With misinformation about and how shit Google search is lately, it’s definitely a skill worth learning.
“I used to be able to Google like you, but then they changed what Google was and now what I can do doesn’t work, and what you have to do seems weird and scary to me.”
I used to google onions, because it was the style at the time
I used to be able to Google like you
…but then I got enshittification in the knee
And it’ll happen to you!
Not only is “Googling” one of my most important job skills, now that I’m doing professional services, my entire job basically consist of “Learn product ${FOO} faster than the customer’s employees can.” Which of course primarily consists of knowing what to search for, how to find it, and how to interpret and use what I find.
So you’re that contractor that always shits out code that looks like the guy who wrote it was just learning the language?
Yeah pretty much. I mean I do the best I can (and I do have resources to look to for help).
Did it work tho
Works as expected.
To be fair you could call this “search optimisation” and the people on Linkedin would eat this up
I might actually put this under my skills. I’m fairly good at googlefu.
Or prompt engineering.
“I’ve got 10 years of googling experience”.
“Sorry, we only accept candidates with 12 years of googling experience”.
A few years ago… Okay over a decade ago 🤕 Google offered a free course on “googling” with a certificate for completion. You’re damn straight I put that on my resume. Of course they’ve disabled half the tricks they taught us but now.
“Prompt Engineering”: AKA explaining to Chat GPT why it’s wrong a dozen times before it spits out a useable (but still not completely correct) answer.
That’s actually a valid skill to know when to tell the AI that it’s wrong.
A few months ago, I had to talk to my juniors to think critically about the shitty code that AI was generating. I was getting sick of clearly copy-pasted code from chatGPT and the junior not knowing what the fuck they were submitting to code review.
Should start asking them like, why did you do this? Why did you chose this method? To make them sweat :p
That used to make sense when LLMs were not the thing, when evaluating assessments from students, half of which asked someone else and didn’t bother to even read the code
If no one can make sense of the change, then you reject it. Makes no difference if it was generated with an LLM or copy-pasted from Stackoverflow.
I just ask ChatGPT to review pull requests.
I’m trying to convince a senior developer from the team I’m a member of, to stop using copilot. They have committed code that they didn’t understand (only tested to verify it does what it’s expected to do). I doubt it’d succeed…
If there exists an answer, as gpt will tell you the answer exists till the very end, even when it’s not so
I have multiple people in my IT department who henpeck when they type. If you don’t want him, please send the CV my way.
I knew a compsci grad who used a physical magnifying glass to read screens
You didn’t have to do us henpeckers like that
I will be honest as a late GenX it’s going to be interesting as my cohort retires because we were the last generation to remember before The Internet and grew up to understand the technology not just use it.
If you’re my age or older please make sure you’re teaching your young coworkers how to break things and put them back together without the aid of all the tools and resources they have at their fingertips now. Creativity thrives in adversity. Creativity is at risk when tools like ChatGPT are at their fingertips now.
/rant
Get off your high horse old man. Millennials were born into technology, molded by it. We live and breathe it, and also grew up in a world where things most definitely did not just work.
I think you significantly underestimate the ingenuity and problem solving abilities of the younger generations. My Gen Z coworkers are extremely smart and hard working and understand how things work just as well, if not better than older generations.
I said nothing about the ingenuity and problem solving. That’s not the concern. I also didn’t take any exception on work ethic or intelligence. You’re putting words in my mouth.
I never said that you said those things. You said you were the last generation to understand technology and not just use it, which is quite frankly ridiculous and untrue - especially for anyone with work ethic and intelligence.
I think they mean that they were the last generation who was alive and learning about how things were built and innovated on, while newer generations won’t have that benefit.
They will be exposed to high level tools instead that automate a lot of the work which will make things easier for them but reduce understanding.
Thus, the newer generations on average will need to purposefully dig back into the past to learn what the older generations learned by just being around while it was happening.
These are just general trends though, its not going to be very practical to try to apply it to any individuals, or the group of people you work with.
Yeah, the tools are still there to figure out the low level shit, information on it has never been this easy to come by and bright people who are interested will still get there.
However growing up during a time you were forced to figure the low level details of tech out merely to get stuff to work, does mean that if you were into tech back then you definitely became bit of a hacker (in the traditional sense of the word) whilst often what people consider as being into tech now is mainly spending money on shinny toys were everything is already done for you.
Most people who consider themselves as being “into Tech” don’t really understand it to significant depth because they never had to and only the few who actually do want to understand it at that level enough to invest time into learning it do.
I’m pretty sure the same effect happened in the early days vs later days of other tech, such as cars.
The comparison to cars is interesting, although cars maybe have peaked already and I doubt technology has.
I dont think proprietary information is helping much either. Makes young folk think they need to get a job at Google to work on something real and important.
On the nose. Thank you for explaining it far more eloquently than I was able to.
edit: replied to wrong user
Dude Socrates was convinced that reading and writing would ruin everyone’s memory who grew up with it. Whining about <innovation> somehow handicapping the next generation by making them “too dependent on technology” or whatever and couching it in reasonable-sounding terms is as old as language, and time always makes fools of those who indulge in that sort of masturbatory delusion. You’re just jealous we had cooler toys, own it.
Ask them if they know what udm=14 means.
Oh my fucking god. Thank you!
When I interviewed junior devs for my team, I had zero theoretical questions, and only two coding questions which were basically code that had to be debugged, and once it was running, for them to implement some minor things that I asked them to implement. I said I don’t mind if they googled, I only wanted them to share their screens while they worked, so that I can see how they worked and how they googled/adapted the answers to their code. I interviewed over a dozen people ranging from freshers to 4 yoe, and you should see how terrible they were at googling. Out of all them, only one fresher came close to being good in the interview. Even ‘4 yoe’ devs who ‘spearheaded’ various projects sucked at basic python and googling.
I would 1000% become dumb as a rock with someone watching me not to mention in a high risk setting such as an interview
Yeah. We do a ton of screen sharing guided mentorship in my role, and everyone can’t think straight while sharing their screen.
We get through it, and feedback says it’s worth it. But it still sucks in the moment.
I tend to do the most embarrassing sitcom shit possible when someone is watching me do something I’m an expert in.
Knowing when to cut your losses swallow your pride and ask for help is legitimately an incredibly important dev skill. I’ve met otherwise decent developers that could disappear in a hole for a month on a simple problem that anyone else on the team could help them work through in a few hours because they didn’t want to look dumb.
I’m torn about this because I have good mentors but I genuinely want to try to learn how to code and not just have the answers given to me right away. At least I’m only working on volunteer project so being slow isn’t really holding anyone else up.
Don’t be torn - solve it yourself until you can’t! It’s not helpful to be someone who constantly runs to other folks to fix their stuff and neither is it good to be someone who will just frustrate themselves struggling without progress.
If you’re a junior developer you will probably get time boxed tickets, just try and catch yourself if you’re spinning your wheels (and that isn’t easy, it takes practice).
As with most things in life balance is important, you don’t want to be at either extreme.
Actually finding something on Google often requires some knowledge and the application of the right strategies and tricks.
Holy shit, this guy only Google searches with {google:baseURL}/search?udm=14&q=%s
Definitely a senior.
Lucky guy. Tolerance for calling a spade a spade is a big green flag.
adding googling to my cv rn
Might add Duckduckgoing or web searching
Careful, HR npcs will not know wtf that is
Just tell them it’s a strain of the VI virus.
But it sounds cooler when they don’t know what it’s about, right? Right??
Prompt engineering is a better looking term these days.
When I took handwriting lessons I had to draw each number 100+ times in a row, so I guess I could say I’ve been googoling since 1987
Can I Google myself in your office?
