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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

I didn't read the article and I knew what he meant.

20 years ago I'd buy books to learn Java, Linux, etc. These days if I want to learn something, I just start Googling.

I still think organized and structured information is helpful. We just need to devise a better way. I'm using Github for some things:

https://github.com/melling/ComputerLanguages

And for Swift and iOS where I want to go deeper, I'm creating my own Cookbook, and perhaps my own search engine:

http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift_cookbook.html

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You didn't grok the point of my comment, so let me expand on it.

Someone who works at Google is called a "Googler". When you are used to constantly hearing a word used with meaning A, and almost never meaning B, it can be quite confusing when you hear it in a context where someone uses meaning B, especially when meaning A sort of fits. So you can imagine my confusion when I parsed the entire article as "Why would being a good software engineer and [working for Google] be mutually exclusive? They usually go hand-in-hand!"

I did understand your comment. I know someone who works at Google is called a Googler. However, from the context of the subject, I knew a person who worked at Google would not have such a worry, while someone who learned how to program by Googling would have such a worry. Many programmers are self-taught. It's gotta be quite common to wonder if you know enough to do a particular job if you're Google'ibg your way to proficiency.

Actually, imposter syndrome is more common at Google than most other companies. This makes sense; imposter syndrome comes from a mismatch of judging your own talents versus that you perceive from your peers, so you are more likely to feel unsure of your own abilities when your coworkers are world-class leaders of their field than if they are just random average engineers. A lot of attention is paid to raising awareness of imposter syndrome during new employee orientation, and all new employees are assigned a mentor to help guide them through their initial months, again with lots of emphasis placed on ensuring that people feel like they belong.

That ComputerLanguages repo, wow! This is really awesome! And far, far superior to my own store/collection of helpful links by language by far :(. I may just stop altogether collecting helpful links on languages I may never, ever use, when there're such better lists and guides (like yours) out there that I can search if I ever need to. There are far more programming languages/ideas than there is time.

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