Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer • Hacker News Board

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#241

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 9:42 PM UTC

inimino wrote: post #213

abalone wrote: post #75

This is great but the premise seems kind of straw man. I don’t know a single developer that thinks “googling stuff means you’re not a proper engineer.” Perhaps this is a reference to the interviewing process. Tests are a different thing, though. I’ve been on practical technical screens where you can google, because the test was about building a larger system, and they don’t care if you don’t remember this or that API…

Googling too much is an indicator that your environment or process isn't working well. It's not a point of pride if half your job requires looking up how to use tools you don't understand. The problem is that people naturally blame themselves for not knowing everything rather than accepting that we have built monuments of trash code that nobody should be expected to understand and that therefore we should stop doing…

[deleted]

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#242

Post by manifestsilence » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 9:43 PM UTC

cosmos14 wrote: post #204

bdcravens wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Yahoo isn't a search engine; the results are powered by another search engine (at this time, Bing)

I’ve tried Bing. Many of the result were unrelated to my question.

Bing has issues with not scraping dynamic content very well if at all. We had to eliminate libraries that render important content after page load with javascript because they'd show up on Google but not Bing.

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#243

Post by wcchandler » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 9:43 PM UTC

aloknnikhil wrote: post #7

On the list of things I always Google, is how to create a symbolic link under Linux. I just can't figure out a way to remember what comes first; the source or the destination. The man pages add to the confusion by calling the "source" the target. So, the rule of thumb I now follow is cp or mv semantics.

link -s this (to) that

This has to exist... but that doesn’t.

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#244

Post by sharadov » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 9:43 PM UTC

abalone wrote: post #146

sharadov wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every engineer on HN (several threads that I've browsed) seems to have a serious disdain for coder-pad interviews/whiteboard sessions. And I think HN has a good representation of software engineers. So, who are these companies hiring?

Every student I’ve ever met seems to have a serious disdain for exams, but for some reason universities keep giving them.

I would rather do an exam every year, and get a grade on the skills that they expect. Exams are standardized, granted that they are not perfect, but its closest to a system that works. Am not at the whims and fancies of an individual interviewer.

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#245

Post by Chyzwar » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 9:44 PM UTC

quickthrower2 wrote: post #214

Chyzwar wrote: post #191

Longer I work as a developer less frequently I google stuff. Most times I use google to find a project on Github and read docs. If I google for something specific then it is for finding better solution.

That implies you are not learning new things, or you are getting that info from books or some other source. Or you bookmark all docs pages or something?

I watch conference talks, contribute to open source, work on side projects. I have plenty of opportunities to learn. I just do not find googling that much compelling. It is more useful to read docs and try to debug instead instantly reaching for google.

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#246

Post by cbsks » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 9:44 PM UTC

cosmos14 wrote: post #204

bdcravens wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Yahoo isn't a search engine; the results are powered by another search engine (at this time, Bing)

I’ve tried Bing. Many of the result were unrelated to my question.

Google does such a good job with personalized results, that we have have forgotten how to search. Remember the old days when using a search engine effectively was a specialized skill? Search engines have gotten a lot better since then, but a lot of the improvements have been due to personalized results. It’s not easy to transition from Google to Bing or DuckDuckGo.

That being said, Google is also a good search engine, so it’s difficult to compete with them regardless of personalized results.

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#247

Post by lliamander » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 9:45 PM UTC

abalone wrote: post #75

This is great but the premise seems kind of straw man. I don’t know a single developer that thinks “googling stuff means you’re not a proper engineer.” Perhaps this is a reference to the interviewing process. Tests are a different thing, though. I’ve been on practical technical screens where you can google, because the test was about building a larger system, and they don’t care if you don’t remember this or that API…

> How often do you have to derive novel algos?

I have done what you could call deriving novel algorithms, and in a commercial context no less[1]. What is or is not an algorithm not very well defined. There was a famous paper which defined an algorithm as "logic + control", which could really describe any code that we write.

I think what the experience taught me (where a CS education might help) was how to think algorithmically. The point of algorithmic thinking and algorithmic code is to be able to prove (formally or informally) that certain undesirable states are impossible. Algorithms focused around performance have proofs that unnecessary computations are not performed, cryptographic algorithms have proofs that secrets are not revealed during the computation, concurrency algorithms prove that data races do not occur, and so on.

It's actually quite easy to apply this sort of thinking to highly problem-specific code. The more specific the code is, the stronger the guarantees you can prove.

What becomes more difficult is writing code that is both generic and is able to make interesting guarantees about the state space of it's execution. It's the code that kind of code (generic with strong guarantees) that are what people typically mean by "algorithms".

[1] Not really as bad as this https://xkcd.com/664/

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#248

Post by jteppinette » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 9:50 PM UTC

I use dash to keep all of the reference material for libraries and programming languages I use stored locally. It has cut my searches down to almost nothing. IMO, it is better to use the reference material, because it forces you to understand the mechanisms involved and solve the problem yourself vs looking up a solution. This act helps imprint the knowledge into your long term memory. Of course, this is my anecdotal experience. As an aside, having the docs local is a godsend when working without internet or on a bad connection.

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#249

Post by lliamander » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 9:52 PM UTC

blackflame7000 wrote: post #115

abalone wrote: post #75

This is great but the premise seems kind of straw man. I don’t know a single developer that thinks “googling stuff means you’re not a proper engineer.” Perhaps this is a reference to the interviewing process. Tests are a different thing, though. I’ve been on practical technical screens where you can google, because the test was about building a larger system, and they don’t care if you don’t remember this or that API…

Isn't that what a whiteboard interview is? Proving you can do things without google or else you aren't a proper engineer? (For the record I disdain whiteboard interviews as the accepted metric for testing one's ability)

I think whiteboard interviews are fine, so long as the candidate is told ahead of time what the subject the whiteboard test will be about and has time to study for it (perhaps even given a take-home coding assignment about the same subject) and where the subject is actually relevant to code that has been written at the company.

But I do think that Computer Science Jeopardy on a whiteboard is a bad idea.

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#250

Post by celticninja » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 9:58 PM UTC

_bxg1 wrote: post #95

abalone wrote: post #75

This is great but the premise seems kind of straw man. I don’t know a single developer that thinks “googling stuff means you’re not a proper engineer.” Perhaps this is a reference to the interviewing process. Tests are a different thing, though. I’ve been on practical technical screens where you can google, because the test was about building a larger system, and they don’t care if you don’t remember this or that API…

> I don’t know a single developer that thinks “googling stuff means you’re not a proper engineer.” I've met lots of younger devs who have varying degrees of impostor syndrome, so anecdotes like this probably help people like that feel less bad about not knowing everything.

I have this all the time, but to counter it I think about this time last year and it wouldn't have worked at all, now it works but it may be ugly, even better I almost understand why it works.