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
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
...the rest of that resume must be absolutely insane. Or he's applying to be a businessman.
I'm out here with a Master's degree and 3 years of work experience and I'm not even getting a first call. Shit's tough out here.
Have you tried adding "Googling" as a skill?
Fuck, I'm ready to try anything at this point.
Isn't this a repost? I remember seeing this a while ago.
u/repostsleuthbot
Oh fuck
I didn't find any posts that meet the criteria.
It could be OC or not. Who knows really.
Beep Boop, I'm not a bot.
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