How to deal with coworkers who don't know basic computer skills
Working alongside colleagues who cannot use basic tools like email, calendars, or Excel forces others to constantly stop and teach them simple tasks. This extra burden makes everyday jobs significantly harder and prevents teams from working efficiently.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Google how to do things
- 2having assistants or junior staff handle tech tasks
- 3training
- 4doing the work for them
- 5shifting focus to meta-thinking and prompt engineering
- 6managing tech debt aggressively
- 7tweaking AI-generated results until acceptable
In their words
Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.
“is it common for anyone else to have older coworkers who don’t know how to use their email or excel?”source ↗
“it makes my job harder when I have to show them to the calendar etc.”source ↗
“I know many people who can’t use Excel at all. And several people who can read and write emails, but somehow “don’t receive” or “can’t find” emails on the regular.”source ↗
“Our bookkeeper is the same. She works off of old and outdated spreadsheets that someone else set up for her. She cannot create new ones and doesn't understand how they work.”source ↗
“At my place of work we've recently hired several 'engineers' who have been exposed as frauds who know nothing but how to beg the chatbot to do things. When you bring actual issues that require critical thinking or technical knowledge, they fold like a stack of cards and meat-proxy a Teams reply to you.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
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