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I always felt my best asset as an engineer was my googling skills. I always also felt like this is almost cheating, but of course in a way (in most ways) it's n

I always felt my best asset as an engineer was my googling skills. I always also felt like this is almost cheating, but of course in a way (in most ways) it's not. I often solve problems for colleagues by returning a google response from the first page of search results. Meaning, most likely, that I had a better google query than they had. I wonder if this skill can become more useful in the age of "prompt engineering"? Will my googling skills be useless and I need to start over? Or will my ability to google naturally convert into a decent prompt-engineering skill given a reasonable amount of practice?

bryanrasmussen 4y ago
>Meaning, most likely, that I had a better google query than they had. there's two parts, good google query, but also figuring out which of the results returned is the most likely to be useful. I've often found results for people that were on the first page of the most obvious query in the world to start with, but they were not the first result but down a bit and maybe looked a bit weird.
factormeta 4y ago
Also keep in mind that your google query is bubbled, may be your search query is better than your colleagues because of your search history etc.
duggan 4y ago
I used to think this, but I'm not sure google-fu is the real superpower here. I've been surprised to encounter many developers who just don't seem to be able to read and comprehend the output of a program; logs, stack traces, etc. That's the basic — sometimes only — input to a search query. I suspect the ability to comprehend and describe a problem is a skill that translates quite smoothly to a world of prompt-based interaction.