The best programmers are the quickest to Google • Hacker News Board

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#201

Post by zeidrich » Tue, Feb 26, 2013, 6:16 PM UTC

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #94

jfarmer wrote: post #14

Yes and no. I'm a co-founder of http://devbootcamp.com so I see this every day in the context of people learning to be programmers. "The best programmers I know understand how to architect and build large projects piece by piece. They can focus on the macro because don’t get hung up in the pieces. They know how to use Google to find solutions fast. DRY." I agree with the first and second bit and strictly speaking the…

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…

Yes, but the thing is you didn't build the drill, you didn't cast the fixings, you didn't design the drill bits.

It's one thing to google for a sorting algorithm, find one that doesn't work correctly, and learn about it in the process. And from your post it sounds like you learned a bit about hanging curtains just from your google experience.

The article is arguing against thinking "I need to hang curtains" and gathering together bits of materials that you have lying around the house to try to make it work. Someone has made the drill, and maybe you don't know which drill it is you need, but the right answer is most definitely not "build your own drill".

In programming, people will quite often go and build their own drill. I guess this is less of a DRY problem than a NIH problem.

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#202

Post by Groxx » Tue, Feb 26, 2013, 6:49 PM UTC

joesb wrote: post #134

jacquesm wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3. Hire a professional while you go and do revenue generating work. Nothing wrong with acquiring a new skill. And next time you know how to do it.

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.

I find most of the benefit of learning new skills is in how they supplement other skills. I may very well never need to drill into masonry or have dry lined walls - by knowing that they exist, I can ask better questions.

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#203

Post by sirmarksalot » Tue, Feb 26, 2013, 6:51 PM UTC

windexh8er wrote: post #60

nollidge wrote: post #49

This is something that bugs me about whiteboard-style interviews - they test almost none of the typical day-to-day aspects of programming. Without Google, without docs, without a REPL, without the code-run-debug cycle, how is it that you think you're assessing how effective I am in real life ? EDIT: not to mention that you're also not testing me for one of the most important abilities of a coder in a software shop: h…

Is anybody going down the path of giving the candidate X hours yo complete a project, shoe iterations via source control history, showcase documentation and the overall build - plan? I would think you'd find the high performers easier in this light. Not being a programmer by day but proficient in bash and Python I was in an interview last year where the person asking the questions did just not get it. In one example…

My best explanation is that a lot of programmers have Asperger's syndrome, and in a pinch, some of them will be called upon to take part in an interview loop.

I once had an interview where the interviewer asked me to write him a partial template specification in C++. Any time I gave him anything that wasn't exactly right syntactically, he would just say "uh uh," with no further feedback. I did eventually get it, at which point he moved on to bit manipulation questions, which I must admit were somewhat outside the box of what one normally expect from an interview, so I'll give him credit for that. Needless to say, I didn't get the job.

Later that day, I Googled the interviewer, and found his home page, which had a collection of clever bit twiddling hacks he'd collected over the years. I guess that's important or something.

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#204

Post by bad_user » Tue, Feb 26, 2013, 8:11 PM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #183

bad_user wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good doctors are pattern matchers. In complex cases they do research by reading books or asking others, but they already have a good idea in what's going on. A doctor that can only recognize diseases like the common cold is not a good one. Your example is exaggerated and also, the patient may already be dead by the time the investigation is over, which is worsened by the fact that aggressive treatments (like strong a…

>>Your example is exaggerated and also No, This is the normal trend here in India. And unfortunately lives are cheap here. Its not like in US that you can sue people, in other parts of the world things are a lot more different. There is practically no regulation in countries like India.

Well I wasn't talking about particular health-care systems, but rather about good doctors, of which you can find everywhere, albeit in a minority.

I don't live in the US. I live in Romania, which has a ruined public healthcare system, but even here I've met medical personnel that's worth their salt.

As an example my now 3-year old suffered from a severe allergic reaction called "Lyle's syndrome" (look it up). We went to the hospital in the early stages and the doctor that took the case immediately recognized it, even though at first it looked like some kind of severe cold/flu (coming in combination with tonsillitis and fever).

After several hours of being hospitalized, his skin pealed off in certain areas, but he was already on both antibiotics and corticoids and so the reaction wasn't so severe as it could have been (imagine your whole skin pealed off, with the same effect as second or third-degree burns). And the problem with weird allergic reactions is that antibiotics from the cephalosporins class or other medicine that produces allergic reactions can kill you.

Also, our doctor went basically blind for the whole time, because the blood tests you perform when the patient is under treatment are mostly useless, being used only to discover how well or not the patient is responding to treatment. For instance she discovered a bacterial infection, which is known to cause Lyle's syndrome, but was it an external infection that caused it or because of an imbalance of intestinal flora due to antibiotics? We also gave him antibiotics before hospitalizing him, that might have also caused this reaction. Lyle's syndrome is known to be caused by both antibiotics and bacterial infections.

The root cause in the case of Lyle's syndrome is extremely important because the treatment and severity of the reaction differs. Our doctor basically took a guess based on how his skin looked.

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#205

Post by fnbaptiste » Tue, Feb 26, 2013, 11:02 PM UTC

Agree and disagree. I'm very good at finding solutions fast with Google, but those solutions only work for me because I know what I'm doing. I know several developers (or designers who do a bit of development) who rely too heavily on other people's code for every problem they encounter. As a result their work is often riddled with conflicts and often doesn't work quite the way they originally intended. Everything becomes a work around. When everything breaks they have no idea how to fix it. Lately I find if I know how to build it from scratch I'd much rather do that