> Getting information and help was difficult As time goes on, I don't see this as the benefit I used to. When Google supplanted Altavista as my go-to engine fo

> Getting information and help was difficult As time goes on, I don't see this as the benefit I used to. When Google supplanted Altavista as my go-to engine for technical docs, and then when StackOverflow come to the scene, I initially thought these were great developments. But I was wrong. Yes, it took much longer to both obtain and read the Intel/Microsoft/VESA/Cisco/IETF/etc documentation, but at the end of that process I always had a very solid understanding of what I was doing, why I was doing it, and where to look if X or Y goes wrong. Engineering coworkers and managers understood the process, understood the time delays involved, and accepted what were typical turnaround times for both programming and debugging iterations. Nowadays? I solve the problem much more quickly, but within a range of zero to very little understanding of why it works, what is above and below me in the abstraction hierarchy, what the hardware is actually doing, what the performance tradeoffs are, etc. And then to speak to engineering culture, if you ever step out to do it the old-fashioned way, impatience often sets in and you're told to just Google it, bro. If something goes horribly wrong, would you prefer your engineering team to have developed a deep understanding of what's actually going on under the hood, or would you rather have a pile of stackoverflow answers patched together? I think the old way was better. My brain is dumber and lazier than before, and I'm uncomfortable with this feeling. It's just sad.