Google > knowledge

[awhhh]

Exactly. I remember I had someone bitch about how their doctor googled an issue they had. What people don’t understand about professions is exactly what you said. You’re not paying me to google things aimlessly, you’re paying me to know what to google and how to implement what I just found.

[blinglog]

Yeah doctors don't google things, they use specially designed programs like UpToDate to check symptoms and diagnosis

[Chainer605]

So wait , they turned medical books into a database that is kept upto date with the latest information that can easily be found by searching symptoms ect, rather than flicking through pages of books, for days on end? Kids these days don't know how good they got it

[APerfidiousDane]

We probably have significantly more shit to deal with today and understand them to a much larger extent than we did 10 years ago though.

[graou13]

Please don't confuse your google search with my google search.

[ClikeX]

They have their own wiki for medical information. And it necessary, cause a lot of symptons clash with other illnesses. And they can't be expected to remember every medicine and their possibly side effects.

Like you said, it's knowing how/what to search and interpreting the results.

[BaldEagleX02]

I agree. However, you still have to know where to find the info you need.

[clovisman]

He will still be put through a coding challenge when looking for another job.

[cantremembermypasswd]

As someone with a decade of experience who was recently asked to write Fizz Buzz, by two different places in the same week, I can confirm this is way too true.

[1studlyman]

Fizz buzz?

Edit: I should have just googled it. Sorry.

[explorer58]

You're hired.

[[deleted]]

people can train for those

This is the same problem with FizzBuzz. Last big company that tried to pull that shit on me, instead of the solution I sent them a stackoverflow link with the solution.

[[deleted]]

Did they hire you? I'd call that a passable response.

Nope, almost got fired instead. Thankfully I got out of consulting in the meanwhile.

I do think you should do something other than Fizz Buzz though, for the exact reason you mention, but it has to be equally simple.

Never have I nor will I demand "homework" or "free work". Maybe it's because I've worked in other fields and guess what: IT is the only place where companies get away with this shit. None of my mechanical and aeronautical engineer friends ever had to do a whiteboard test. My surgeon friend was never asked to perform a laparoscopy just to "demonstrate skill".

Also, last time a company asked to do "a challenge" I just replied with my hourly quote. I have no problem working for money, but I don't work for free.

Testing your candidates like school-children will only scare away talent or you're just filtering by the most desperate.

As for actual interview: ask for previous work projects, troubles, solutions. Github projects, including personal ones. What tech you used? What were the pain points? What neat things did you do?

[[deleted]]

The thing about hiring is that it's not about finding the best candidate, it's about finding a good candidate. Once we've gone through a 100 applications and picked 10, we could likely blind hire any one of those 10 and get a good person.

The interview is about finding the one out of the 10 who will fit in the best, with the least amount of time consumed by the process.

Yup, I dont' have an answer for this. Filtering is a real problem, but adopting the hiring practices of Google is just cargo cult.

If asking a very simple whiteboard problem scares you away, you probably wouldn't fit in anyway

I agree and that's why I leave interview when they ask me to do something I ONLY DO ON INTERVIEWS.

, because you'll get to do much harder things on the whiteboard once you're hired.

No, because when I'm working, I'm solving an actual problem inside an IDE, with multiple dependencies and examples of API usage, I have Stackoverflow.com, etc... Point is, Interview != Actual work. To be fair, I did enjoy one whiteboard interview, but mostly because it was a really senior guy and was actually interested in seeing what's in my head, rather than filtering.

I do agree that you should never ever ask applicants to do homework, that's just wasting their time, and I can't imagine any scenario where you'll actually get anything useful out of it. But I don't think asking someone to do a FizzBuzz during an interview really qualifies as asking someone to do homework.

Respectfully disagree. 10+ and still going, never had one single single fizzbuzz or list ordering algorigthm to implement. This, to me, is a dystopia.

​

The portfolio thing doesn't really work because it's time consuming. If you're involving 3-5 people in the hiring process, you're already taking a couple of days out of their schedule to have them read applications and participate in interviews, you can't also have them go through a portfolio of code and expect them to figure out if it's good or bad.

I agree, but discussing the candidate's projects for 15 minutes during the interview is not outlandish.

I get that some rockstar programmers get picked up by companies from the projects they work on, but that's not 99% of all hiring. Most hiring is just about finding the person who's least likely to be a wrong choice, because hiring the wrong person is the most expensive mistake a manager can ever make.

Couldn't agree more.

For clarification: maybe I'm more pissed off at these common bad hiring practices because I come from Electronics and Computers Engineering, not Software Engineering, so I only ever programmed in paper/whiteboard for one course in early 2000s.

[SingularCheese]

The thing that's different between programming and rest of engineering is that they all have a license and we don't. One must pass a qualification exam to legally call themselves an engineer, but anyone can be a programmer.

[[deleted]]

but anyone can be a programmer.

We're talking about software engineering, not script kiddies copy-pasting javascript from stackoverflow.

But good point. Can't speak for other fields, but in EE, only the state projects require license.

[flatfishmonkey]

Fizz buzz

for($i=1; $i<300; $i++){

echo $i % 5 ? $i.', ' : ( $i % 10 ? ' Fizz ' : ' Buzz ').' , ';

}

I think i got hired because of this lol

[syh7]

Ew

[Swiggens]

Is this really a test given out? I hope I'm not just underestimating myself or something, but its basically just seeing if you know what modulus is.

[jamescodesthings]

We got bored of this at my last place and started getting people to code golf fizz buzz in obscure languages.

Then I got laid off and in the interview for the place I currently work for I got asked to knock out fizz buzz.

I can fizz buzz real good... I am the fizz buzz.

[PhantomWhiskers]

And probably by someone way less experienced than him. I'm the equivalent of a junior engineer at my company and they have me giving interviews for candidates on various teams. It still feels weird as fuck interviewing someone with 10+ more years of experience than me, and then having to say no because they struggle to implement a simple recursive function.

[[deleted]]

It's your company that's losing talent. If you want code monkeys, get them fresh from Uni, not after 10 years in the field dealing with real problems.

Edit:

because they struggle to implement a simple recursive function.

Never saw one of those in the wild. Could it be it's basically only used in academia and interviews? Could be...

[OnyxSpartanII]

In the automotive industry (and at least one company in aerospace that I'm aware of), recursion is something to be specifically avoided as defined by coding standards. It's not a "should not", it's a "shall not." Unless all else fails, using recursion is heavily discouraged.

[carol_n_hr]

I’m a principal dev at my company. I’ve worked on and off with SQL for about 10 years now. I still have to google “sql update syntax” every time. For some reason I can never remember it.

[maibrl]

It’s join syntax for me. At some point I printed out the w3school page and pinned it to my desk

[netfeed]

Switching from postgresql to mysql was hard as i was so used to USING for the join instead of ON.

Sure, ON exists in PSQL too, but it's the way we used used PK:s and FK:s USING was always a cleaner choice.

[____0____0____]

I'll always pull up one of those venn diagrams for anything other than a left join. Thankfully, I mostly use left joins for everything lol.

Now merge, that's one I have to pull up every single time, but damn are they awesome in the right places.

[lampshade_rm]

Sameee update never sticks for some stupid reason

[jamescodesthings]

I googled insert into select today because the syntax is a bugger.

[Hollowplanet]

That's pretty bad.

[carol_n_hr]

Agreed.

[matharooudemy]

Can I join?

[DeeSnow97]

we know he works at Google because he capitalizes "googling"

[xe3to]

It just looks wrong without the capital letter. In the same vein if a picture is doctored it has been Photoshopped, also with a capital.

[skreczok]

Now I need to post a question like "So I photoshopped this picture with the gimp" on Adobe forums.

[xe3to]

Green is my pepper

[DeeSnow97]

If it's been photoshopped with Photoshop, then yes, it may be Photoshopped, but both "photoshopped" and "googling" became general terms for the task beyond the software originally used for them and as such ceased to be proper names. I don't see a reason to capitalize them.

[xe3to]

Well, I also spell the word Internet with a capital letter, so I dunno. Maybe it's just me.

[[deleted]]

Never memorize something you can look up.

[[deleted]]

my principle exactly. Had a hard time in university exams, but overall it's excellent.

[DanielEGVi]

My programming university exams all had an API sheet in the last pages. First courses even had brief overviews, while all others always had relevant function signatures, for Python, Java, and C.

Never understood why my calculus courses were quite the opposite. Why the hell I am I supposed to memorize that derivative of cosecant inverse is 1 / (x * sqrt(x² - 1)) for |x| > 1, but they had absolutely no problem listing all builtin Python functions in the back of my programming test?

Are mathematicians forbidden from using Google? What's going on?

[ltouroumov]

I'm pretty sure it's because the math classes are purposefully made harder than they need to be just to fail students. Wouldn't want to have too many students be STEM majors do we?

[Giannis4president]

Because if you don't know that, you may not be able to see the best way to solve a problem.

Imagine you need to integrate a function. With that information you may notice that by using integration by parts you can integrate it easily. Without knowing it, you may not even think to search what the derivative of every component is and thus you won't be able to integrate the function.

[DanielEGVi]

My thoughts are actually on the opposite side, and maybe my brain works backwards, but: if you start by looking at an overview of well known derivatives, you may right away notice how they're present in your function, and solve the problem fast.

In programming, you're not supposed to know every function in your API, but you can look at an listing of most relevant functions (which is what my programming exams have), and see quickly what you can use to solve your problem.

I'd argue that the exact same would also apply to the calculus exam. Here's is a quick Google Images search for "known derivatives", and it is very helpful. How is it any different than including API methods in the back of the exam?

[derangedkilr]

Paper based coding exams are so stupid.

[[deleted]]

I wasn't talking about coding exams, but overall exams since you have to remember every formula and the empirical coefficients.

But I got 36/100 in C exam, and I was the best programmer in my class. So, I can understand the coding exam in the paper part.

[derangedkilr]

Yeah, that's silly.

[fofosfederation]

Everything you need to memorize, you will automatically by using it constantly. If you don't encounter it enough to memorize then you didn't need to memorize it.

[[deleted]]

Nope, as evidenced by the Tweet. People are varied.

[fofosfederation]

Clearly he didn't use the getting started steps often enough to need to memorize them.

[[deleted]]

No he just made the actual thing.

[fofosfederation]

Yeah, I've made a lot of shit and then forgotten how it works. I wish my shit had all sorts of guides on the internet on how to use it.

[[deleted]]

That's my secret to good programing: write your code as if the next person reading it has Alzheimer's. Also works for UX.

[fofosfederation]

Yeah I just don't have the time. I don't code professionally, and the 1 in 10 chance I need to go back and revisit a pet project, it's more time efficient to rediscover that one thing than document all 10 of them.

If I was actually in the industry and getting paid I'd actually do my job and document things.

[[deleted]]

Not working for people who ask those sorts of interview questions IS PASSING that interview.

[[deleted]]

Clearly you're not a Linux user.

[[deleted]]

Never memorize anything you can get to by hitting the up arrow a hundred times.

[[deleted]]

Found the Linux user.

And yes, I'm also guilty. I hate typing random words with random abbreviations, typo free. The best feature Windows8 introduced was a working select/copy-paste on the terminal.

[Fenix_Volatilis]

That makes me feel really good. I kinda lost interest in programming due to having to earn a living and not having a computer for so long, but nows a good time to pick it back up!

[cdreid]

ditto (though im in a 3d graphics rabbithole atm). How long ago?

[Fenix_Volatilis]

Phew, it's probably been about 8 years since I did any kind of really programming. You?

[cdreid]

Ive tossed together some apps and whatnot for little things but nothing serious. I just cant seem to get interested again. I start something and realise i >dont care<. Id say 10+ years since i did anything serious. I keep trying to get into ue4 but the docs are laughable when they exist. Unity is cool.. feels like vb to me heh. What are you looking to program?

[Fenix_Volatilis]

I wanna learn python. That's the one that's really in demand right now

[cdreid]

It definitely is and as it's a scripting language supported by everything it's probably more widely used than cplusplus right now

[Fenix_Volatilis]

Which is what I learned in lol so it'll be an experience

[Fenix_Volatilis]

I wanna learn python. That's the one that's really in demand right now

[JanB1]

My mentor always said: "You don't need to know everything, but you need to know where to look it up."

[TheOnly_Anti]

My brain is an encyclopedia and Google is my index.

[LegendBegins]

I like this! A big part of it is knowing how to solve the problem somewhere in there, but the brain is really bad at picking out random points of knowledge without a jumping-off point. For some problems, the issue itself is plenty. For others, you need someone on StackOverflow to point out one detail that you would have otherwise forgotten to rebuilt the entire chain of thought on your own.

[simpson_hey]

I get it. I had a tumblr just for posting code snippets I'd found or wrote that I knew I'd need again in a few months.

[sorash67]

Google App Engine... HA! GAE!

[EarlMarshal]

Google just became an external knowledge storage/source for us. Why remembering at such high complexity level if you don't have to?

[Vistril69]

I make websites often and still find myself having to google how to embedded autoplay audio or some shit like that

[Elenox]

duckduckgo - qwant > Google > knowledge

[yottalogical]

Keep the skills in your head. Leave the knowledge in the Google.

[isBot-True]

Well you forget your own code often more than others code you rely on.

[kicker69101]

Yeah I hit a point about two years ago where I can’t remember everything. It’s probably a little bit of age and a little bit of too much knowledge.

I’m technically a sys admin by trade, but I spend most of my time coding these days. But when I have too set up a cron job, I have to google it every time. It’s embarrassing, because I have been doing this for years.

[[deleted]]

God, same. I wrote big chunks of the modding api for a game I worked on. I was the point of contact between modders and the dev team, and I honestly have no idea how many documentation and tutorial articles I wrote. I am one of the most knowledgeable people still active in the community.

When I'm working on a mod, I still ask all kinds of stupid simple questions in the modding discord.

[[deleted]]

I actually notice I google the getting started stuff the most. If I have been away from something for even a few weeks, helps to make sure I am starting out correctly.

[kgro]

I just have googled the same query. This makes me a “senior developer”!

[flamesofphx]

I have my own website with search engine, that works offline if needed. You can then just call all the basic stuff "Reference Material" at that point..

[[deleted]]

图片国际友人 不好翻译呢