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Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?

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Re: Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?

#2

Post by hibikir »

Professional programmers get paid to solve problems. It just happens that many problems can be solved through google.

There's nothing to be ashamed of if you need to do a bunch of searches to get your job done. What we all should be wary of though, is to have a job so that all of our problems are solved through googling.

Where we really earn our money is when we create something that wasn't there before, solving original problems.

Re: Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?

#4

Post by MisterBastahrd »

How dare a developer double check his work to make sure he's going down the right path and has an optimal solution. Instead, he should sit around for a few hours trying to figure out why his B-Tree traversal is suboptimal. Because that's the best use of a client's time.

Re: Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?

#5

Post by bargl »

I love Scott's response here. He comes at it by saying that feeling this way is not just OK but normal and then expanding on ways that you can overcome this by doing practice problems.

This has been a great boon to my confidence lately as when I'm working the mode I get in is to solve a problem as fast as possible because if I don't I'm wasting my companies money... I don't always get the time to think about the problem (which I recognize is not a great environment but it's easy to fall into). So googling something and taking the first working answer sometimes seems the best thing to do even though deep down I know it isn't.

That is why I do practice problems, they force me to think and give me a chance to ease off of Google. Great advice as from Scott.

Re: Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?

#7

Post by llamataboot »

amaks wrote: post #3

That's very easy to tell during a coding and problem solving interview.

Sure, just do whiteboard coding of a difficult algorithm because it replicates actual coding conditions quite nicely I'd much rather see what a candidate can come up with while working at their leisure, using their favorite IDE, googling syntax and other questions, testing, and having time to refactor than see what they will come up with on the fly, under pressure, without any tools available to them.

Re: Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?

#8

Post by khnd »

nnnnni wrote: post #6
amaks wrote: post #3

That's very easy to tell during a coding and problem solving interview.

I'd rather hire someone who is able to use available resources efficiently than someone who just has a really good memory.

The goal of the problem solving interview is more to see the candidates reasoning process and less the ability to recall the problem and reproduce a solution. I like interviews where the problems are more open ended and the interviewer is active in the process and it's more of a discussion towards a solution and THEN coding or at least some pseudocode.

I've had interviews where I'll be asked some canned algo/data structures problem (some version of knearest, or longest substring) and then the interviewer will tune out- these are mostly lame.

Re: Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?

#9

Post by eric_cc »

nnnnni wrote: post #6
amaks wrote: post #3

That's very easy to tell during a coding and problem solving interview.

I'd rather hire someone who is able to use available resources efficiently than someone who just has a really good memory.

This. I've also had co-workers hell-bent on building out over-the-top unnecessary solutions (albeit sometimes neat in a technical sense) to problems that already had existing solutions that we could have easily leveraged and saved lots of time (money). Being able to leverage resources efficiently so that you are able to get more done is valuable. Go crazy and solve big problems when necessary but don't be afraid of using Google or any other resource to get through the rest.
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