Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The best programmers are the quickest to Google

blog.framebase.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 205 posts

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#141

Post by static_typed »

I sat with a newbie programmer the other day. We sat there and made good use of third-party libraries, frameworks and code to get things moving, and concentrate on the core problem at hand.

Now, we had to Google a bit to install the third-party and dependency stuff, and tinker with configuration to get it all ready.

Eventually we delivered the GUI version of 'Hello World', and the newbie programmer had already progressed several steps when he remarked: "So, modern programming is basically building my code on top of other people's code, without really knowing how it all works, if it is really any good, and hoping it all works well enough to make the whole thing work".

Any he was right. Long gone is the time when we understood all the components and code for our entire domain.

And we are often the poorer for it.

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#142

Post by 1123581321 »

kbenson wrote: post #93
mobweb wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they key to becoming a non-beginner are the first two bits, not the third. It's developing that filter experts have which separates relevant information from irrelevant information. Lots of beginners use Google in a backwards sort of way, having been trained to "look for the solution." It's not about memorization, then, it's about this compression algorithm we call "being an expert." I think this goes pretty much…

It's not only knowing how to filter the results, but knowing what to Google for in the first place. Often results will be different if the search uses slightly different terminology, and knowing what the right terminology to use is requires a little bit of domain knowledge. Once you have the domain knowledge, not only is it easier to determine what results are more likely to yield useful information, but you also get…

Yes, my first steps in learning about something new are to search usin the words I know to find terms, then use those terms to find other terms, and to keep going until I have hit bottom. Then I read the books the people using the most expert terms recommend.

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#144

Post by calhoun137 »

I'm sorry but no. This article should be called "The best programmer I know can quickly understand things he finds from google, but I don't really know what he's doing that makes him so awesome".

Sure googling something fast can be a nice little boost to productivity, but only if you know what you are doing. If I drag and drop code from my web browser instead of using copy paste, I might save a few seconds after doing it 50 times; but if I totally fuck up my code-base because I don't know what the code is doing, then productivity is going to decrease significantly when the entire team gets backed into a corner and has to take the time to figure out where the bugs are, if/how to rewrite core systems, and hopefully this wont happen, but where the security holes are that let a hacker pwn your DB or worse.

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#145

Post by 3minus1 »

kbenson wrote: post #93
mobweb wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they key to becoming a non-beginner are the first two bits, not the third. It's developing that filter experts have which separates relevant information from irrelevant information. Lots of beginners use Google in a backwards sort of way, having been trained to "look for the solution." It's not about memorization, then, it's about this compression algorithm we call "being an expert." I think this goes pretty much…

It's not only knowing how to filter the results, but knowing what to Google for in the first place. Often results will be different if the search uses slightly different terminology, and knowing what the right terminology to use is requires a little bit of domain knowledge. Once you have the domain knowledge, not only is it easier to determine what results are more likely to yield useful information, but you also get…

I agree with this. I was recently amazed when a front-end developer came up with a google query that had much better results for a problem I was having.

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#146

Post by gchpaco »

groby_b wrote: post #121
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me give a non-programming example. It took me the best part of the weekend to drill twelve holes for curtains - because it is not enough to Google for the answers. Now, if you knock on a wall and it sounds hollow - you just google for hollow wall fixings. Great. I'll go buy some of those. Drill into the wall. And hit brick behind the plaster. Err... Ok they have invented a new type - dry lined Walls. The gap is s…

I cannot upvote you enough - especially on the first point. All the googling in the world is worthless without knowing what to Google for . The "trick" of expert[^1] programmers is to know the difference, and to slowly expand the base they can build on. [^1] An expert is merely a person who has learnt from more mistakes. There's nothing magical about it, as much as the cult of the rock star programmer would have us b…

"Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement." I think Nasrudin?

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#148

Post by LukeShu »

jfarmer wrote: post #75
jfarmer wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more broad than that. I'm pretty sure that's just what it means to be an expert at anything. You have a set of heuristics at work as an expert. To a beginner, everything has the same emphasis. They won't even be able to differentiate correct from incorrect in many cases. Watch a lawyer scan through a contract or a copyeditor edit your essay -- same thing. They catch in a second something you'd never catch in hou…

It's funny because that's perfectly backwards. :) Machine learning is a model of this thing we observe in ourselves. Don't mistake a picture of a pipe for the pipe itself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)

I'm not sure what your point is. What is the image, and what is the actual object?

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#150

Post by entropy_ »

kisielk wrote: post #138
joesb wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YAGNI. There's nothing wrong with not acquiring new skill either. It depends on how soon/often you will need to use the skill in the future. Also on how urgent you need to do it if the need arises.

The trick is having enough skill to be able to evaluate the professional you're going to hire. I've been bitten by this before both in my personal and professional life. If you don't know enough about the field even someone with only a marginal amount of knowledge about the topic can seem like an expert.

As programmers we see this all the time when non-technical people make very bad hiring decisions. It's a chicken and egg type problem for a non-technical (co-)founder to build a good team because(or find a technical co-founder) he/she needs a good programmer to evaluate potential hires but they can't make that evaluation themselves.

I would expect myself to encounter exactly the same problems others encounter when trying to hire good programmers when I'm trying to hire some other kind of expert in a field I have little experience in.

Post reply on HN