7 ms·

Does it actually matter if I can? Is using reference material a bad thing? Edit: I know the article touches on that idea briefly but my argument would be "of

Does it actually matter if I can? Is using reference material a bad thing? Edit: I know the article touches on that idea briefly but my argument would be "of course it doesn't matter". Sure, I could develop slightly faster with a more encyclopedic memory but I really doubt it would make an observable difference in the long-term. Most of my time isn't spent referencing libraries or syntax but instead I spend most of my time thinking out the logic and higher level relationships of my code. I suspect that is largely the case of any development even remotely non-trivial.

phkahler 6y ago
Let's say Elon starts that colony on Mars and you think "Ima move there and write code for a living." You might have the internet, but its 15 minutes each direction. Nothing interactive works, and while they brought copies of Wikipedia, stack overflow didnt package so easily. Or more simply, can you write a web app without internet access?
- tutfbhuf 6y ago
  > stack overflow didnt package so easily You just need some copy of something like: the way back machine, google cache or archive.is and then do asynchronous mirroring and you are not so far behind. Zoom meetings might be a problem though.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    > Zoom meetings might be a problem though. If it prompted the meeting organiser to put their one point into an email, thereby saving 6 people a 45 minute meeting, would it be a problem or a feature?
    - tutfbhuf 6y ago
      Would be an interesting case study to find out if remote developers from Mars are actually more productive due to lack of synchronous communication.
      - mtVessel 6y ago
        Anyone who has worked with a team in a time zone 8+ hours away from their own can already answer this question. It depends entirely on the technical and communication skills of all involved parties.
  - jeegsy 6y ago
    I think you might be missing the point of the hypothetical
- megous 6y ago
  That would be a colony on The Sun.
- akiselev 6y ago
  Vast majority of documentation and even the websites promoting most web related libraries are autogenerated from git. Run a bash script with a bunch of `git clone` on an Earth based server and and ship the disk image, latency be damned. Dash [1] does package up StackOverflow and a bunch of library docs too. [1] https://kapeli.com/dash https://kapeli.com/dash
- jjk166 6y ago
  And what if you wanted to go camping on the ocean floor? Can you start a camp fire underwater? That you can imagine some convoluted scenario where a skill could be employed does not mean it is an efficient use of your time to develop that skill, particularly when that scenario is easily avoidable.
  - scubbo 6y ago
    Well said.
  - phkahler 6y ago
    Touche.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  Do we not have a cached version of the web on the Mars colony?
- yosamino 6y ago
  > Or more simply, can you write a web app without internet access? I understand what you are trying to say - but what would be the point of that ? If we were to prepare an essential list of documents that are required to write web applications without access to the net, we would probably be able to cobble it together and make it available offline. I mean MDN, CanIuse and CssTricks.com would already get you like 90% there.
  - martijnvds 6y ago
    Add the RFC library for fallback/server side of things.
- rzzzt 6y ago
  You can cache documentation locally: https://devdocs.io/ https://devdocs.io/
- twox2 6y ago
  What use is a web app without internet access? Also, as if no internet access = no refernce.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  Elon would take care of it : Tesla Code X© - whether you are underwater,on the moon or Mars, we got you covered with Reddit, HN, Stack Overflow dumps in an easy searchable database. Add-ons for PornHub are available separately.
- jspash 6y ago
  There is no javascript on Mars. Think about that! Sounds wonderful :P
warkdarrior 6y ago
It matters because SWE interviews rely on coding without googling. Maybe we need to change how interviews are done to test people on their Googling skills. For a given coding task, what do they search for? Do they Google for the right terms? Do they converge quickly on the right website to copy from?
- deeeeplearning 6y ago
  Or just give them free reign to use whatever tools they would use in an actual work environment and see what the end results are. Sure makes more sense than seeing how many leetcode problems you memorized.
- slg 6y ago
  >It matters because SWE interviews rely on coding without googling. Some (probably most) SWE interviews rely on coding without Googling. However I have been through plenty of interviews in which that wasn't the case. Coincidentally I also find this type of honesty in the interview process is a good indicator of how much I would enjoy working at the company.
- kortilla 6y ago
  SWE interviews (at FAANGs at least) don’t care about library specifics though. As long as you know the syntax and how to write algos/data structures, you can make it through. There is a strong argument that being good at that isn’t required for most SWEs (including at FAANG), but it is something that having library/framework references doesn’t really help with.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    > There is a strong argument that being good at that isn't required for most SWEs (including at FAANG) Algos/data structures are used as a proxy for problem solving and how fast someone can learn. Plus every decent CS program will have a few courses on it. Also, internal codebases are, well, internal. You won't get a nicely formatted Stack Overflow response on how X works if X is deep in the Google Source tree.
mywittyname 6y ago
I mostly agree, but I think there are situations where it does make a difference. I had a position working on a pretty complicated 3d application in Angular. At times, it felt like I was fighting a war on two fronts, one dealing with Angular complexities and the other dealing with domain complexities. A better understanding of Angular in general would have greatly increased my productivity. Now, whether or not an increase in team productivity would have really mattered is hard to gauge.
908B64B197 6y ago
That's the reason I do algorithmic whiteboard instead of full blown "real world" coding exercises. I don't care that someone memorized whatever command line syntax to create a new project in whatever framework. That's just rote. Even what we write on the whiteboard I don't expect it to compile. Is it ToString or toString? Can't recall either. What I care about is that someone can ask the relevant questions, come up with a design and explain what and why they are doing something.
- _the_inflator 6y ago
  And afterwards? What is the hired guy then doing? Fixing the size of a button? ;)
  - munk-a 6y ago
    That really depends on how much management there is for hand holding. I expect a good developer to get a ticket to fix the size of a button and be able to follow up with stakeholders about the size of the button next to it. It'd be really weird if we sunk so much effort into ticket writing that everything really was just reduced to a task - at that point the ticket author should just go ahead and fix the thing.
    - 908B64B197 6y ago
      A dedicated ticket to go fix a button. That's a symptom of a pretty dysfunctional org. If my requirements are that precise I'll farm that to offshored contractors.
      - selfhoster11 6y ago
        It's a symptom of a well organised org. The ticket doesn't need to have a lot of detail (unless your ticketing system is dysfunctional and forces you to input a lot of information, which is sadly more common than it needs to be), only enough to capture what needs to be done and where so it's not forgotten. It's no different to filing a ticket with the building management to replace a broken lightbulb - it's in your interest to know whether they replaced it already without having to stand up from your desk to check, and it's in their interest to know which individual problems are located where so that they can plan their weekly maintenance run through the building accordingly.
yarcob 6y ago
It's not a problem when you look up the spelling or the order of arguments in the reference. It's a problem when you search for the solution to every problem with a search engine. So many answers on the internet are written by absolute beginners, who happened to have the same problem, and then blogged about the solution after spending 5 minutes of googling. Sometimes these answers are alright, but often they are shallow and miss context. The problem is excacerbated by the fact that 1000s of sites try to get into the top results for programming questions. So you end up with crappy shallow answers, and never learn the underlying details. And then there's the problem that the more experienced you get, the less you look up answers, so the less you are exposed to sites like Stack Overflow, and the less you contribute to Stack Overflow. So the result is that the least experienced contribute most to the answers on the web. My preferred solution is to buy books. Find the best book on your topic and read a chapter, and you'll learn more than if you had googled 100 questions. The downside of books is that it only works for "old" tech. If you want to learn about the hot new Swift UI Declarative Reactive Whatever, your out of luck and you need to scrape together any info you can find from random blog posts...
- onion2k 6y ago
  My preferred solution is to buy books. Find the best book on your topic and read a chapter, and you'll learn more than if you had googled 100 questions. Books are also written by amateurs a lot of the time, especially if the topic is a bit niche. I've had people from publishers reach out to me to write a book about things based on a single blog post in the past.
  - allie1 6y ago
    Doesn’t make books bad. It still requires someone sitting down to organize his/her thoughts and do the research.
  - dbcurtis 6y ago
    In the pre-web days I had a shelf full of O’Reilly books. Everyone did. But O’Reilly has gone down hill, and the popular tools have good on-line doc that is much fresher than a book can ever be. Technical books have become a dumpster fire. Some publishers (I’m looking at you Packt) are so bad their books are not worth the space they take in a dumpster. Total waste of trees.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mch82 6y ago
You are 100% right. Of course it doesn’t matter. > Does an over-reliance on documentation indicate a lack of critical expertise that will ultimately result in considerably lower job performance? Technical research is a skill. I love working with teammates who understand how to find, evaluate, and apply proven solutions. Most projects can spare the time to do a reuse trade study before writing something from scratch. Use (and authoring) of documentation is also a skill. Professionals use documentation to communicate with teammates so projects can scale efficiently.

phkahler 6y ago

Let's say Elon starts that colony on Mars and you think "Ima move there and write code for a living." You might have the internet, but its 15 minutes each direction. Nothing interactive works, and while they brought copies of Wikipedia, stack overflow didnt package so easily. Or more simply, can you write a web app without internet access?

tutfbhuf 6y ago
> stack overflow didnt package so easily You just need some copy of something like: the way back machine, google cache or archive.is and then do asynchronous mirroring and you are not so far behind. Zoom meetings might be a problem though.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  > Zoom meetings might be a problem though. If it prompted the meeting organiser to put their one point into an email, thereby saving 6 people a 45 minute meeting, would it be a problem or a feature?
  - tutfbhuf 6y ago
    Would be an interesting case study to find out if remote developers from Mars are actually more productive due to lack of synchronous communication.
    - mtVessel 6y ago
      Anyone who has worked with a team in a time zone 8+ hours away from their own can already answer this question. It depends entirely on the technical and communication skills of all involved parties.
- jeegsy 6y ago
  I think you might be missing the point of the hypothetical
megous 6y ago
That would be a colony on The Sun.
akiselev 6y ago
Vast majority of documentation and even the websites promoting most web related libraries are autogenerated from git. Run a bash script with a bunch of `git clone` on an Earth based server and and ship the disk image, latency be damned. Dash [1] does package up StackOverflow and a bunch of library docs too. [1] https://kapeli.com/dash https://kapeli.com/dash
jjk166 6y ago
And what if you wanted to go camping on the ocean floor? Can you start a camp fire underwater? That you can imagine some convoluted scenario where a skill could be employed does not mean it is an efficient use of your time to develop that skill, particularly when that scenario is easily avoidable.
- scubbo 6y ago
  Well said.
- phkahler 6y ago
  Touche.
ALittleLight 6y ago
Do we not have a cached version of the web on the Mars colony?
yosamino 6y ago
> Or more simply, can you write a web app without internet access? I understand what you are trying to say - but what would be the point of that ? If we were to prepare an essential list of documents that are required to write web applications without access to the net, we would probably be able to cobble it together and make it available offline. I mean MDN, CanIuse and CssTricks.com would already get you like 90% there.
- martijnvds 6y ago
  Add the RFC library for fallback/server side of things.
rzzzt 6y ago
You can cache documentation locally: https://devdocs.io/ https://devdocs.io/
twox2 6y ago
What use is a web app without internet access? Also, as if no internet access = no refernce.
cosmodisk 6y ago
Elon would take care of it : Tesla Code X© - whether you are underwater,on the moon or Mars, we got you covered with Reddit, HN, Stack Overflow dumps in an easy searchable database. Add-ons for PornHub are available separately.
jspash 6y ago
There is no javascript on Mars. Think about that! Sounds wonderful :P

warkdarrior 6y ago

It matters because SWE interviews rely on coding without googling. Maybe we need to change how interviews are done to test people on their Googling skills. For a given coding task, what do they search for? Do they Google for the right terms? Do they converge quickly on the right website to copy from?

deeeeplearning 6y ago
Or just give them free reign to use whatever tools they would use in an actual work environment and see what the end results are. Sure makes more sense than seeing how many leetcode problems you memorized.
slg 6y ago
>It matters because SWE interviews rely on coding without googling. Some (probably most) SWE interviews rely on coding without Googling. However I have been through plenty of interviews in which that wasn't the case. Coincidentally I also find this type of honesty in the interview process is a good indicator of how much I would enjoy working at the company.
kortilla 6y ago
SWE interviews (at FAANGs at least) don’t care about library specifics though. As long as you know the syntax and how to write algos/data structures, you can make it through. There is a strong argument that being good at that isn’t required for most SWEs (including at FAANG), but it is something that having library/framework references doesn’t really help with.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > There is a strong argument that being good at that isn't required for most SWEs (including at FAANG) Algos/data structures are used as a proxy for problem solving and how fast someone can learn. Plus every decent CS program will have a few courses on it. Also, internal codebases are, well, internal. You won't get a nicely formatted Stack Overflow response on how X works if X is deep in the Google Source tree.

mywittyname 6y ago

I mostly agree, but I think there are situations where it does make a difference. I had a position working on a pretty complicated 3d application in Angular. At times, it felt like I was fighting a war on two fronts, one dealing with Angular complexities and the other dealing with domain complexities. A better understanding of Angular in general would have greatly increased my productivity. Now, whether or not an increase in team productivity would have really mattered is hard to gauge.

908B64B197 6y ago

That's the reason I do algorithmic whiteboard instead of full blown "real world" coding exercises. I don't care that someone memorized whatever command line syntax to create a new project in whatever framework. That's just rote. Even what we write on the whiteboard I don't expect it to compile. Is it ToString or toString? Can't recall either. What I care about is that someone can ask the relevant questions, come up with a design and explain what and why they are doing something.

_the_inflator 6y ago
And afterwards? What is the hired guy then doing? Fixing the size of a button? ;)
- munk-a 6y ago
  That really depends on how much management there is for hand holding. I expect a good developer to get a ticket to fix the size of a button and be able to follow up with stakeholders about the size of the button next to it. It'd be really weird if we sunk so much effort into ticket writing that everything really was just reduced to a task - at that point the ticket author should just go ahead and fix the thing.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    A dedicated ticket to go fix a button. That's a symptom of a pretty dysfunctional org. If my requirements are that precise I'll farm that to offshored contractors.
    - selfhoster11 6y ago
      It's a symptom of a well organised org. The ticket doesn't need to have a lot of detail (unless your ticketing system is dysfunctional and forces you to input a lot of information, which is sadly more common than it needs to be), only enough to capture what needs to be done and where so it's not forgotten. It's no different to filing a ticket with the building management to replace a broken lightbulb - it's in your interest to know whether they replaced it already without having to stand up from your desk to check, and it's in their interest to know which individual problems are located where so that they can plan their weekly maintenance run through the building accordingly.

yarcob 6y ago

It's not a problem when you look up the spelling or the order of arguments in the reference. It's a problem when you search for the solution to every problem with a search engine. So many answers on the internet are written by absolute beginners, who happened to have the same problem, and then blogged about the solution after spending 5 minutes of googling. Sometimes these answers are alright, but often they are shallow and miss context. The problem is excacerbated by the fact that 1000s of sites try to get into the top results for programming questions. So you end up with crappy shallow answers, and never learn the underlying details. And then there's the problem that the more experienced you get, the less you look up answers, so the less you are exposed to sites like Stack Overflow, and the less you contribute to Stack Overflow. So the result is that the least experienced contribute most to the answers on the web. My preferred solution is to buy books. Find the best book on your topic and read a chapter, and you'll learn more than if you had googled 100 questions. The downside of books is that it only works for "old" tech. If you want to learn about the hot new Swift UI Declarative Reactive Whatever, your out of luck and you need to scrape together any info you can find from random blog posts...

onion2k 6y ago
My preferred solution is to buy books. Find the best book on your topic and read a chapter, and you'll learn more than if you had googled 100 questions. Books are also written by amateurs a lot of the time, especially if the topic is a bit niche. I've had people from publishers reach out to me to write a book about things based on a single blog post in the past.
- allie1 6y ago
  Doesn’t make books bad. It still requires someone sitting down to organize his/her thoughts and do the research.
- dbcurtis 6y ago
  In the pre-web days I had a shelf full of O’Reilly books. Everyone did. But O’Reilly has gone down hill, and the popular tools have good on-line doc that is much fresher than a book can ever be. Technical books have become a dumpster fire. Some publishers (I’m looking at you Packt) are so bad their books are not worth the space they take in a dumpster. Total waste of trees.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mch82 6y ago

You are 100% right. Of course it doesn’t matter. > Does an over-reliance on documentation indicate a lack of critical expertise that will ultimately result in considerably lower job performance? Technical research is a skill. I love working with teammates who understand how to find, evaluate, and apply proven solutions. Most projects can spare the time to do a reuse trade study before writing something from scratch. Use (and authoring) of documentation is also a skill. Professionals use documentation to communicate with teammates so projects can scale efficiently.