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.
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.
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.
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
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 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."
For reals. I never bookmarked anything as I’d just regoogle what I was looking for but as of six months ago I can’t find shit. It’s like it never existed and all I get is spam websites that’s are skinned to looks genuine. I’m honestly going back to Askjeeves.com…
Did it used to be better? I rarely if ever used it before Google’s enshittification, but now I’m just happy to find streaming services whatever I need.
No, I’ve been using it for about 4 years or more, I think, and the search is stably kind of okay. Some time ago Google used to work when ddg failed, but…