve lock-in. If an app disappears, all your tagging and structure goes with it.
learn linux. it is the past and the future.
Yes! I’m a Gen Z, and I’ve understood the concept of files and folders for years. I credit much of that to having used Ubuntu for most of my computing life, and to actually having used real files and folders and since I was around 6. It’s very hard for me to imagine not understanding this :-).