File Not Found - A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans

[Kal-El814]

I saw this coming a while back and knew we’d be headed down this both eventually. Many people around my age or older (41) have everything barfed on their desktops. Most people younger than me delegate their file management to apps whole cloth. They’ve never ever been in the folder where their photos or music are stored locally, they just open the app that uses those files. 
 

As the article says for certain engineering jobs and / or in heavily regulated environments, a well defined file structure probably makes sense. Other than that, the folder structure paradigm is probably a huge waste of time for the overwhelming majority of users at this point. 
 

Kids who grew up with search engines could change STEM education forever - The Verge

WWW.THEVERGE.COM

 

[Keyser_Soze]

My file architecture is immaculate!

[GeneticBlueprint]

21 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

My file architecture is immaculate!

 

My music folder's immaculate organization has brought many a metal fan to orgasm.

[vaxick]

Google is also banking on these kids making Chrome OS the dominant operation system in the future.

[Keyser_Soze]

40 minutes ago, GeneticBlueprint said:

My music folder's immaculate organization has brought many a metal fan to orgasm.

 

But how deep does your OCD go? Do your album folders also have the release year on them?

[GeneticBlueprint]

24 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

But how deep does your OCD go? Do your album folders also have the release year on them?

 

How deep does it go? So deep that even though I want to put the year in the name of the folder, I don't because it's not part of the album's title. Besides, I can name the year any of the numerous albums I own came out off the top of my head.

[Keyser_Soze]

42 minutes ago, GeneticBlueprint said:

 

How deep does it go? So deep that even though I want to put the year in the name of the folder, I don't because it's not part of the album's title. Besides, I can name the year any of the numerous albums I own came out off the top of my head.

 

I don't do it either. I just mentioned it because a friend I wanted to share albums with said he wouldn't accept it because the year wasn't on the folder.

[Anathema-]

The future is file tagging. The thing is people already do it they just try to fit the tags into the narrow name and folder structure paradigm (like putting a "year released" into the name field for an album).

[Slug]

My new filing technique is unstoppable.

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

The real psychos are the people who manually sort their email. 

 

Reports get their own folder(s), as do messages from outside the organization (or other whitelisted domains, a layer of protection against phishing) but other than that all mail goes in "inbox"

[SuperSpreader]

4 minutes ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

The real psychos are the people who manually sort their email. 

 

Reports get their own folder(s), as do messages from outside the organization (or other whitelisted domains, a layer of protection against phishing) but other than that all mail goes in "inbox"

I just mark everything as read, who cares. 

[cusideabelincoln]

6 minutes ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

The real psychos are the people who manually sort their email. 

 

Reports get their own folder(s), as do messages from outside the organization (or other whitelisted domains, a layer of protection against phishing) but other than that all mail goes in "inbox"

 

All email goes to junk, except whitelisted.  User to keep my inbox empty, but have given up lately since the search function has improved.  Inbound rules are applied 5o separate into folders for half my stuff and the rest just stays in the inbox.

[CitizenVectron]

12 minutes ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

The real psychos are the people who manually sort their email. 

 

Reports get their own folder(s), as do messages from outside the organization (or other whitelisted domains, a layer of protection against phishing) but other than that all mail goes in "inbox"

 

For my personal Gmail I do this since the search is so great. For my work email (in Office) I manually organize since Outlook's search is total crap.

[SuperSpreader]

I don't mind this change, but I hate seeing walls of files or text to begin with and don't want to remember every file name (for those of us who work in thousands of files).

 

But also, if you don't know where you saved your files that's sorta on you (article) and you're a fucking dummy. 

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

27 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

 

For my personal Gmail I do this since the search is so great. For my work email (in Office) I manually organize since Outlook's search is total crap.

I haven't had much issue with the search function in outlook. 

 

Including an email item as an attachment is the goddamn worst

[Ghost_MH]

3 hours ago, Anathema- said:

The future is file tagging. The thing is people already do it they just try to fit the tags into the narrow name and folder structure paradigm (like putting a "year released" into the name field for an album).

 

Manual tagging isn't really all that necessary anymore. For photos, if I want to find a picture of my son from the day I brought him to work with me, Google knows what he looks like and knows where I work. I jump into Google Photos and ask and the pictures just magically pop up without ever having to tag anything. The same goes for documents. Windows and macOS will search the content of documents, so it doesn't have to actually know the document tag as long as the contents are relevant to what you're searching for.

 

43 minutes ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

The real psychos are the people who manually sort their email. 

 

Reports get their own folder(s), as do messages from outside the organization (or other whitelisted domains, a layer of protection against phishing) but other than that all mail goes in "inbox"

 

I totally do some light manual sorting. Mostly just moving some mail into a To Do folder and others into a Save for Later folder. Everything else is either auto sorted based on rules I set up or just dumped into an archive folder to get them out of my inbox.

[mclumber1]

I don't bother deleting my work emails, as the org auto deletes all emails after 18 months.  Instead, I just mark all as read if I don't want to bother opening and reading a group of emails. 

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

6 minutes ago, mclumber1 said:

I don't bother deleting my work emails, as the org auto deletes all emails after 18 months.  Instead, I just mark all as read if I don't want to bother opening and reading a group of emails. 

Lol an old company I worked at had auto delete after 90 days. Had to manually save emails for projects (in violation of official company policy) allllll because they got a little tiny fbi raid for alleged antitrust violations

[Ghost_MH]

21 minutes ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

Lol an old company I worked at had auto delete after 90 days. Had to manually save emails for projects (in violation of official company policy) allllll because they got a little tiny fbi raid for alleged antitrust violations

 

It's just SO much easier to auto delete mail if you expect to face a lawsuit at some point. "You want all our emails about this deal from last year? That's cool, but we don't even keep email past six months. You want chat logs? Those disappear as soon as you close the chat window."

 

It makes complying with discovery requests so much easier. I literally wouldn't have it any other way.

[SuperSpreader]

45 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

It's just SO much easier to auto delete mail if you expect to face a lawsuit at some point. "You want all our emails about this deal from last year? That's cool, but we don't even keep email past six months. You want chat logs? Those disappear as soon as you close the chat window."

 

It makes complying with discovery requests so much easier. I literally wouldn't have it any other way.

How deleted is deleted? 

[Ghost_MH]

4 minutes ago, SuperSpreader said:

How deleted is deleted? 

 

Gone, gone. If your legal policy is that you don't keep mail for more than six months then even the backups get purged at six months. Keeping mail forever is a terrible stance for any company. After a certain point, you need to implement tools that can search through terabytes of mail in the event of a lawsuit. Ain't nobody got time for that. Also, nothing good can ever come from having more data you can be compelled to share with opposing council.

[SuperSpreader]

2 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

Gone, gone. If your legal policy is that you don't keep mail for more than six months then even the backups get purged at six months. Keeping mail forever is a terrible stance for any company. After a certain point, you need to implement tools that can search through terabytes of mail in the event of a lawsuit. Ain't nobody got time for that. Also, nothing good can ever come from having more data you can be compelled to share with opposing council.

Great! Our chat history seems to clear out every 6mo and that's good because I've said some rude af things about leadership. 

[Ghost_MH]

10 minutes ago, SuperSpreader said:

Great! Our chat history seems to clear out every 6mo and that's good because I've said some rude af things about leadership. 

 

I have totally stood there and chewed people out for not purging backups at the end of our retention period. If you don't follow your own retention rules and so things like allow people to archive email offline or keep backups indefinitely, you can totally be compelled to search through all those offline archives and backups.

 

Fuck no. That's even more work than just keeping all your mail forever.

[CitizenVectron]

1 hour ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

It's just SO much easier to auto delete mail if you expect to face a lawsuit at some point. "You want all our emails about this deal from last year? That's cool, but we don't even keep email past six months. You want chat logs? Those disappear as soon as you close the chat window."

 

It makes complying with discovery requests so much easier. I literally wouldn't have it any other way.

 

This is why there needs to be stronger regulation in many sectors about data retention policies. Internal communications should be kept for a minimum of 5+ years in some sectors, just like financial records.

[AbsolutSurgen]

load"$",8

list

 

This is how I looked at files when I was a kid.

Things change, and will continue to change.

[TwinIon]

I see this a lot at work. I've tried to move some things to cloud based repositories that don't rely on traditional file structures, and our user base (primarily over 40) don't get it at all. Traditional file structures are very easy to understand, but if you've conceptualized all computing around that idea, it can be very difficult to let go of. The idea that a bunch of STEM profs would be inflexible doesn't surprise me at all.

 

I remember at least one prof that had their own physical linux box that we had to ssh into to drop off our programing assignments in very specific folder structures, so their automated testing routine could go through and grade us. Any mild deviation in naming schemes would mean our assignment wouldn't be counted.

[Ghost_MH]

24 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

This is why there needs to be stronger regulation in many sectors about data retention policies. Internal communications should be kept for a minimum of 5+ years in some sectors, just like financial records.

 

Five years it's such a long time. There are only two people that need email that old. People that aren't good at documenting important information and lawyers. Two groups of people that have given me nothing but headaches.

[CitizenVectron]

19 minutes ago, TwinIon said:

I see this a lot at work. I've tried to move some things to cloud based repositories that don't rely on traditional file structures, and our user base (primarily over 40) don't get it at all. Traditional file structures are very easy to understand, but if you've conceptualized all computing around that idea, it can be very difficult to let go of. The idea that a bunch of STEM profs would be inflexible doesn't surprise me at all.

 

I remember at least one prof that had their own physical linux box that we had to ssh into to drop off our programing assignments in very specific folder structures, so their automated testing routine could go through and grade us. Any mild deviation in naming schemes would mean our assignment wouldn't be counted.

 

I think it doesn't really matter except where you are using applications that rely on specific file placement. Obviously it also still matters if you are in STEM and need to go deeper than just "using" an app. If you are doing any programming then you need to understand where stuff is, because we still use file structure for creating and running things.

[Kal-El814]

8 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

Five years it's such a long time. There are only two people that need email that old. People that aren't good at documenting important information and lawyers. Two groups of people that have given me nothing but headaches.

 

For clinical trials I believe records need to be maintained for 15 years after submission. 6 months seems crazy low to me.for any kind of regulated environment.

[SuperSpreader]

14 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

Five years it's such a long time. There are only two people that need email that old. People that aren't good at documenting important information and lawyers. Two groups of people that have given me nothing but headaches.

Maybe 5 yr for HR, company leadership/officers 

[Bloodporne]

3 hours ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

The real psychos are the people who manually sort their email. 

 

Reports get their own folder(s), as do messages from outside the organization (or other whitelisted domains, a layer of protection against phishing) but other than that all mail goes in "inbox"

I just counted and I have 14 subfolders in my Inbox. Three of those subfolders have subfolders with one having a total of 23 subfolders. 

 

[Ghost_MH]

17 minutes ago, Kal-El814 said:

 

For clinical trials I believe records need to be maintained for 15 years after submission. 6 months seems crazy low to me.for any kind of regulated environment.

 

15 minutes ago, SuperSpreader said:

Maybe 5 yr for HR, company leadership/officers 

 

And the industry I'm currently in, we need to maintain records for to least 7 years. That just means we have to document everything because we only have a much shorter retention policy. Sometimes, documentation is just taking an email and saving it, whole cloth, to some place on Sharepoint or Teams or even a simple file share. Email is not a good place to organize things. Employees leave and then you have to keep their stuff around in active databases for years. If you do archive it, then a lawsuit comes up, and out of the archive everything comes so you can search through it. Like, HR should be archiving important discussions about employee issues in a place all HR employees can access. What they shouldn't be doing is just keeping it in their email as a secret from the rest of HR until a lawsuit comes up forcing someone to go through old mailboxes to dredge things up.

 

I should mention, this is all coming from an IT policy wonk like me. I've had too many headaches and involved in too many lawsuits. I'm all for people storing and keeping track of all the important shit they say and do. Just not in email. That's a terrible place for it. Luckily, it seems younger generations are more than happy to embrace things like Teams or other cloud-based collaboration tools with their nice search features.

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

46 minutes ago, Bloodporne said:

 

[SaysWho?]

4 hours ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

The real psychos are the people who manually sort their email. 

 

[SuperSpreader]

I'm just glad my surly comments no longer exist anywhere.