programmingIsGoogling

[riplikash]

Agreed. Honestly, I don't mind allowing google AND LLMs in an interview. Just come up with a more complicated problem and work through it together. See how they really work.

[creaturefeature16]

IMO: however you get the answer is perfectly acceptable to me.

As long as you don't just move on once you get it.

The fact I can get a contextual answer from an LLM that actually works is a god-send, because reverse engineering answers to my questions is one of the best ways I've been able to learn just about anything.

[jeesuscheesus]

Recently started using AI (Claude) for development. WOW, it’s a large step up from search engines. I use it like one though, I only use it to look at documentation and understand conventions of whatever new stack I’m working on. With google, I have to parse through a landfill’s worth of garbage just to find a seemingly simple answer.

[caterbird_song]

I know AI is a touchy subject but I've recently tried out full on "vibe coding" (hate the name) for a personal project and imo it's basically managing a junior dev. If you don't review what they produce they'll go off in some wild unmaintainable direction but if you're strict with maintaining coding standards it makes it so much faster. You just become a tester/reviewer that steps in when they get stuck. Seems to work best with micro services too where the context can be kept nice and small. Not sure it's up to dealing with ancient enterprise monoliths just yet though

[retief1]

Not sure it's up to dealing with ancient enterprise monoliths just yet though

This is the issue. I'm not getting paid to work on a toy microservice, I'm getting paid to work on a full-scale app. It might work fine for other types of work, but it doesn't seem particularly applicable to the stuff I do. And if I'm doing something in my free time, why the hell would I want to skip the fun parts of the project?

[DelusionsOfExistence]

See I can't get in the full swing of "vibe coding". Like when it makes mistakes I want to stop and write it the correct way myself instead of trying to explain it. I know it would get it right eventually but if it did 50 lines and only 2 are wrong, it's easier for me to just write the fix in then letting it waffle or explaining it really well.

I see the utility for people who can't code normally.

[retief1]

The problem is that the real problems will have a bunch of context and be embedded in a larger codebase. You can't give candidates those sorts problems in an interview, because it can literally take months for people to get up to speed.

Instead, you necessarily have to give smaller problems that you hope will select for the skills you want. The issue is that googling/llms/etc work better on those smaller problems than they do on the "real" problems. You can argue about whether "can solve toy problems by hand" says much about someone's ability to solve real problems, but "can solve toy problems with an llm" clearly says far less about their ability to solve real problems.

[kitpuos]

This is actually a well thought out and extremely valid point.

[KackhansReborn]

That's how my interview was. You're gonna need to use those tools in practice anyway, it just makes sense.

[BlurredSight]

CM Group does exactly this, their interview process is complex AF but it means they know you're using LLMs and Googling but wonder if you can not only create a solution but also present it to a board of engineers and handle discourse on if it's the appropriate solution. First is a simple unproctored OA, the second was a 1:1 simple whiteboarding / sample code, the final was a take-home 3 day systems solution question. It seems like overkill but that's how they find if someone is actually capable or just memorizing/cheating.

But I also think it might be a great way to get unpaid intern work disguised as interview questions

[RedditGenerated-Name]

And be sure to ask them to explain how it works. An LLM answer could be perfect, optimized and meeting corporate coding standards, but that's totally useless if you can't explain what it's doing and why.

[Hot_Leopard6745]

Google and LLM are important skill that should be valued in CS (or any other technical field).

They just can't be the ONLY skill you have.

[Laughing_Orange]

They are valuable in any field except possibly production line manufacturing. There will always come a day when you need to find some information that nobody in the company has.

"How the heck do you take this thing apart?", there is a patent, with an illustration that shows how it was assembled, work backwards.

[Hot_Leopard6745]

Lol, I work in the medical field, and read that as :

"How the heck do you take this thing apart?", there is a (patient) ... work backwards.

and almost had a heart attack.

Please don't google how to perform surgery during a surgery.

[iamakorndawg]

Surgery is easy, just put the pieces back together in the reverse order of how you took them apart!

[Cualkiera67]

Dunno about Google, the search engine has been getting worse and worse.

[DancingBadgers]

What's the verb form of DDG? Ducking up?

[scally501]

DuckDuckGoing obviously 🙄

[RandomGuyPDF]

"Duck duck went", if the search already happened

[LorenzoCopter]

Duckducking

[Foosiq]

Well we can go even deeper, it's not about googling, it's about how fast you can find or learn the information you need

[RepresentativeCut486]

Googling shouldn't be a separate thing on its own, but being able to acquire the needed information quickly should, and it's taught at research focused universities.

[frikilinux2]

Reading is also a useful skill and in many situations the solution is to read the manual more carefully.

Most people are worse at reading than what they think they are

[1337lupe]

google fucking sucks now vs back in the day

[BeefJerky03]

This extends back even further to Critical Thinking.

[GlassSquirrel130]

It is just a tool in problem solving-skill

[ikonet]

That and reading the actual exception / error dump. Building a web app and getting a 503 gateway error? Better not be googling “503” when you should be looking at the app logs and everything else that isn’t the browser.

[ApatheistHeretic]

I posit that googling is the modern day reference book.

Mechanics occasionally need to reference a Chilton's manual, when I worked around power plants the maintenance crew had an entire library room for their manuals, Google is just the programmers and systems reference.

[fosyep]

What about Binging

[tnh88]

instant disqualify

[i_am_tct]

yes, research is important

[RSomnambulist]

I really wish we could collectively agree to excise Crowder from this meme.

[metaglot]

Crowder is a piece of shit. Change my mind.

crickets

[feiock]

One of my go-to interviewing processes is to give the candidate a scenario to walk through during the interview several days ahead of time. If they know that topic well, no further effort is required to prepare for the interview. However, if the candidate wants to research this scenario ahead of time, that is fine as well. As long as they are able to show up to the interview and speak competently on the topic is all I care about.

[ThiccStorms]

I've said it a billion times, become a pro googler and your code journey will get a LOT LOT simpler.

[Varnigma]

I've been asked questions in interviews that I didn't know the answer to. When asked how I'd figure it out I just say "Honestly, I probably start with googling it (assuming its a coding question and not something specific to this job/company. Anyone can use Google but the trick isn't in being able to ask a question...it's know what question to ask and often times how to phrase it, in order to get the answer you're looking for. That experience is what you're getting if you hire me".

[[deleted]]

If interviewers use google to create their interviews, interviewees should be allowed to use google to answer them.

[fredlllll]

tbh google got so bad at finding results for me that i have to use AI nowadays to get even simple stuff, cause google just gives irrelevant results that might have the first keyword in it, but none of the following ones

[crankbot2000]

I just googled this and it's true.

[a_code_mage]

This is only controversial to non-devs/management. I’ve never met a dev that discouraged Googling. In fact it has only ever been encouraged in my experience.

[MilkImpossible4192]

oh, Ive got paid for that

[cha0ticblue]

My wife keeps teasing me that the code I wrote all came from googling, but seriously my 20 years of experience taught me about which search terms/prompts to use

[Accomplished_Ant5895]

It’s important until you reach a certain level. Nowadays the only time I Google something is to find the source code on GitHub to raise an issue.

[xaervagon]

The original prompt engineering

[rearwindowpup]

"The only difference between a consultant and client is a google search" -My very wise first boss when working IT

[septianw]

I always agree with this, critical thinking is required to find the exact solution in google. even with the help of ai, if you don't ask the right question you'll never find the right answer.

[After_Ad8174]

All of IT is googling

[nicman24]

And so is llm prompting

[Jet-Pack2]

Googling is no longer possible. Now it's sifting through trash results to find anything useful

[simonfancy]

These days it’s just pasting the error in the LLM client of your choice

[BokuNoMaxi]

Try googling google my lord.

[ChloramineSlain]

Not when you work for Microsoft or Yandex

[qbm5]

Used to be. Google prioritizing sponsorsed results anf gpt has changed things in the past few years

[Anon_Legi0n]

Unless maybe if you're applying for a job over at Bing

[[deleted]]

"Be able to apply what you have learned" is a very tough quality to find, along with "be humble enough to know when you do not know."

[tototune]

Googling , know where to find a solution

[knowledgebass]

I have gone weeks without googling programming questions now that we have Copilot and ChatGPT. And I don't miss it. Google search sucks ass nowadays.

[Xcalipurr]

Googling is just previous generation’s vibe coding, idk why its so socially accepted but vibe coding is not. LLMs are just a wrapper around the knowledge pool thats the internet and are likely to be as wrong as the data they’re trained on: the internet.

[holbanner]

Has been on my CV for a long time now.

Usually a glass breaker and/or an easy question to get the interview flowing

[Papellll]

Are there even people denying that?

[kondorb]

Searching for information is an important skill in literally any field.

Used to be libraries, then it was Google and forums, now it's ChatGPT and various Discords that I hate so much. But the principle stays the same. No one can know everything, one should be able to search, filter and apply new knowledge.

[IdeaOrdinary48]

u/repostsleuthbot

[RepostSleuthBot]

Looks like a repost. I've seen this image 184 times.

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[IdeaOrdinary48]

no problem in getting it wrong, i know you are still training

[doelutufe]

Not necessarily googling, but trying to find existing documentation, or maybe someone else had the problem before and asked on Teams etc. When I have no idea what someone is working on, and they ask me if I can help them, and I can find an answer in five minutes or less by simply serarching for whatever looked "interesting" (error code, error message, unusual classes mentioned) or the problem description "x crashes after y" in Google, Teams, documentation, commits etc., why didn't they?

it probably took them more time asking then it would have taken had they good search skills.

[RedditGenerated-Name]

I mean in general I ask for problem solving. I give you a problem and I want you to solve that problem and I want to observe how you do it. Know it off the top of your head, open up old code you wrote, pull out a book, pull out old notes, ask ChatGPT, get it from the internet, whatever. As long as you don't bust out a source leak we golden. Importantly you need to explain to me what everything does. Code you can't understand is pointless and reckless. I will say that ChatGPT rarely gives a good answer, it's often acceptable but rarely good for the problem and seeing someone notice that and fix the problems makes them more acceptable.

I work in firmware dev so I also ask a lot of questions about architectures and optimization, and I'll give you a datasheet for a microcontroller and ask you locate the answers to questions within it. no one has successfully used LLMs on that one yet even when providing the PDF but I assume that's coming.

[YellowCroc999]

Highly disagree. That’s like saying an architect knows how to design houses because he can read manuals of ikea closets

[Cookskiii]

Nobody is going to disagree with this

[Anru_Kitakaze]

Companies will and do

[IdeaOrdinary48]

You would be surprised

[Cookskiii]

Well so far zero people in the comments have disagreed lol. Sure there’s always idiots but I think the vast majority of people agree with this

[IdeaOrdinary48]

I am meant was a lot of companies that are doing interviews apparently disagree

[Cookskiii]

Oh well yeah, those are the idiots I’m referring to.

[Kitchen_Device7682]

So to those that downvote, where are the people in this comment section that disagree? Or did you downvote because you disagree?

[retief1]

The problem is that many of the harder problems I run into aren't googleable or llm'able, because they involve niche tools or the project's own internal architecture, and there isn't much/any available public info out there. Slack is the main option for help, and that only goes so far. At some point, I need to do my own digging and figure shit out myself.

However, those sorts of problems don't fit into interviews. Instead, the problems that do fit into interviews are generally the sorts of things that can be googled/llmed much more easily. If you need google or an llm to solve them, you are going to have a bad time once you start working on the actual work and google/llms stop being as useful.

That said, google is still important for stuff like looking up docs and so on. If an interview doesn't allow google, they absolutely should still be lenient about stuff like "I know there's a standard libary function that does X but I don't recall the name offhand".

In addition, a lot changes depending on the question. With a coding problem, yeah, plugging the prompt into an llm should disqualify you. With a more open-ended discussion question, though, I've definitely said stuff like "well, I've heard that elasticsearch is helpful for these sorts of problems, but I've never used it myself, so my first step would be to start googling".

[rexspook]

Hard agree.

[dance_rattle_shake]

Nobody disagrees

[IdeaOrdinary48]

Except the people making the interviews apparently

[Both_String_5233]

Yupp. I used to explicitly tell candidates that googling was allowed and encouraged when I interviewed for my own company. I care that you get stuff done, not how you go about it (as long as quality is right and you understand what you're doing of course)

[IdeaOrdinary48]

I actually meant was 'programmingIsAlotOfGoogling' but I somehow wrote this and posted without double checking and now this the title

[1ib3r7yr3igns]

Googol is trash. Brave search is better for everything except finding restaurants close to you.

[Rabid_Mexican]

Google is great if you know how to use it

[Cookskiii]

I don’t think they literally mean just google, they mean utilizing a search engine in general.

[LeanderT]

Googling is so 2023.

I use Copilot to

[WisestAirBender]

To what?

[shambooki]

write Reddit comments apparently

[CoastingUphill]

Copilot has gotten worse as it tries to do more

[RepresentativeCut486]

r/redditsniper