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Craig : How did you troubleshoot? Today I use Stack Overflow constantly. What would you do when you ran into a bug that you couldn’t figure out? Shel : Stay up

Craig : How did you troubleshoot? Today I use Stack Overflow constantly. What would you do when you ran into a bug that you couldn’t figure out? Shel : Stay up late. Hahaha. I remember building an online art gallery back in 1996. It was for an internship. I got it because I bluffed and said I knew HTML. After I was hired, I purchased a book on HTML. Turns out, the company's "CTO" did the same thing. We both learned on the job and stayed up late trying to put that site together. It's almost hard to remember how "primitive" that was now that there's Google and SO.

0xmohit 10y ago
http://imgur.com/gallery/SZPjHwz http://imgur.com/gallery/SZPjHwz https://twitter.com/thepracticaldev/status/716390583217029124 https://twitter.com/thepracticaldev/status/71639058321702912...
- mikeleeorg 10y ago
  So true. So, so true. So true that I often question technical interviewing practices that look solely for ability to memorize complex algorithms exactly, vs ability to seek out an even better solution and apply it effectively.
  - grahamburger 10y ago
    At a previous job I put this in to practice. I would give interviewees a short list of questions on a piece of paper and after the interview they could use a browser and take as much time as they needed to answer the questions. Some were logic type questions that would be difficult to Google, some were just process questions that very few people would know off the top of their head but should be able to Google. The idea was to see if someone could find answers when they ran in to problems. Got some great hires using that technique (and avoided some hires that might have been disastrous!) HR killed it, though.
    - 0xmohit 10y ago
      Open book exams are known to be tougher! I don't mind giving candidates access to language reference manuals, man pages and such.
      - grahamburger 10y ago
        May be so. These were pretty easy questions, though. Like 'What steps/commands would you use to reset the password on a [Make] [Model] managed switch through the serial port?' Very easy to Google. Surprisingly, some people couldn't get the answer right even using Google.
        0xmohit 10y ago
        > Surprisingly, some people couldn't get the answer right even using Google. Never underestimate anybody. I've seen numerous examples wherein folks would copy/paste an obviously inferior answer (or even incorrect) from a Stack Overflow post that contains a much better answer.
        exolymph 10y ago
        You mean never overestimate anybody. Or maybe, "You can never underestimate anybody."
        0xmohit 10y ago
        I meant what I read somewhere long time back: Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
        berntb 10y ago
        This rings a bell right now. :-) Last week I integrated with a service using (shudder) SOAP. I tried the XML call with curl and couldn't get it to work. I cursed, I frothed. The reply error was some Java dump, not helpful. It took me embarrassingly long to realize I got the HTTP header fields for SOAP from something wrong I googled -- it worked when I copied the header line from old code I wrote before... :-) :-(
  - Benjammer 10y ago
    I recently went through a final-round interview process, and a large piece of the technical part of the interview involved handing me a laptop connected to the internet and the interviewer saying "Build a REST API that can handle these 4 curl requests and respond correctly. Use any technology you want. You have access to Google and anything else you can find. You have about an hour, I'll be back to check on you in 20 minutes. Go!" I felt like this was SUCH a better test of my abilities as a professional programmer versus remembering specific algorithms or reciting "best practices" for X, Y and Z.
    - rahul003 10y ago
      That is a good way to see how someone goes about approaching actual work. Which company was this?
    - mrlambchop 10y ago
      This was a great test - I just gave myself this test (I'm usually working in embedded systems so this wasn't something I do all the time) - completed in 30 mins, most of it waiting for installs or reading the web. I think it might be possible to add postgres and OAUTH2 into this as well (assuming one can grok OAUTH2 in 30 mins...).
    - wallacoloo 10y ago
      Oh man, I'd probably spend the first half of that time adjusting to somebody else's development environment, and the second half troubleshooting all the runtime errors caused by various ':w's and 'u's scattered throughout the code (unless it were an OS I was familiar with, I'd hesitate to implement this in a language that requires configuring a compiler & build system. Fortunately, most web software seems to already be written in portable languages).
      - animal531 10y ago
        I've made this comment before, but people don't seem to understand how used one can get to a specific setup. I've spent for example 20 years working with MY Visual Studio setup, with a normal desktop keyboard and mouse. Then I get handed that crappy flaptop that no one wants to use. You do what you can, but still your effectiveness basically drops by 40%. Kudos to the interviewer in this example though.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
pault 10y ago
I taught myself to code in the early 2000s, coming from a graphic design background, through javascript and actionscript[1]. It took me years of sitting in my bedroom after work, reading dense paper manuals with very few resources for clarification. The mailing lists were often intimidating and took days to get an answer, if it all. You can imagine how stressful that was when working on a deadline and hoping that someone responded to your question about some obscure error message before the project was due. I remember being intensely jealous of my coworkers who were learning to code around 2010 and could be spoon fed the information I fought so hard to unearth! [1] Say what you will about actionscript, it was an extremely helpful platform for beginners. I probably would have given up without the easy installation and IDE support. Javascript had essentially no debugging tools (firebug didn't exist until 2006; browsers were a nightmare of inconsistency, and debugging meant dumping vars via document.write()) and I didn't have the technical skill to get a java development environment up and running at the time.
- somedangedname 10y ago
  > ...and could be spoon fed the information I fought so hard to unearth! Yesterday HN introduced me to a short story - have a read if you haven't already. You'll get a good laugh out of it. http://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html http://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html
ojbyrne 10y ago
I seem to recall that googling (well alta-vista-ing) bugs in the 1990s was definitely a thing. Always seemed to end up on a usenet group though.
- JacobAldridge 10y ago
  And every now and then you would come across someone describing the exact problem you ran into ... and the message trail would end with the OP saying "Nevermind, fixed it". Without sharing how!

0xmohit 10y ago

http://imgur.com/gallery/SZPjHwz http://imgur.com/gallery/SZPjHwz https://twitter.com/thepracticaldev/status/716390583217029124 https://twitter.com/thepracticaldev/status/71639058321702912...

mikeleeorg 10y ago
So true. So, so true. So true that I often question technical interviewing practices that look solely for ability to memorize complex algorithms exactly, vs ability to seek out an even better solution and apply it effectively.
- grahamburger 10y ago
  At a previous job I put this in to practice. I would give interviewees a short list of questions on a piece of paper and after the interview they could use a browser and take as much time as they needed to answer the questions. Some were logic type questions that would be difficult to Google, some were just process questions that very few people would know off the top of their head but should be able to Google. The idea was to see if someone could find answers when they ran in to problems. Got some great hires using that technique (and avoided some hires that might have been disastrous!) HR killed it, though.
  - 0xmohit 10y ago
    Open book exams are known to be tougher! I don't mind giving candidates access to language reference manuals, man pages and such.
    - grahamburger 10y ago
      May be so. These were pretty easy questions, though. Like 'What steps/commands would you use to reset the password on a [Make] [Model] managed switch through the serial port?' Very easy to Google. Surprisingly, some people couldn't get the answer right even using Google.
      - 0xmohit 10y ago
        > Surprisingly, some people couldn't get the answer right even using Google. Never underestimate anybody. I've seen numerous examples wherein folks would copy/paste an obviously inferior answer (or even incorrect) from a Stack Overflow post that contains a much better answer.
        exolymph 10y ago
        You mean never overestimate anybody. Or maybe, "You can never underestimate anybody."
        0xmohit 10y ago
        I meant what I read somewhere long time back: Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
        berntb 10y ago
        This rings a bell right now. :-) Last week I integrated with a service using (shudder) SOAP. I tried the XML call with curl and couldn't get it to work. I cursed, I frothed. The reply error was some Java dump, not helpful. It took me embarrassingly long to realize I got the HTTP header fields for SOAP from something wrong I googled -- it worked when I copied the header line from old code I wrote before... :-) :-(
- Benjammer 10y ago
  I recently went through a final-round interview process, and a large piece of the technical part of the interview involved handing me a laptop connected to the internet and the interviewer saying "Build a REST API that can handle these 4 curl requests and respond correctly. Use any technology you want. You have access to Google and anything else you can find. You have about an hour, I'll be back to check on you in 20 minutes. Go!" I felt like this was SUCH a better test of my abilities as a professional programmer versus remembering specific algorithms or reciting "best practices" for X, Y and Z.
  - rahul003 10y ago
    That is a good way to see how someone goes about approaching actual work. Which company was this?
  - mrlambchop 10y ago
    This was a great test - I just gave myself this test (I'm usually working in embedded systems so this wasn't something I do all the time) - completed in 30 mins, most of it waiting for installs or reading the web. I think it might be possible to add postgres and OAUTH2 into this as well (assuming one can grok OAUTH2 in 30 mins...).
  - wallacoloo 10y ago
    Oh man, I'd probably spend the first half of that time adjusting to somebody else's development environment, and the second half troubleshooting all the runtime errors caused by various ':w's and 'u's scattered throughout the code (unless it were an OS I was familiar with, I'd hesitate to implement this in a language that requires configuring a compiler & build system. Fortunately, most web software seems to already be written in portable languages).
    - animal531 10y ago
      I've made this comment before, but people don't seem to understand how used one can get to a specific setup. I've spent for example 20 years working with MY Visual Studio setup, with a normal desktop keyboard and mouse. Then I get handed that crappy flaptop that no one wants to use. You do what you can, but still your effectiveness basically drops by 40%. Kudos to the interviewer in this example though.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

pault 10y ago

I taught myself to code in the early 2000s, coming from a graphic design background, through javascript and actionscript[1]. It took me years of sitting in my bedroom after work, reading dense paper manuals with very few resources for clarification. The mailing lists were often intimidating and took days to get an answer, if it all. You can imagine how stressful that was when working on a deadline and hoping that someone responded to your question about some obscure error message before the project was due. I remember being intensely jealous of my coworkers who were learning to code around 2010 and could be spoon fed the information I fought so hard to unearth! [1] Say what you will about actionscript, it was an extremely helpful platform for beginners. I probably would have given up without the easy installation and IDE support. Javascript had essentially no debugging tools (firebug didn't exist until 2006; browsers were a nightmare of inconsistency, and debugging meant dumping vars via document.write()) and I didn't have the technical skill to get a java development environment up and running at the time.

somedangedname 10y ago
> ...and could be spoon fed the information I fought so hard to unearth! Yesterday HN introduced me to a short story - have a read if you haven't already. You'll get a good laugh out of it. http://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html http://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html

ojbyrne 10y ago

I seem to recall that googling (well alta-vista-ing) bugs in the 1990s was definitely a thing. Always seemed to end up on a usenet group though.

JacobAldridge 10y ago
And every now and then you would come across someone describing the exact problem you ran into ... and the message trail would end with the OP saying "Nevermind, fixed it". Without sharing how!