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Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

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

#261

Post by pmontra »

lunchables wrote: post #137
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 see it at least a couple times a week on sub-reddits related to software development. Junior devs who are convinced more senior developers are super-geniuses who know everything from memory.

We (I'm 50+) know for sure many more things and I see the surprise of junior developers but the exact details? There are too many of them, especially because senior developers often are not narrowly focused on a single part of a project.

A simple example. I'm working with Rails, Django, Phoenix and React (3 different projects). I know I need to do a strftime but I don't remember the exact details in any of Ruby, Python, Elixir and JavaScript. I always google them or grep the source code for other instances.

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

#263

Post by rolltiide »

abalone wrote: post #108
rolltiide wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t know a single developer that thinks “googling stuff means you’re not a proper engineer.” Yes the whole interview process is based on the idea of doing stuff for the company that you wouldn't actually do. Indeed I interview my candidate's ability to find resources, to know what considerations are needed, how to deal with IDEs, collaborative tools, the git protocol. I will fire someone on the spot for impleme…

And I think those “maker” types of roles don’t need a hard C.S. screen. But algorithms aren’t just about reimplementing the classics. There are points even in ordinary “DB front end” type of work where understanding algos will affect how you scale. You may find you’ve just been getting away with brute force approaches because that data sets were small. You can go very far like that but there may come a day when it ma…

I don't disagree with you, and it all comes up after the 20 second standup and in the code reviews, not in the interview, and not in a two week long orientation

Overfitting for the possibility that it might be necessary in a design choice is not the way to gatekeep candidates

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

#264

Post by dang »

iamleppert wrote: post #47

That list of things reads like a bad cliche of the narrow view mindset in some of SV that doing web development somehow amounts to software engineering. Web development, unless you’re doing something novel, is not software engineering. Getting some hodge-poge of react drivel to work is not engineering no more than configuring a router is software engineering. Choose your words with more precision.

Please don't do programming flamewars here. They aren't interesting, and past experience has shown that they can destroy a forum.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#265

Post by jplayer01 »

RHSeeger wrote: post #205
wil421 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve asked pre-internet programmers and they said they used to keep reference books at their desk or even a small library/book room at their employers. I’ve heard some government contractors can’t google because they work on non-internet connected computers. They probably keep a lot of books.

That's what I did at the time. I only got rid of my series of Java 2, Motif, Xlib/Xt, etc programming books when I moved a few years back.

But what if you need them again?

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

#266

Post by anaphor »

Chyzwar wrote: post #245
quickthrower2 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's also more satisfying, and you often end up with a better understanding of things if you try to deduce the solution to a problem before just typing in something you might not really understand (and potentially breaking shit).

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

#267

Post by tzumby »

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 bet you can train a model to predict your skill based on your google searches related to software development.

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

#268

Post by levythe »

abalone wrote: post #177
blackflame7000 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally understand your philosophy and you make some great suggestions, but overall there's one big flaw with whiteboard interviews: Artificial Pressure and its impact on people's ability to think clearly on the spot. I am a very methodical thinker which is why I tend to prefer work in large scale ore high-performance systems where you consider the implications of thread contention and so forth. I've designed and b…

> Obviously I was laughed at for someone who's actually had 10 years experience with c++ to forget something so basic but it happens when you are on the spot. This 100% happened to me (apart from being laughed at) only it was even more of a meltdown. Also 10 years experience and a problem I could do in my sleep. It was my first interview after a long time and it triggered performance anxiety and nervousness. The solu…

If the system is so poorly evaluating people that they have to train an irrelevant set of skills to succeed in it, what does that say about the system?

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

#269

Post by deathanatos »

Do yourself a favor and set up browser shortcuts. In Chrome, for example, you can add custom search engines. If you set the search URL to:

  https://google.com/search?q=site:docs.python.org/3+%s&btnI
(That last character is a capital "eye"/I, for "I'm".) It does a Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" search for your query, and restricts the results to the Python docs. So, e.g., I can type:

  py enum
And get the Python docs for the enum module.

I recommend this for MDN, too, e.g. I can type,

  mdn map type
and get the JS `Map` docs.

I need to add one for crates.io & the Rust STL. Note, of course, that this sends your searches to Google by virtue of using the "I'm Feeling Lucky" functionality.

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

#270

Post by dharmab »

InitialLastName wrote: post #228
wil421 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve asked pre-internet programmers and they said they used to keep reference books at their desk or even a small library/book room at their employers. I’ve heard some government contractors can’t google because they work on non-internet connected computers. They probably keep a lot of books.

A friend works at a military contractor doing (effectively) windows GUIs for power system controls. His only access to an internet-connected computer is on his breaks, where he has to wait in line to use one of a very small number of computers in a special room to google things. I don't think he has books, but he has an enormous amount of documentation (something like the whole MSDN library, a bunch of internal docum…

I hope they can get a StackOverflow offline archive https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
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