11 ms·

Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?

158 points by reinhardt 10y ago

CydeWeys 10y ago
Not gonna lie, I couldn't make heads nor tails of this blog post until I reached the very end, and realized they were using "Googler" to mean "doing Google searches". I kept thinking "Why would being a good developer and being a Googler be mutually exclusive?!"
- melling 10y ago
  I didn't read the article and I knew what he meant. 20 years ago I'd buy books to learn Java, Linux, etc. These days if I want to learn something, I just start Googling. I still think organized and structured information is helpful. We just need to devise a better way. I'm using Github for some things: https://github.com/melling/ComputerLanguages https://github.com/melling/ComputerLanguages And for Swift and iOS where I want to go deeper, I'm creating my own Cookbook, and perhaps my own search engine: http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift_cookbook.html http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift_cookbook.html
  - asoplata 10y ago
    That ComputerLanguages repo, wow! This is really awesome! And far, far superior to my own store/collection of helpful links by language by far :(. I may just stop altogether collecting helpful links on languages I may never, ever use, when there're such better lists and guides (like yours) out there that I can search if I ever need to. There are far more programming languages/ideas than there is time.
  - CydeWeys 10y ago
    You didn't grok the point of my comment, so let me expand on it. Someone who works at Google is called a "Googler". When you are used to constantly hearing a word used with meaning A, and almost never meaning B, it can be quite confusing when you hear it in a context where someone uses meaning B, especially when meaning A sort of fits. So you can imagine my confusion when I parsed the entire article as "Why would being a good software engineer and [working for Google] be mutually exclusive? They usually go hand-in-hand!"
    - melling 10y ago
      I did understand your comment. I know someone who works at Google is called a Googler. However, from the context of the subject, I knew a person who worked at Google would not have such a worry, while someone who learned how to program by Googling would have such a worry. Many programmers are self-taught. It's gotta be quite common to wonder if you know enough to do a particular job if you're Google'ibg your way to proficiency.
      - CydeWeys 10y ago
        Actually, imposter syndrome is more common at Google than most other companies. This makes sense; imposter syndrome comes from a mismatch of judging your own talents versus that you perceive from your peers, so you are more likely to feel unsure of your own abilities when your coworkers are world-class leaders of their field than if they are just random average engineers. A lot of attention is paid to raising awareness of imposter syndrome during new employee orientation, and all new employees are assigned a mentor to help guide them through their initial months, again with lots of emphasis placed on ensuring that people feel like they belong.
- OJFord 10y ago
  I did the same thing - didn't get it until "try programming for a day without Googling". Was expecting some blog post about someone concerned he was just 'going through the motions' working at Google; not 'really developing anything'.. ha.
  - CydeWeys 10y ago
    Yes, that is exactly how I interpreted it.
88e282102ae2e5b 10y ago
I feel ridiculous saying this, but my secret is that I read the documentation of whatever tool I'm using. Google answers beginner questions so well that I never even thought to do this when I was first learning, and when googling started to fail me I would just fall back on the scientific method to figure out how a library worked. Perhaps it was a good exercise in critical thinking, but it was terrible for productivity.
- alistproducer2 10y ago
  Yep, documentation and source when googling begins to fail.
  - zo1 10y ago
    And occasionally you'll happen to come across a bug in a library you thought was beyond your understanding/comprehension.
    - alistproducer2 10y ago
      I actually enjoy finding/fixing bugs in OSS. I strive to be more of an engineer than a developer. Learning how large projects are put together and maintained help make me a better engineer.
    - buu700 10y ago
      I've found this to be the case much more often than "occasionally" since I've started habitually comparing third-party software's behaviour to relevant specs/documentation rather than assuming whatever the implementation does is correct. I've caught and reported several Chrome vulnerabilities this way just in the course of normal usage, and have to work around bugs in libraries that my code depends on (often involving poking around said libraries' code for insight into the problem) on a fairly regular basis.
hashkb 10y ago
Wait... big difference between Googling, even a lot; and copying code. If you mindlessly copy code and it works, even once, without really understanding (e.g. could you teach the pattern/trick/concept/etc to a teammate?) you are a bad developer. All things being equal, if you are a great Googler (or doc reader, or whiteboard question asker) that is an aspect of being a strong dev.
tumbas 10y ago
there is no work unless you take the hoe and break a sweat
logicallee 10y ago
I propose an extension to DRY (don't repeat yourself) called DRO (don't repeat others), meaning if anyone has ever done it you shouldn't have to do it again. Then it's easy to tell whether you're googling or developing: "am I writing something nobody did EVER /trying to improve the state of the art of xyz?" If yes, you should understand deeply and "develop", if no you should be searching and changing variable names. If you're writing a new framework - then by all means! actually understand the code. If not, you shouldn't have to.
- shrugger 10y ago
  I don't agree with this. Developers should try to always understand the code they are working on. Keep your stack small, understand it as best you can, and use that knowledge to solve problems. That's what programming is. Smushing a bunch of frameworks together until the code works isn't going to help anybody improve, and I think it's fundamentally contributive to the larger issue. If you don't understand the code you're writing or reading, it follows suit that it probably isn't going to work that well or be easy to maintain.
  - logicallee 10y ago
    If everyone is keeping their stack small, everyone is doing the same thing over and over and over again. Why shouldn't we copy best practices over without understanding it? Should you really spend an hour vertically aligning an element in a compatible way, when you could copy and paste in 30 seconds and go straight to testing the code you didn't read, write, or understand - and see that it does exactly as advertised? Why shouldn't programmers have a division of labor? Why should everyone understand everything?
    - shrugger 10y ago
      I'm not really prepared to explain why being ignorant about your tools is toxic to good work, but I'll offer this: If everyone knew C, would they keep writing the same code over and over? Obviously not. They'd find new ways to compose what they've already written to create whatever they want. It's not a waste of time for more than one person to know how to do something. People start from the bottom and learn their way up. In your example, what happens the next time they need to align another element? They either copy and paste whatever they did before, or google it again, right? If they had taken five minutes to learn it before that, they'd already know how to do it, and could just write it. Redundant knowledge is not a bad thing.
BatFastard 10y ago
Being a googler will often reveal solutions to specific problems. However it rarely reveals if you should choose that solution, or the architecture that it fits in, or anything larger than an algorithm.
shrugger 10y ago
I feel like the whole impostor syndrome thing has gone too far. At this point, we have legitimately talented developers questioning whether or not they are 'good' enough and it is actually quite frustrating to see. I sort of understand it from the students' perspectives, because they have a professor to compare themselves to and aspire to, I think in that scenario it spurs self-improvement but in the workplace it seems like it would only be counterproductive at best to compare yourself to other coworkers or even other people in the field. I remember when I first started, I never thought "Shit, will I ever be as good at Scheme as Sussman?" I just worked the exercises and kept moving forward. Nowadays, there seems to be a real strong pressure to be aware of all the new technologies, newest libraries, and all this material that nobody could ever possibly have time to completely understand, and it drives people crazy, I think.
- hashkb 10y ago
  Have to point out: we also have legitimately terrible developers using Impostor Syndrome as a political tool to keep their jobs and write whiny blog posts. Everyone should have a healthy way of dealing with feeling inadequate, besides whining. (e.g. learning things)
  - shrugger 10y ago
    It's even a meta-issue! So, how do we find out which people are whining and which aren't? How do we encourage people to just learn and self-improve rather than sink to escapism?
  - jjoonathan 10y ago
    If your answer to FOMO / imposter syndrome is "learn more" then you'll quickly find yourself mired in analysis paralysis. It's a strategy that simply doesn't scale to today's world where there is more to learn than can be learned. A better strategy is to develop a sense for the marginal value of learning so that you can decide at some point to stop learning and start working (or, equivalently, choose the right mix of the two). This still leaves the psychological problem unaddressed, so solutions that tackle it head on have their place. The solution for dealing with actual imposters is to fire them. If, somehow, they manage to use "imposter syndrome" as a deflection (I haven't seen this play in the wild and I'm not convinced it's prevalent or even could be made to work), then gather evidence that they aren't pulling their weight and proceed to use it. If that doesn't work, it's not because of some stupid blog post, it's because there's stronger politics at play. Abort/retry/ignore as warranted.
pistle 10y ago
Flip the question. Am I being a good developer if I'm not Googling it? You are a creative problem solver. You have to understand your problem and put together a solution. Within defined constraints of time, budget, and quality, you must solve your problem. Solid understanding of good developer practices and general algorithm or application design principles marries WELL with talent in processing information from the web. Bringing them together, you get past "solved" challenges in completing your current task or project done. I'd argue that being adequate at both is better. Relying too much on either facet is worse than being good at both with a talent for bringing the two together.
13of40 10y ago
I think this hits on a tenet of modern development, which is that if you find yourself actually implementing an algorithm, be it a sort, compression, crypto, or whatever, you're probably programming badly. That's not to say that your implementation won't work, but that there's already a library that does it and a well-worn design pattern that takes advantage of it, and you can find both of those in a few minutes on google / stackoverflow. Edit: I am in no way saying you shouldn't try to understand the algorithm. Coding it yourself is fine exercise for a rainy Sunday morning, but it's (usually) not the best way to do your day job.
- Xcelerate 10y ago
  I don't know. You'd be amazed how many common algorithms don't have good libraries for them (particularly for newer languages).
spo81rty 10y ago
As a developer you can't know everything about everything. We commonly have to solve problems we are have never solved before. We have to use APIs we have never used before. Google makes a huge difference in learning how.
askyourmother 10y ago
A good developer will Google for direction to help get a little clarity on a problem, maybe to review alternative ideas and solutions. A bad developer will blindly copy and paste and use that. Painting-by-numbers, Coding-by-google. I have seen the problems with the latter, where a team of offshore devs built a monster Java codebase by "doing the needful", which in this case was cutting and pasting from the first result in Google. One of the devs was different, he would cut and paste from bing. Fun times.
- paganel 10y ago
  I guess that's a +1 for Google's SERPs when it comes to programming, unlike how bad they do in other search sub-domains. But I'm biased, I'm an off-shore programmer who has copy-pasted code snippets from Google searches countless times (they were SE links in 99% of the cases). Of course I could have copied the code by hand in order to feel morally superior, but as I am lazy I didn't see any need for that. At least I always made sure to include a link to the SE page from where the code snippet had been taken, so lets hope that SE won't change their link structure anytime soon.
chiph 10y ago
If I'm doing something I don't normally do (data access code, XML parsing, etc), yeah, I'm going to look it up. And not feel any shame about it. This might be because I started out in the engineering program in college, and one of the tenets there is "don't trust your memory - look it up. Otherwise people die."
JohnIdol 10y ago
Google is just an extension of our memory nowadays - it's not worth it memorising stuff you know you can google, eventually if you google it often enough it'll stick. And googling will do you no good if you have no idea what you are doing.
ThomPete 10y ago
It doesn't matter. As long as you can do what you want to do with code you are a developer. Whether looking up code on google or in a reference book.
- exodust 10y ago
  I agree. Especially when by "Google" we basically mean Stack Overflow. I end up there a lot, and the benefit is often in the comments and different takes on a problem. I've learned so many good Jquery tricks from that place, I owe the network and users a great debt. One can often learn why something is the wrong answer too, which is valuable information. With web frontend, often the best solution is a combination of Jquery and good old vanilla JS, and getting that balance right... come on, let's face it, we need to help each other get there.
alistproducer2 10y ago
A good engineer uses any tool that makes them a better engineer. You think people who can recite algorithms also have the ability to learn a api, library, or framework without googling or reading documentation?
tmpanon1234act 10y ago
People need to focus more on getting results. We're collectively so steeped in posturing about technology stacks and idiosyncratic decisionmaking that we've missed the bigger picture: get something done. For instance, anyone who says they factored in all the tradeoffs and then chose Haskell isn't trying to get things done or build a sustainable business - they're trying to orchestrate a technological boondoggle. At the end of the day no one cares if you're a good developer. They care that the service looks good and works well. Googling is how you build a better service ergo do it and don't worry about it.
- smileysteve 10y ago
  > We're collectively so steeped in posturing about technology stacks and idiosyncratic decisionmaking that we've missed the bigger picture: get something done. > At the end of the day no one cares if you're a good developer. They care that the service looks good and works well. Those decisions lead over time to an architecture that can good or bad, and assuming your software has patches or improvements over time, that's important. Context: I've worked with too many startups with non-dry untested code that are now getting past "looks good and works well" to needs to drastically expand feature set or change underlying features.
  - tmpanon1234act 10y ago
    We do heavy backend unit/integration testing, less so on the frontend and a lot of UAT. It's good enough to move fast with some confidence but yes sometimes you have to do tough things and that comes from experience. I recently wrote a distributed, cache-coherent session store for instance. Googling is necessary not sufficient.
anotheryou 10y ago
Who cares about the label? Just know what you can or can not accomplish and act accordingly.
blazespin 10y ago
protip: flashcards. If you ever find yourself reaching for a detail you think you should know offhand, make sure you add it and study on a regular basis. You'll stop feeling like an impostor.
buckbova 10y ago
15 years with positions from analyst, engineer, to architect and I still Google something for work every day. I don't feel bad about this at all. I remember when I couldn't Google. Those were tough days.
- Roboprog 10y ago
  Products in the 80s and early 90s usually came with books. Some of which were pretty good, if you could get access to the books.
Manishearth 10y ago
As someone who has been programming in Rust since before 1.0, I have been through the probably rare experience of working with an un-Googleable language. I relied solely on docs and occasionally the mercy of helpful folks on IRC, and it turned out OK. A side effect of this is that I still never Google for Rust answers, even though there are tons to be found now. However, if I was programming in Javascript, which has been the language I've known for the longest and done the most in, I would still Google everything because I'm lazy. I'm pretty sure I don't need to, it's just faster. It's possible to be a Google-programmer out of laziness and not necessity. Diving into an un-googleable language (or ecosystem -- many closed-source ecosystems at work would be un-googleable or undocumented; I recall that understanding the codebase for my internship required me to either read tons of code or ask people with arcane inside knowledge) can help hone these skills. Or just promise to not use Google for something.
- programLyrique 10y ago
  For rust, although there are now lots of answers, many use uncompatible versions of rust with the current one in my exprience, so still rather un-Googleable.
- bobbytherobot 10y ago
  Usually when I search Google for JavaScript language or DOM API, I'll start my search with "mdn" to get the relevant Mozilla documentation.
colund 10y ago
This kind of "imposter syndrome" in software development is for me rather foreign. I've never been born with a silver spoon and I've seen lots of people who are math and programming geniuses but I've worked very hard at learning development and know how to do a good job now. I find it waste of energy to philosophise on whether one is good or not. To my ears it sounds almost like humble brag. Or a question from a girlfriend "am I ugly?" where the correct answer is not yes... :)
phamilton 10y ago
I've recently started defining my skill set as an engineer rather than a developer. The difference, to me at least, is one of execution vs implementation. Implementation can be done by a good Googler. Execution requires good communication, recognizing and challenging assumptions, making worthwhile tradeoffs, etc. It's been a little bizarre to see how this focus has changed my development. I sit in on team discussions about coding style and design patterns and find it quite uninteresting. I code as much as the next person on the team, so I'm not aspiring to be an ivory tower architect or anything, but I find weighing in on engineering decisions adds far greater value.
- turaw 10y ago
  For comparison, I would normally define an 'x' developer (depending on specialty) as anyone who writes code and a software engineer as a developer whose job description involves engineering, per the American Engineers' Council for Professional Development [1]: "The creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination; or to construct or operate the same with full cognizance of their design; or to forecast their behavior under specific operating conditions; all as respects an intended function, economics of operation or safety to life and property." In my ideal world, every developer would do what you're describing as engineering, and the software engineers would be those who far exceed those requirements.
icedchai 10y ago
Good developers are good Googlers.
- GrumpyYoungMan 10y ago
  But are good Googlers necessarily good developers? Most likely not.
iamben 10y ago
Been talking about this a lot with friends/peers recently. Personally I think half the skill is knowing what to Google. My mum's husband is a painter and decorator. Every house is different, but he has built up a set of skills over the years he's been active that allow him to broadly apply his knowledge to understand how to solve a problem. Similarly, I can't always solve the problem, but I do know where to start asking questions, and I do know how to follow those up efficiently. Is this when I Google for the docs, for answers to a problem, for a place to find help? And then after that, it's about knowing the next steps, knowing which part is likely to be the next relevant thing to Google/research. Do I get stuff done? Sure. Do I remember how to do it next time? Sometimes. But sometimes it's just enough to know how to start solving the next problem. I think we just feel a bit fraudulent because Google is easier. I'd be surprised if anyone ever said "Am I good at xxxxx or just good at going to the library, choosing the right books and reading the required parts?"
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  >>Been talking about this a lot with friends/peers recently. Personally I think half the skill is knowing what to Google. Yes, exactly. I said this a few days ago in another similar discussion: Google is really good at "meta-guidance." If I search for something and don't get any results, it means I'm either asking the question incorrectly, or I'm trying to solve the wrong problem. Which brings me to the subject at hand: if someone is really good at Google'ing answers on a topic, then they're most likely good at that topic. I believe it was Einstein who said (I may be misattributing the quote here): never memorize something you can look up easily.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > Which brings me to the subject at hand: if someone is really good at Google'ing answers on a topic, then they're most likely good at that topic. So much this. I noticed this myself. When I google for information in the domains I know, I can be extremely efficient, because I know what to ask for and how to evaluate both results and the metadata - i.e. how much results I got, how good/crappy they are, etc. But when I try to search for information on topics I have little to no experience in, I struggle to find what I'm looking for. And more often than not, I'm left with this feeling of incompleteness, like the information I needed was still out there, if I could only phrase my query correctly...
sarreph 10y ago
Can anybody shed light on how Googling for programming answers is seen in the workplace? I've always been a solo / start-up developer (for now), and sometimes I sit back and think about how my (often zealous) use of SO and Google would bode with a team of developers in an office. Would I be considered (to use a loaded term) an impostor if I was seen to be using SO a lot, even if I produced good results? -- I think that last point — of good results — is key, but I am curious to how co-workers perceive this kind of productivity...
- wahnfrieden 10y ago
  Everyone at the workplaces I've been in uses SO and Google frequently. The difference comes with how resourcefully they're used - more senior devs tend to be more efficient in seeking out accurate answers, while juniors may find misleading info, info irrelevant to the version or environment they're using, info that they have trouble adapting to their specific needs; or may have more trouble finding the best search terms to use; or may simply take longer to scan through results.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  As somebody who has worked in small and medium-sized businesses, I don't even understand the discussion. If I can find on the web some way or some better way to do something that I want to do, I literally put the link in the comments to my code.
  - zappo2938 10y ago
    My code is littered with links to SO, GitHub, and tutorial blogs. I have no shame. I put getting a job done correctly and fast over what other people think of me. Use as many ideas from other people, but try to contribute your own.
    - exodust 10y ago
      Yikes, another one. I dunno... maybe I'm behind the times. I don't like web links in code comments myself unless it's the comment above a plugin that you wouldn't touch anyway. I remember a fellow developer used to curse in his comments. Expletives about what he didn't like etc. Funny the first time I saw it, then got annoying.
zw123456 10y ago
This topic is very interesting to me from a little different perspective. I am a senior member of technical staff at a very large company and often managers will have me sit in on job interviews with candidates to cover the technical side. Recently, I sat in an interview and I had my list of questions. It was a telephone interview (1st round, not uncommon), I noticed that I could hear subtle typing in the background as the manager asked various questions. When it came time for the technical questions, I could hear a lot more typing. It occurred to me that the candidate was probably googling the answers. After the interview I mentioned it to the manager and she said "so, isn't that how you guys do it anyhow ?". I was a little taken back and have to admit I did not have any response. But, at least for this manager, how good someone is at googling the answers is a legitimate point of evaluation for a prospective candidate. I admit I use google, stackexchange and etc. to find answers, but it is not my primiary source of information and I just don't think it is a substitute for knowledge, is it ? This bothered me very much.
- hackinthebochs 10y ago
  > but it is not my primiary source of information and I just don't think it is a substitute for knowledge, is it ? I think this is the real problem of the "just google it!" culture in programming. Expertise is devalued, even seen as wasteful. But ultimately you'll never create anything genuinely new if you don't have a strong base of knowledge to work from. Googling the details is great, but you have to have an idea of what to google if you're doing anything beyond the most basic development.
shanselman 10y ago
Gosh, this is a pretty old post. Maybe add (2013) to the title. Source: I wrote the post.
Xcelerate 10y ago
It's the same thing when people ask me for help with computer problems. The first thing I ask is "Did you Google the error message?" And then I normally Google it for them and the first result is typically a forum post with someone else who had the problem, and someone else has usually posted a solution.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  I used to feel the same way. Then I realized that it's not just about Google'ing the error message. It's also about having enough experience and knowledge to figure out which of the suggested solutions are both safe to try and likely to solve the issue. It may seem silly, but most people who work with computers are genuinely worried about doing the wrong thing (e.g. clicking the wrong button) and permanently breaking something. This is why, at the first sign of trouble, they come to us geeks with their tails tucked between their legs.
  - Xcelerate 10y ago
    > they come to us geeks with their tails tucked between their legs. That's fine with me; I do the same thing when my car breaks or there is an electrical problem. Some things I don't mind tinkering with — for other things I would rather take the "simple" problem to an expert, even if it costs me a lot.
markbnj 10y ago
>> Third, try programming for a day without Googling. Then two days, maybe a week. See how it feels. Remember that there was a time we programmed without copying our work. It's not usually, or even often, about copying work for me. I google because there is no freaking way I can remember all the details of linux, python, bash, regular expressions, flask, elasticsearch, redis, haproxy, postgresql, mongodb, Google Cloud Platform, kubernetes, logstash, kibana, Java... that's a real list from my last project. If you were going to hire me for a position doing roughly the same thing, and you stuck me in a room and picked questions off a list related to those things I set out above, with the understanding that I am good enough for you if I can answer the question, and not good enough if I can't... it's a crapshoot. 100%. I may have spent hours preparing for the interview. You may have spent hours preparing for the interview. And then you ask me something like "In an elasticsearch mapping template how would you retain the untokenized value of a string for use in a returned list of aggregates?" and maybe I did that yesterday and remember, or maybe we should just both go back to whatever we were doing before we met. I'm interviewing right now, and if you can't tell it's frustrating. I'm not valuable unless I am experienced and capable with a huge list of technologies, and hey, as a reward you the interviewer get to pick anything you want from that huge list and try to trip me up with it! ;)
- dozzie 10y ago
  > [...] there is no freaking way I can remember all the details of linux, python, bash, regular expressions, flask, elasticsearch, redis, haproxy, postgresql, mongodb, Google Cloud Platform, kubernetes, logstash, kibana, Java... that's a real list from my last project. Sounds like badly written thing (probably not designed at all). And you do know that there are archaic things like documentation and own notes, right?
  - d23 10y ago
    Why does that sound like a badly written thing, you having no knowledge of the specific domain he's referencing? Perhaps it's a web frontend in flask, load balanced by haproxy, uses redis heavily for caching, postgres for structured data, and mongo for analytics (yeah yeah, we can gripe about how bad mongo is). These applications run via kubernetes on GCE, the logs of which are forwarded to logstash, stored in elasticsearch (running on the JVM), and viewed via kibana. > And you do know that there are archaic things like documentation and own notes, right? Yes, hence his mentioning that he needs to Google to reference them.
SCAQTony 10y ago
My sorry attempt at wit: Was Vermeer a painter or a photographer who traced? Is it not the product and/or result that counts; not how you got there? Vermeer traced his subjects using optics; it was not painted freehand: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/11/vermeer-secret-tool-mirrors-lenses http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/11/vermeer-secret-too...
tk120404 10y ago
To be a good googler, first they need to be good developer
ozy123 10y ago
Also writing good code (easy to maintain, few bugs, easy to extend) is a craft not something you do spontaneously when you need to fix a problem. It takes time to develop and get a good sense for it. This is the key thing I see with all these bootcamp grads - they know the terms and they know how to throw crud apps together but they struggle to write clean code that adheres to SOLID that isn't littered with antipatterns.
- bobbytherobot 10y ago
  The bootcamp grads. They'll use more libraries in a simple take home problem than we use in a medium size project.
zerr 10y ago
A question for Win32 API developers - are you able to program [with Win32 API] without literally copy/pasting the code from MSDN, SO or other sources?
rebootthesystem 10y ago
Walk into any large engineering organization and you'll see stacks of engineering books and reference materials everywhere. Companies also send engineers to courses, seminars and conferences. Reaching for reference materials and guidance is as much a part of engineering as it is to remember the theory. If you don't have the implementation for a Finite Impulse Response filter or a Binary Genetic Solver committed to memory, that's OK. I care far more about whether or not you understand when and how to apply them than whether or not you are a living engineering database. So, yeah, Google away.
bikamonki 10y ago
Say you'd like to upgrade your laptop but you are limited to maybe a few (not easy) hardware tweaks where gains are really not that significant. You'd have to work really hard for a few extra cycles, a few extra MB. So, through the years you just become very efficient at using these limited resources at particular and highly specialized tasks, after all, more than 8 programs running at the same time just freeze the poor thing. One day you discover a new gadget, an external HD. That is great news, you buy one and move tons of unused data to the gadget. Your laptop is not faster now but you can do software tweaks to virtually give you more performance. Just some years later you discover something awesome: many others have decided to hook their HDs together and share information stored on them. With this discovery you realize that your laptop can now be almost completely devoted to running algorithms, almost no resources are wasted in saving and retrieving data from internal memory. You even develop a program to search and find data on the hooked HDs which brings the responses almost instantly, allowing you to become even better at running your algorithms. Even more so, this search program constantly learns and improves at finding the right answers. At some point you just code a few scripts to go get the answers of recurrently asked questions, why saving the answers you say. This laptop upgrade works dandy...until The network of HDs break :( Did I answer the question?
samsonradu 10y ago
I think it would be a mistake to try programming without Google in the first place. A smart developer should make the best out of the tools available. Besides interviews I really can't imagine a real-world situation where you are forced to develop without access to information (Google). Also, our brain does not need to act as a data storage, it actually sucks at it and we solved that problem a long time ago, by writing down information.
ball_of_lint 10y ago
Let's say we need to fix a car. We know that the yellow sprocket is broken and needs to be replaced, but you don't know how to do it off the top of your head. If you knew you could google how, would you fix it yourself? Now, would you call yourself a mechanic for being able to google how and do it? Google is an excellent tool. Programming, which can use google heavily, is still a skill.
sehugg 10y ago
I learned programming by reading user manuals, books, and magazines. It was kind of like Googling, except less random-access. But your documentation was much more complete, because the tools were comparatively smaller. Now fast-forward to 2016, and take something like Docker, which seems conceptually simple but has lots of sharp corners like capabilities for mapping mounts to userspace fuse volumes. The documentation would go obsolete while it was being printed. So don't be so hard on yourself -- most of us are just hot-gluing components together, and if you are lucky enough to get paid writing that red-black tree they interview for at Google/Facebook, then consider yourself lucky, and also consider ripping someone else's version with unit tests.
LoSboccacc 10y ago
I programmed before google and before stack overflow. The povotal change was that nobody post the forumization of support bothered to write documentation worth reading. You didn't need google for simbian or for the java runtime of for stdio. Everything was laid out in beautiful completness including race conditions to watch out for and all valid parameters enumerated before your eyes.
- drumdance 10y ago
  Well, Java was still in beta as late as 1996 and the Internet was a huge part of why it was attractive. I built my first company using it. Big mistake. It was extremely buggy and slow. Something like StackOverflow would have been a huge help to our development team.
deleted 10y ago
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mwfunk 10y ago
This is basically the Stack Overflow debate that comes up every few weeks on HN, but I think it's a false dichotomy. The implication is that "real developers" don't need SO/Google/etc., and that our profession is plagued by incompetents who somehow get through the day by copy/pasting code they found on the Internet without understanding how it works. Thing is, SO/Google/etc. are critical resources for most developers. Not using the web as a research tool when appropriate is incredibly inefficient. No one knows everything, and no one can know everything. Those resources don't just help us find solutions for our problems, they're critical to learning. I think the to-Google-or-not-to-Google debates are really people bothered by other people who copy/paste things from SO without understanding the code they are pasting. You should be getting 2 things from that exercise: you find the solution to your problem, and you learn how it solves similar problems in the future. This isn't just for your benefit, it's for the benefit of the other people you work with, and for the benefit of the shared code base if there is one. Especially if it's a large, complicated code base that will live on long after you move on to other things. Everyone does the first part (using the solution), and almost everyone does the second part (understanding the solution) to one degree or another. However, there are a few people who will not only deny any responsibility for the second part, but will actually be proud that they're not "wasting time" by internalizing what they just did. Instead they're moving on to the next problem to solve that they don't understand. They're optimizing for quantity over quality of output, and for the appearance of efficiency over actual efficiency. So we all have a That Guy in mind when we feel guilty about finding solutions on SO ("I don't wanna be That Guy, but this solves my problem so I should probably use it..."). We may also have worked with one or more That Guys on a shared codebase and gotten burned by it. It sucks to inherit code from That Guy, because That Guy optimizes for scripted demos and perceived functionality. TL;DR I propose that the eternal debate about whether or not Google and SO ruined software engineering is really just one group of people complaining about That Guy, and another group of people who think they're being unfairly accused of being That Guy. The fire is fueled by a small number of actual That Guys sprinkled throughout the industry, but they are usually not participants in these debates.
unclebucknasty 10y ago
Programming itself has changed. It used to be more about logic and design. Now, it's more about gluing together an ever-proliferating bunch of open source libraries, frameworks, and tools. It's no wonder devs need to keep Google at the ready.
georgeecollins 10y ago
As an old guy who used to program in the 1980's, I can't explain how amazing stack overflow is. How we lived before it: - Used tools and systems we knew and knew worked. - Found people with experience and made friends with them. - Read books. (To be fair, certain bookstores used to be much better.)
argumentum 10y ago
I suppose at some level how good of a Googler you are affects how well of whatever you want to be good at .. So you might say being a good Googler is part of being a good developer.
skuunk1 10y ago
Not sure if it makes any difference, but I tend to Google syntax rather than solutions... I often know "what" I want to do, I just can't remember the "how".
voidr 10y ago
I google for solutions all the time, does that mean I can be replaced by anybody who can type a question into a search box? If that would be the case then, companies would not hire highly skilled developers, they would just hire people who can type. You need to know: * what the actual question is * how to pick the good answer * how to integrate the solution with what you already have Being a good googler means you can solve almost any problem because you are able to learn the solution on the fly, which can make you more effective than people who have a lot more knowledge in their head but lack the skill to find solutions to new problems.

158 points by reinhardt 10y ago

Not gonna lie, I couldn't make heads nor tails of this blog post until I reached the very end, and realized they were using "Googler" to mean "doing Google searches". I kept thinking "Why would being a good developer and being a Googler be mutually exclusive?!"

melling 10y ago
I didn't read the article and I knew what he meant. 20 years ago I'd buy books to learn Java, Linux, etc. These days if I want to learn something, I just start Googling. I still think organized and structured information is helpful. We just need to devise a better way. I'm using Github for some things: https://github.com/melling/ComputerLanguages https://github.com/melling/ComputerLanguages And for Swift and iOS where I want to go deeper, I'm creating my own Cookbook, and perhaps my own search engine: http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift_cookbook.html http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift_cookbook.html
- asoplata 10y ago
  That ComputerLanguages repo, wow! This is really awesome! And far, far superior to my own store/collection of helpful links by language by far :(. I may just stop altogether collecting helpful links on languages I may never, ever use, when there're such better lists and guides (like yours) out there that I can search if I ever need to. There are far more programming languages/ideas than there is time.
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  You didn't grok the point of my comment, so let me expand on it. Someone who works at Google is called a "Googler". When you are used to constantly hearing a word used with meaning A, and almost never meaning B, it can be quite confusing when you hear it in a context where someone uses meaning B, especially when meaning A sort of fits. So you can imagine my confusion when I parsed the entire article as "Why would being a good software engineer and [working for Google] be mutually exclusive? They usually go hand-in-hand!"
  - melling 10y ago
    I did understand your comment. I know someone who works at Google is called a Googler. However, from the context of the subject, I knew a person who worked at Google would not have such a worry, while someone who learned how to program by Googling would have such a worry. Many programmers are self-taught. It's gotta be quite common to wonder if you know enough to do a particular job if you're Google'ibg your way to proficiency.
    - CydeWeys 10y ago
      Actually, imposter syndrome is more common at Google than most other companies. This makes sense; imposter syndrome comes from a mismatch of judging your own talents versus that you perceive from your peers, so you are more likely to feel unsure of your own abilities when your coworkers are world-class leaders of their field than if they are just random average engineers. A lot of attention is paid to raising awareness of imposter syndrome during new employee orientation, and all new employees are assigned a mentor to help guide them through their initial months, again with lots of emphasis placed on ensuring that people feel like they belong.
OJFord 10y ago
I did the same thing - didn't get it until "try programming for a day without Googling". Was expecting some blog post about someone concerned he was just 'going through the motions' working at Google; not 'really developing anything'.. ha.
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  Yes, that is exactly how I interpreted it.

88e282102ae2e5b 10y ago

I feel ridiculous saying this, but my secret is that I read the documentation of whatever tool I'm using. Google answers beginner questions so well that I never even thought to do this when I was first learning, and when googling started to fail me I would just fall back on the scientific method to figure out how a library worked. Perhaps it was a good exercise in critical thinking, but it was terrible for productivity.

alistproducer2 10y ago
Yep, documentation and source when googling begins to fail.
- zo1 10y ago
  And occasionally you'll happen to come across a bug in a library you thought was beyond your understanding/comprehension.
  - alistproducer2 10y ago
    I actually enjoy finding/fixing bugs in OSS. I strive to be more of an engineer than a developer. Learning how large projects are put together and maintained help make me a better engineer.
  - buu700 10y ago
    I've found this to be the case much more often than "occasionally" since I've started habitually comparing third-party software's behaviour to relevant specs/documentation rather than assuming whatever the implementation does is correct. I've caught and reported several Chrome vulnerabilities this way just in the course of normal usage, and have to work around bugs in libraries that my code depends on (often involving poking around said libraries' code for insight into the problem) on a fairly regular basis.

hashkb 10y ago

Wait... big difference between Googling, even a lot; and copying code. If you mindlessly copy code and it works, even once, without really understanding (e.g. could you teach the pattern/trick/concept/etc to a teammate?) you are a bad developer. All things being equal, if you are a great Googler (or doc reader, or whiteboard question asker) that is an aspect of being a strong dev.

tumbas 10y ago

there is no work unless you take the hoe and break a sweat

logicallee 10y ago

I propose an extension to DRY (don't repeat yourself) called DRO (don't repeat others), meaning if anyone has ever done it you shouldn't have to do it again. Then it's easy to tell whether you're googling or developing: "am I writing something nobody did EVER /trying to improve the state of the art of xyz?" If yes, you should understand deeply and "develop", if no you should be searching and changing variable names. If you're writing a new framework - then by all means! actually understand the code. If not, you shouldn't have to.

shrugger 10y ago
I don't agree with this. Developers should try to always understand the code they are working on. Keep your stack small, understand it as best you can, and use that knowledge to solve problems. That's what programming is. Smushing a bunch of frameworks together until the code works isn't going to help anybody improve, and I think it's fundamentally contributive to the larger issue. If you don't understand the code you're writing or reading, it follows suit that it probably isn't going to work that well or be easy to maintain.
- logicallee 10y ago
  If everyone is keeping their stack small, everyone is doing the same thing over and over and over again. Why shouldn't we copy best practices over without understanding it? Should you really spend an hour vertically aligning an element in a compatible way, when you could copy and paste in 30 seconds and go straight to testing the code you didn't read, write, or understand - and see that it does exactly as advertised? Why shouldn't programmers have a division of labor? Why should everyone understand everything?
  - shrugger 10y ago
    I'm not really prepared to explain why being ignorant about your tools is toxic to good work, but I'll offer this: If everyone knew C, would they keep writing the same code over and over? Obviously not. They'd find new ways to compose what they've already written to create whatever they want. It's not a waste of time for more than one person to know how to do something. People start from the bottom and learn their way up. In your example, what happens the next time they need to align another element? They either copy and paste whatever they did before, or google it again, right? If they had taken five minutes to learn it before that, they'd already know how to do it, and could just write it. Redundant knowledge is not a bad thing.

BatFastard 10y ago

Being a googler will often reveal solutions to specific problems. However it rarely reveals if you should choose that solution, or the architecture that it fits in, or anything larger than an algorithm.

shrugger 10y ago

I feel like the whole impostor syndrome thing has gone too far. At this point, we have legitimately talented developers questioning whether or not they are 'good' enough and it is actually quite frustrating to see. I sort of understand it from the students' perspectives, because they have a professor to compare themselves to and aspire to, I think in that scenario it spurs self-improvement but in the workplace it seems like it would only be counterproductive at best to compare yourself to other coworkers or even other people in the field. I remember when I first started, I never thought "Shit, will I ever be as good at Scheme as Sussman?" I just worked the exercises and kept moving forward. Nowadays, there seems to be a real strong pressure to be aware of all the new technologies, newest libraries, and all this material that nobody could ever possibly have time to completely understand, and it drives people crazy, I think.

hashkb 10y ago
Have to point out: we also have legitimately terrible developers using Impostor Syndrome as a political tool to keep their jobs and write whiny blog posts. Everyone should have a healthy way of dealing with feeling inadequate, besides whining. (e.g. learning things)
- shrugger 10y ago
  It's even a meta-issue! So, how do we find out which people are whining and which aren't? How do we encourage people to just learn and self-improve rather than sink to escapism?
- jjoonathan 10y ago
  If your answer to FOMO / imposter syndrome is "learn more" then you'll quickly find yourself mired in analysis paralysis. It's a strategy that simply doesn't scale to today's world where there is more to learn than can be learned. A better strategy is to develop a sense for the marginal value of learning so that you can decide at some point to stop learning and start working (or, equivalently, choose the right mix of the two). This still leaves the psychological problem unaddressed, so solutions that tackle it head on have their place. The solution for dealing with actual imposters is to fire them. If, somehow, they manage to use "imposter syndrome" as a deflection (I haven't seen this play in the wild and I'm not convinced it's prevalent or even could be made to work), then gather evidence that they aren't pulling their weight and proceed to use it. If that doesn't work, it's not because of some stupid blog post, it's because there's stronger politics at play. Abort/retry/ignore as warranted.

pistle 10y ago

Flip the question. Am I being a good developer if I'm not Googling it? You are a creative problem solver. You have to understand your problem and put together a solution. Within defined constraints of time, budget, and quality, you must solve your problem. Solid understanding of good developer practices and general algorithm or application design principles marries WELL with talent in processing information from the web. Bringing them together, you get past "solved" challenges in completing your current task or project done. I'd argue that being adequate at both is better. Relying too much on either facet is worse than being good at both with a talent for bringing the two together.

13of40 10y ago

I think this hits on a tenet of modern development, which is that if you find yourself actually implementing an algorithm, be it a sort, compression, crypto, or whatever, you're probably programming badly. That's not to say that your implementation won't work, but that there's already a library that does it and a well-worn design pattern that takes advantage of it, and you can find both of those in a few minutes on google / stackoverflow. Edit: I am in no way saying you shouldn't try to understand the algorithm. Coding it yourself is fine exercise for a rainy Sunday morning, but it's (usually) not the best way to do your day job.

Xcelerate 10y ago
I don't know. You'd be amazed how many common algorithms don't have good libraries for them (particularly for newer languages).

spo81rty 10y ago

As a developer you can't know everything about everything. We commonly have to solve problems we are have never solved before. We have to use APIs we have never used before. Google makes a huge difference in learning how.

askyourmother 10y ago

A good developer will Google for direction to help get a little clarity on a problem, maybe to review alternative ideas and solutions. A bad developer will blindly copy and paste and use that. Painting-by-numbers, Coding-by-google. I have seen the problems with the latter, where a team of offshore devs built a monster Java codebase by "doing the needful", which in this case was cutting and pasting from the first result in Google. One of the devs was different, he would cut and paste from bing. Fun times.

paganel 10y ago
I guess that's a +1 for Google's SERPs when it comes to programming, unlike how bad they do in other search sub-domains. But I'm biased, I'm an off-shore programmer who has copy-pasted code snippets from Google searches countless times (they were SE links in 99% of the cases). Of course I could have copied the code by hand in order to feel morally superior, but as I am lazy I didn't see any need for that. At least I always made sure to include a link to the SE page from where the code snippet had been taken, so lets hope that SE won't change their link structure anytime soon.

chiph 10y ago

If I'm doing something I don't normally do (data access code, XML parsing, etc), yeah, I'm going to look it up. And not feel any shame about it. This might be because I started out in the engineering program in college, and one of the tenets there is "don't trust your memory - look it up. Otherwise people die."

JohnIdol 10y ago

Google is just an extension of our memory nowadays - it's not worth it memorising stuff you know you can google, eventually if you google it often enough it'll stick. And googling will do you no good if you have no idea what you are doing.

ThomPete 10y ago

It doesn't matter. As long as you can do what you want to do with code you are a developer. Whether looking up code on google or in a reference book.

exodust 10y ago
I agree. Especially when by "Google" we basically mean Stack Overflow. I end up there a lot, and the benefit is often in the comments and different takes on a problem. I've learned so many good Jquery tricks from that place, I owe the network and users a great debt. One can often learn why something is the wrong answer too, which is valuable information. With web frontend, often the best solution is a combination of Jquery and good old vanilla JS, and getting that balance right... come on, let's face it, we need to help each other get there.

alistproducer2 10y ago

A good engineer uses any tool that makes them a better engineer. You think people who can recite algorithms also have the ability to learn a api, library, or framework without googling or reading documentation?

tmpanon1234act 10y ago

People need to focus more on getting results. We're collectively so steeped in posturing about technology stacks and idiosyncratic decisionmaking that we've missed the bigger picture: get something done. For instance, anyone who says they factored in all the tradeoffs and then chose Haskell isn't trying to get things done or build a sustainable business - they're trying to orchestrate a technological boondoggle. At the end of the day no one cares if you're a good developer. They care that the service looks good and works well. Googling is how you build a better service ergo do it and don't worry about it.

smileysteve 10y ago
> We're collectively so steeped in posturing about technology stacks and idiosyncratic decisionmaking that we've missed the bigger picture: get something done. > At the end of the day no one cares if you're a good developer. They care that the service looks good and works well. Those decisions lead over time to an architecture that can good or bad, and assuming your software has patches or improvements over time, that's important. Context: I've worked with too many startups with non-dry untested code that are now getting past "looks good and works well" to needs to drastically expand feature set or change underlying features.
- tmpanon1234act 10y ago
  We do heavy backend unit/integration testing, less so on the frontend and a lot of UAT. It's good enough to move fast with some confidence but yes sometimes you have to do tough things and that comes from experience. I recently wrote a distributed, cache-coherent session store for instance. Googling is necessary not sufficient.

anotheryou 10y ago

Who cares about the label? Just know what you can or can not accomplish and act accordingly.

blazespin 10y ago

protip: flashcards. If you ever find yourself reaching for a detail you think you should know offhand, make sure you add it and study on a regular basis. You'll stop feeling like an impostor.

buckbova 10y ago

15 years with positions from analyst, engineer, to architect and I still Google something for work every day. I don't feel bad about this at all. I remember when I couldn't Google. Those were tough days.

Roboprog 10y ago
Products in the 80s and early 90s usually came with books. Some of which were pretty good, if you could get access to the books.

Manishearth 10y ago

As someone who has been programming in Rust since before 1.0, I have been through the probably rare experience of working with an un-Googleable language. I relied solely on docs and occasionally the mercy of helpful folks on IRC, and it turned out OK. A side effect of this is that I still never Google for Rust answers, even though there are tons to be found now. However, if I was programming in Javascript, which has been the language I've known for the longest and done the most in, I would still Google everything because I'm lazy. I'm pretty sure I don't need to, it's just faster. It's possible to be a Google-programmer out of laziness and not necessity. Diving into an un-googleable language (or ecosystem -- many closed-source ecosystems at work would be un-googleable or undocumented; I recall that understanding the codebase for my internship required me to either read tons of code or ask people with arcane inside knowledge) can help hone these skills. Or just promise to not use Google for something.

programLyrique 10y ago
For rust, although there are now lots of answers, many use uncompatible versions of rust with the current one in my exprience, so still rather un-Googleable.
bobbytherobot 10y ago
Usually when I search Google for JavaScript language or DOM API, I'll start my search with "mdn" to get the relevant Mozilla documentation.

colund 10y ago

This kind of "imposter syndrome" in software development is for me rather foreign. I've never been born with a silver spoon and I've seen lots of people who are math and programming geniuses but I've worked very hard at learning development and know how to do a good job now. I find it waste of energy to philosophise on whether one is good or not. To my ears it sounds almost like humble brag. Or a question from a girlfriend "am I ugly?" where the correct answer is not yes... :)

phamilton 10y ago

I've recently started defining my skill set as an engineer rather than a developer. The difference, to me at least, is one of execution vs implementation. Implementation can be done by a good Googler. Execution requires good communication, recognizing and challenging assumptions, making worthwhile tradeoffs, etc. It's been a little bizarre to see how this focus has changed my development. I sit in on team discussions about coding style and design patterns and find it quite uninteresting. I code as much as the next person on the team, so I'm not aspiring to be an ivory tower architect or anything, but I find weighing in on engineering decisions adds far greater value.

turaw 10y ago
For comparison, I would normally define an 'x' developer (depending on specialty) as anyone who writes code and a software engineer as a developer whose job description involves engineering, per the American Engineers' Council for Professional Development [1]: "The creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination; or to construct or operate the same with full cognizance of their design; or to forecast their behavior under specific operating conditions; all as respects an intended function, economics of operation or safety to life and property." In my ideal world, every developer would do what you're describing as engineering, and the software engineers would be those who far exceed those requirements.

icedchai 10y ago

Good developers are good Googlers.

GrumpyYoungMan 10y ago
But are good Googlers necessarily good developers? Most likely not.

iamben 10y ago

Been talking about this a lot with friends/peers recently. Personally I think half the skill is knowing what to Google. My mum's husband is a painter and decorator. Every house is different, but he has built up a set of skills over the years he's been active that allow him to broadly apply his knowledge to understand how to solve a problem. Similarly, I can't always solve the problem, but I do know where to start asking questions, and I do know how to follow those up efficiently. Is this when I Google for the docs, for answers to a problem, for a place to find help? And then after that, it's about knowing the next steps, knowing which part is likely to be the next relevant thing to Google/research. Do I get stuff done? Sure. Do I remember how to do it next time? Sometimes. But sometimes it's just enough to know how to start solving the next problem. I think we just feel a bit fraudulent because Google is easier. I'd be surprised if anyone ever said "Am I good at xxxxx or just good at going to the library, choosing the right books and reading the required parts?"

enraged_camel 10y ago
>>Been talking about this a lot with friends/peers recently. Personally I think half the skill is knowing what to Google. Yes, exactly. I said this a few days ago in another similar discussion: Google is really good at "meta-guidance." If I search for something and don't get any results, it means I'm either asking the question incorrectly, or I'm trying to solve the wrong problem. Which brings me to the subject at hand: if someone is really good at Google'ing answers on a topic, then they're most likely good at that topic. I believe it was Einstein who said (I may be misattributing the quote here): never memorize something you can look up easily.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > Which brings me to the subject at hand: if someone is really good at Google'ing answers on a topic, then they're most likely good at that topic. So much this. I noticed this myself. When I google for information in the domains I know, I can be extremely efficient, because I know what to ask for and how to evaluate both results and the metadata - i.e. how much results I got, how good/crappy they are, etc. But when I try to search for information on topics I have little to no experience in, I struggle to find what I'm looking for. And more often than not, I'm left with this feeling of incompleteness, like the information I needed was still out there, if I could only phrase my query correctly...

sarreph 10y ago

Can anybody shed light on how Googling for programming answers is seen in the workplace? I've always been a solo / start-up developer (for now), and sometimes I sit back and think about how my (often zealous) use of SO and Google would bode with a team of developers in an office. Would I be considered (to use a loaded term) an impostor if I was seen to be using SO a lot, even if I produced good results? -- I think that last point — of good results — is key, but I am curious to how co-workers perceive this kind of productivity...

wahnfrieden 10y ago
Everyone at the workplaces I've been in uses SO and Google frequently. The difference comes with how resourcefully they're used - more senior devs tend to be more efficient in seeking out accurate answers, while juniors may find misleading info, info irrelevant to the version or environment they're using, info that they have trouble adapting to their specific needs; or may have more trouble finding the best search terms to use; or may simply take longer to scan through results.
pessimizer 10y ago
As somebody who has worked in small and medium-sized businesses, I don't even understand the discussion. If I can find on the web some way or some better way to do something that I want to do, I literally put the link in the comments to my code.
- zappo2938 10y ago
  My code is littered with links to SO, GitHub, and tutorial blogs. I have no shame. I put getting a job done correctly and fast over what other people think of me. Use as many ideas from other people, but try to contribute your own.
  - exodust 10y ago
    Yikes, another one. I dunno... maybe I'm behind the times. I don't like web links in code comments myself unless it's the comment above a plugin that you wouldn't touch anyway. I remember a fellow developer used to curse in his comments. Expletives about what he didn't like etc. Funny the first time I saw it, then got annoying.

zw123456 10y ago

This topic is very interesting to me from a little different perspective. I am a senior member of technical staff at a very large company and often managers will have me sit in on job interviews with candidates to cover the technical side. Recently, I sat in an interview and I had my list of questions. It was a telephone interview (1st round, not uncommon), I noticed that I could hear subtle typing in the background as the manager asked various questions. When it came time for the technical questions, I could hear a lot more typing. It occurred to me that the candidate was probably googling the answers. After the interview I mentioned it to the manager and she said "so, isn't that how you guys do it anyhow ?". I was a little taken back and have to admit I did not have any response. But, at least for this manager, how good someone is at googling the answers is a legitimate point of evaluation for a prospective candidate. I admit I use google, stackexchange and etc. to find answers, but it is not my primiary source of information and I just don't think it is a substitute for knowledge, is it ? This bothered me very much.

hackinthebochs 10y ago
> but it is not my primiary source of information and I just don't think it is a substitute for knowledge, is it ? I think this is the real problem of the "just google it!" culture in programming. Expertise is devalued, even seen as wasteful. But ultimately you'll never create anything genuinely new if you don't have a strong base of knowledge to work from. Googling the details is great, but you have to have an idea of what to google if you're doing anything beyond the most basic development.

shanselman 10y ago

Gosh, this is a pretty old post. Maybe add (2013) to the title. Source: I wrote the post.

Xcelerate 10y ago

It's the same thing when people ask me for help with computer problems. The first thing I ask is "Did you Google the error message?" And then I normally Google it for them and the first result is typically a forum post with someone else who had the problem, and someone else has usually posted a solution.

enraged_camel 10y ago
I used to feel the same way. Then I realized that it's not just about Google'ing the error message. It's also about having enough experience and knowledge to figure out which of the suggested solutions are both safe to try and likely to solve the issue. It may seem silly, but most people who work with computers are genuinely worried about doing the wrong thing (e.g. clicking the wrong button) and permanently breaking something. This is why, at the first sign of trouble, they come to us geeks with their tails tucked between their legs.
- Xcelerate 10y ago
  > they come to us geeks with their tails tucked between their legs. That's fine with me; I do the same thing when my car breaks or there is an electrical problem. Some things I don't mind tinkering with — for other things I would rather take the "simple" problem to an expert, even if it costs me a lot.

markbnj 10y ago

>> Third, try programming for a day without Googling. Then two days, maybe a week. See how it feels. Remember that there was a time we programmed without copying our work. It's not usually, or even often, about copying work for me. I google because there is no freaking way I can remember all the details of linux, python, bash, regular expressions, flask, elasticsearch, redis, haproxy, postgresql, mongodb, Google Cloud Platform, kubernetes, logstash, kibana, Java... that's a real list from my last project. If you were going to hire me for a position doing roughly the same thing, and you stuck me in a room and picked questions off a list related to those things I set out above, with the understanding that I am good enough for you if I can answer the question, and not good enough if I can't... it's a crapshoot. 100%. I may have spent hours preparing for the interview. You may have spent hours preparing for the interview. And then you ask me something like "In an elasticsearch mapping template how would you retain the untokenized value of a string for use in a returned list of aggregates?" and maybe I did that yesterday and remember, or maybe we should just both go back to whatever we were doing before we met. I'm interviewing right now, and if you can't tell it's frustrating. I'm not valuable unless I am experienced and capable with a huge list of technologies, and hey, as a reward you the interviewer get to pick anything you want from that huge list and try to trip me up with it! ;)

dozzie 10y ago
> [...] there is no freaking way I can remember all the details of linux, python, bash, regular expressions, flask, elasticsearch, redis, haproxy, postgresql, mongodb, Google Cloud Platform, kubernetes, logstash, kibana, Java... that's a real list from my last project. Sounds like badly written thing (probably not designed at all). And you do know that there are archaic things like documentation and own notes, right?
- d23 10y ago
  Why does that sound like a badly written thing, you having no knowledge of the specific domain he's referencing? Perhaps it's a web frontend in flask, load balanced by haproxy, uses redis heavily for caching, postgres for structured data, and mongo for analytics (yeah yeah, we can gripe about how bad mongo is). These applications run via kubernetes on GCE, the logs of which are forwarded to logstash, stored in elasticsearch (running on the JVM), and viewed via kibana. > And you do know that there are archaic things like documentation and own notes, right? Yes, hence his mentioning that he needs to Google to reference them.

SCAQTony 10y ago

My sorry attempt at wit: Was Vermeer a painter or a photographer who traced? Is it not the product and/or result that counts; not how you got there? Vermeer traced his subjects using optics; it was not painted freehand: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/11/vermeer-secret-tool-mirrors-lenses http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/11/vermeer-secret-too...

tk120404 10y ago

To be a good googler, first they need to be good developer

ozy123 10y ago

Also writing good code (easy to maintain, few bugs, easy to extend) is a craft not something you do spontaneously when you need to fix a problem. It takes time to develop and get a good sense for it. This is the key thing I see with all these bootcamp grads - they know the terms and they know how to throw crud apps together but they struggle to write clean code that adheres to SOLID that isn't littered with antipatterns.

bobbytherobot 10y ago
The bootcamp grads. They'll use more libraries in a simple take home problem than we use in a medium size project.

zerr 10y ago

A question for Win32 API developers - are you able to program [with Win32 API] without literally copy/pasting the code from MSDN, SO or other sources?

rebootthesystem 10y ago

Walk into any large engineering organization and you'll see stacks of engineering books and reference materials everywhere. Companies also send engineers to courses, seminars and conferences. Reaching for reference materials and guidance is as much a part of engineering as it is to remember the theory. If you don't have the implementation for a Finite Impulse Response filter or a Binary Genetic Solver committed to memory, that's OK. I care far more about whether or not you understand when and how to apply them than whether or not you are a living engineering database. So, yeah, Google away.

bikamonki 10y ago

Say you'd like to upgrade your laptop but you are limited to maybe a few (not easy) hardware tweaks where gains are really not that significant. You'd have to work really hard for a few extra cycles, a few extra MB. So, through the years you just become very efficient at using these limited resources at particular and highly specialized tasks, after all, more than 8 programs running at the same time just freeze the poor thing. One day you discover a new gadget, an external HD. That is great news, you buy one and move tons of unused data to the gadget. Your laptop is not faster now but you can do software tweaks to virtually give you more performance. Just some years later you discover something awesome: many others have decided to hook their HDs together and share information stored on them. With this discovery you realize that your laptop can now be almost completely devoted to running algorithms, almost no resources are wasted in saving and retrieving data from internal memory. You even develop a program to search and find data on the hooked HDs which brings the responses almost instantly, allowing you to become even better at running your algorithms. Even more so, this search program constantly learns and improves at finding the right answers. At some point you just code a few scripts to go get the answers of recurrently asked questions, why saving the answers you say. This laptop upgrade works dandy...until The network of HDs break :( Did I answer the question?

samsonradu 10y ago

I think it would be a mistake to try programming without Google in the first place. A smart developer should make the best out of the tools available. Besides interviews I really can't imagine a real-world situation where you are forced to develop without access to information (Google). Also, our brain does not need to act as a data storage, it actually sucks at it and we solved that problem a long time ago, by writing down information.

ball_of_lint 10y ago

Let's say we need to fix a car. We know that the yellow sprocket is broken and needs to be replaced, but you don't know how to do it off the top of your head. If you knew you could google how, would you fix it yourself? Now, would you call yourself a mechanic for being able to google how and do it? Google is an excellent tool. Programming, which can use google heavily, is still a skill.

sehugg 10y ago

I learned programming by reading user manuals, books, and magazines. It was kind of like Googling, except less random-access. But your documentation was much more complete, because the tools were comparatively smaller. Now fast-forward to 2016, and take something like Docker, which seems conceptually simple but has lots of sharp corners like capabilities for mapping mounts to userspace fuse volumes. The documentation would go obsolete while it was being printed. So don't be so hard on yourself -- most of us are just hot-gluing components together, and if you are lucky enough to get paid writing that red-black tree they interview for at Google/Facebook, then consider yourself lucky, and also consider ripping someone else's version with unit tests.

LoSboccacc 10y ago

I programmed before google and before stack overflow. The povotal change was that nobody post the forumization of support bothered to write documentation worth reading. You didn't need google for simbian or for the java runtime of for stdio. Everything was laid out in beautiful completness including race conditions to watch out for and all valid parameters enumerated before your eyes.

drumdance 10y ago
Well, Java was still in beta as late as 1996 and the Internet was a huge part of why it was attractive. I built my first company using it. Big mistake. It was extremely buggy and slow. Something like StackOverflow would have been a huge help to our development team.

deleted 10y ago

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mwfunk 10y ago

This is basically the Stack Overflow debate that comes up every few weeks on HN, but I think it's a false dichotomy. The implication is that "real developers" don't need SO/Google/etc., and that our profession is plagued by incompetents who somehow get through the day by copy/pasting code they found on the Internet without understanding how it works. Thing is, SO/Google/etc. are critical resources for most developers. Not using the web as a research tool when appropriate is incredibly inefficient. No one knows everything, and no one can know everything. Those resources don't just help us find solutions for our problems, they're critical to learning. I think the to-Google-or-not-to-Google debates are really people bothered by other people who copy/paste things from SO without understanding the code they are pasting. You should be getting 2 things from that exercise: you find the solution to your problem, and you learn how it solves similar problems in the future. This isn't just for your benefit, it's for the benefit of the other people you work with, and for the benefit of the shared code base if there is one. Especially if it's a large, complicated code base that will live on long after you move on to other things. Everyone does the first part (using the solution), and almost everyone does the second part (understanding the solution) to one degree or another. However, there are a few people who will not only deny any responsibility for the second part, but will actually be proud that they're not "wasting time" by internalizing what they just did. Instead they're moving on to the next problem to solve that they don't understand. They're optimizing for quantity over quality of output, and for the appearance of efficiency over actual efficiency. So we all have a That Guy in mind when we feel guilty about finding solutions on SO ("I don't wanna be That Guy, but this solves my problem so I should probably use it..."). We may also have worked with one or more That Guys on a shared codebase and gotten burned by it. It sucks to inherit code from That Guy, because That Guy optimizes for scripted demos and perceived functionality. TL;DR I propose that the eternal debate about whether or not Google and SO ruined software engineering is really just one group of people complaining about That Guy, and another group of people who think they're being unfairly accused of being That Guy. The fire is fueled by a small number of actual That Guys sprinkled throughout the industry, but they are usually not participants in these debates.

unclebucknasty 10y ago

Programming itself has changed. It used to be more about logic and design. Now, it's more about gluing together an ever-proliferating bunch of open source libraries, frameworks, and tools. It's no wonder devs need to keep Google at the ready.

georgeecollins 10y ago

As an old guy who used to program in the 1980's, I can't explain how amazing stack overflow is. How we lived before it: - Used tools and systems we knew and knew worked. - Found people with experience and made friends with them. - Read books. (To be fair, certain bookstores used to be much better.)

argumentum 10y ago

I suppose at some level how good of a Googler you are affects how well of whatever you want to be good at .. So you might say being a good Googler is part of being a good developer.

skuunk1 10y ago

Not sure if it makes any difference, but I tend to Google syntax rather than solutions... I often know "what" I want to do, I just can't remember the "how".

voidr 10y ago

I google for solutions all the time, does that mean I can be replaced by anybody who can type a question into a search box? If that would be the case then, companies would not hire highly skilled developers, they would just hire people who can type. You need to know: * what the actual question is * how to pick the good answer * how to integrate the solution with what you already have Being a good googler means you can solve almost any problem because you are able to learn the solution on the fly, which can make you more effective than people who have a lot more knowledge in their head but lack the skill to find solutions to new problems.