Computer literacy is definitely down in gen z and alpha.

I had a computer class that was fairly self guided, do projects and tell the facilitator how it's good for community or whatever. All I would do when she walked by is go to hackertyper and tell her I was coding.

So yes.

Oh, they def are. Most people under ~20 only use touch screen devices. In school, they have apps for building documents and power points, so they can just do those in their phone or a tablet.

I'm watching it in my high school aged niece: she barely knows how to type on a real keyboard, let alone how to access a command line, and even less so what can be accomplished through it.

Developers are that dumb when it comes to computers. Actual fucking developers.

Yes. They are.

Everything is magic to them the way it was to the boomers. Open the box, plug it in, it works, hope nothing unusual happens along the way.

Of course there are plenty who know more, but I’ve got kids and helped them build their own PCs. They still know relatively little, but their friends don’t even understand that cellphones are computers and reject the idea altogether.

I used to tell a story about how my boss had to call me into his office to show him how to maximize a window after he accidentally changed its size. I had to do similarly basic instructions for several young news hires lately, and most don't seem to be picking it up very well.

It's less that kids are dumb with computers - since everyone's dumb with computers when they're inexperienced - and more that they're as unwilling to learn as my grandma; I'll show them how to do something, and they'll completely forget how by the next day.

I saw computers as an exciting new thing, but the next generation seems to think of them as outdated tech.

I've met young adults that don't know how to type with ten fingers, that have never touched a desktop pc and can't properly explain the differences between an OS, a browser and a search engine

As a young person:

They really are. They get used to fancy GUIs and don't understand anything about computers.

There are still a few that are good with computers, but that number is going down.

Kids? I regularly interact with PhD students that don't know how to open a fucking ZIP archive. I've had one that thought that "SSD" was a kind of RAM, and insisted on installing Windows on a hard drive. I've had one that couldn't grasp the idea of 2FA. I've had one that only had a single copy of his dissertation and lost all of it when Bitlocker ate the disk.

Organic intelligence is going extinct, I swear.

They are wayyy worse

I'm sorry to inform you that when I was in high school I had classmates ask me if I was hacking when opening up the command line. We don't have snitches though and the people here have the ability to listen to explanations.