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

31–40 of 205 posts

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#31

Post by benaiah »

ry0ohki wrote: post #25

I've always believed this, of course then I worked at a company that wrote it's own programming language for it's product, and there was nothing to Google for (I still don't understand why they did this but stay with me). In that environment, you learn quickly what skills separate a good programmer from a bad one. The traits I found the most useful: -Learning speed (ability to quickly grasp a completely foreign conce…

Just out of curiosity, were you working at Fog Creek? What you said reminded me of an article[1] by Jeff Atwood.

1: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/has-joel-spolsky-ju...

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#34

Post by jlarocco »

nnoitra wrote: post #24

To be honest I completely agree with the quote. The most important thing should be the ability to reason about Computer Science and programming. On the other hand, I've written and implemented tons of Algorithms and DTs for the sole purpose of learning. I have a lot of accumulated toy code. "So unless you’ve already memorized that sorting algorithm by heart, why in the world would you want to spend 2 hours trying to…

I think the article has an implied context of "for work."

Implementing data structures and algorithms is a great way to learn about them and to get better at programming. But in the context of work, where I need to get stuff done, I'm not going to implement a low level algorithm if I don't need to - I'm looking for a pre-built solution in the standard library, or heading to a search engine to find a third party library.

That's not to say some training time at work isn't a good idea, but it'd be silly for a person's business to fail because they got caught up implementing all of their low level data structures for coding practice.

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#36

Post by vu0tran »

pav3l wrote: post #32

>why in the world would you want to spend 2 hours trying to figure it out yourself? I am sure a large portion of HN-ers (myself included) enjoy doing exactly that. I want to spend my day solving problems , not googling shit.

> Excluding for fun and educational purposes

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#37

Post by nnoitra »

pav3l wrote: post #32

>why in the world would you want to spend 2 hours trying to figure it out yourself? I am sure a large portion of HN-ers (myself included) enjoy doing exactly that. I want to spend my day solving problems , not googling shit.

I agree, the pleasure is arriving at the solution yourself. That's why CS is so appealing to so many people. It's fun and when you correctly solve a tough technical problem you feel great.

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#38

Post by mobweb »

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…

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 for everything that you do using Google, not just programming. I do some on-site user support on the side, fixing end user PC problems. Most people watching me over my shoulders are usually shocked to see that I have to Google the solutions for most problems.

Once the shock wears off, they are actually fascinated by how I seem to be able to instantly filter between relevant and non-relevant content and search results. Some even tell me that they've Googled for hours for a problem that people who have this "filter" ability can probably find a solution for in under a minute...

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#39

Post by jiggy2011 »

Most annoying thing ever was doing IT work at a company where internet access was not granted to employees below a certain paygrade.

The amount of times I'd run into a problem and then instinctively fire up the browser just to get the "cannot connect to google.com" message.

They handed out ringbinders full of notes to staff insisting that everything we needed was in there.

Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google

#40

Post by Legion »

0x0 wrote: post #27

I think the key takeaway here is not just being the quickest to Google, but the quickest to google well . It's so frustrating to see people trying to google a problem, but fumbling with a poorly written query and/or focus on the wrong search result hit snippets.

People call it Google-Fu for a reason.

You could probably tell a lot about a candidate by how they Google for things. To effectively search, you have to effectively define the problem. Often that means having the understanding to redefine your specific problem into a more generic one that you can search for. Ineffective searchers will struggle to do that, or worse, simply throw words into the search bar and expect a magical answer.

Post reply on HN