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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 w
by 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 agoMy 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 agoDoesn’t make books bad. It still requires someone sitting down to organize his/her thoughts and do the research.
- dbcurtis 6y agoIn 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.
- mike_d 6y ago> It's a problem when you search for the solution to every problem with a search engine Why? I'd fire an engineer who took on problems and refused to spend 10 minutes googling around and looking for solutions first. I have no interest in humoring someone who dismisses the entire internet because it is written by "dumb people." Buying and reading books is how you draw out a project you don't want to work on.
- yarcob 6y agoCode I've seen at an (at the time) very well known startup horrified me. It must have been written by people with exactly this mindset: "Why spend time learning all this useless background information when I can just find the answer on google in 10 minutes". It was obvious that people just cobbled together dirty workarounds that they must have found somewhere on the internet. They used runtime hacks to circumvent limitations in a library API, even though the library was developed by someone else at the same startup, and the runtime hacks were not necessary if the developer had any clue about what they were doing. Sometimes you get stuck, and searching the web can help you get unstuck. But the problem is when people just search for the solution to EVERY problem they encounter and never learn the basics because they don't want to "draw out the project". (Addendum: I'm not dismissing the internet. You can find good information on the internet. But it takes time. The problem is that people take shortcuts, and instead of learning everything they need to know, they just google for the answer to their specific problem because it seems more productive in the short term. Buying and reading books will take longer than copying an answer from Stack Overflow, but it will not take longer than learning sufficiently in depth about a topic by reading blog posts, documentation, etc)