Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Using documentation is fine. You aren't going to solder stuff only by eyeballing the component packaging either.

On-line information? That's another question entirely. This would be a more interesting test: can you make a basic webapp (or other type of app representative of your experience) without Internet access?

If you're dealing with an older stack and toolkit, you probably have many books' worth of manuals already installed. Unless you're unlucky and didn't notice the documentation isn't installing along with your tools. Or you're on Windows[0]. You can use them to work out most of the problems you're facing.

Newer tools though? There's this annoying trend of under-documenting things, and relying on people on StackOverflow to fill in the gaps. Or even worse, setting up a Slack/Discord for the project, and getting people to help each other there.

Maybe I'm just old, but when I'm working with computer tools, I prefer to solve the issues myself, instead of chasing around the Internet and talking to people. I also like to be able to continue to work when my Internet dies, or I'm out of range, or the site hosting the docs dies (happens more often than one would expect).

And to answer my own question: yes, I can write basic apps of the type I work on (and bunch of others, including games) without Internet access, as long as you let me use my computer - where I have access to heaps of off-line documentation and lots of prior source code to supplement it.

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[0] - Someone at MS had the bright idea to ship PowerShell without help for its commands by default, so that the first thing Get-Help tells you is to download the man pages...

> Using documentation is fine. You aren't going to solder stuff only by eyeballing the component packaging either.

> On-line information? That's another question entirely. This would be a more interesting test: can you make a basic webapp (or other type of app representative of your experience) without Internet access?

I would suggest that the type of information is important, rather than the medium. It is not that solving the issue yourself is better than talking to other people. It is a matter of ensuring the validity of the information as well as it's suitability to the task. That is more difficult to do without referencing language or library documentation, and I suspect that it is not being done at all by most of the people who rely upon searching the Internet.

While the quality of books is better (on average) than online information, one still has to be selective. The market is flooded with books that offer shallow explanations or are simply a rehash of what dozens of other books have discussed. Not only does the latter limit the breadth of knowledge, but the nuggets of insight offered by any given author are usually so deeply buried that they are easy to miss. Sometimes it is more productive to scour the Internet because of that.

I've stopped relying on Google to give me reference documentation on searching the function/library name.

I generally go directly to the API reference and do the search there because Google results might not even have it on the first few pages.

I actually get annoyed at being pointed at the StackOverflow question that shares a few keywords with my search, but is completely unrelated otherwise.

That is similar to my approach, though I will download the documentation if it is available that way. It is always available, you know which version of the documentation you're using, and I never understood why an intermediary should be involved when something is referenced frequently. (Yes, I realize the latter is a personal quirk.)

As for StackOverflow results, at least there is a chance that they will be more useful than most third-party information. I have found too many sites that attempt to rehash the documentation, perhaps in clearer terms but virtually always covering common knowledge and completely omitting everything else.

I used to keep all the reference documentation downloaded and available offline, but at some point I got lazy because Google did give me the API reference as a first hit.

I guess it's time to start bookmarking those /usr/share/docs/... paths again :)

I second re docs. VS Intellisense has served me very well for known tech (ASP.NET etc); for new tech I rely on official docs or nutshell style books to be with me. I've created ASPSecurityKit.net [0], that sets up a new web app [1] (API/MVC) with user account related workflows; adding the business features then is easy for me.

In my initial days of programming in school/college, I relied almost entirely on local MSDN library installation (during VB6 days, it used to come in three CDs), to learn VB6 and build apps. With that, I built a multi-lingual word processor, a screen reader and some other nice tools that got me hooked with coding. It was around 2003-2006 and I used to only search on internet whenever I needed to add something not supported out-of-the-box in VB6 like Win32 APIs etc.

0: https://ASPSecurityKit.net 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmUO90JNlvs

I take a completely opposite view. If I get stuck on something, I go straight to StackOverflow etc to ask for a solution or at least get more information. Then, I can keep tinkering myself or switch to a completely different task. I am far more productive when I leverage The Hive Mind.

Plus, these questions give me a great reference for next year when I am doing something similar but have forgotten the details.

This approach probably works well because I know how things work at a high level; I think it would be disastrous to do this without any real understanding.

> This approach probably works well because I know how things work at a high level; I think it would be disastrous to do this without any real understanding.

I actually interview for this skill specifically. I stress to candidates that they can and should search the web in whatever way they would when tasked with code in real life.

The speed at which someone can process search results and stackoverflow responses to filter out crap and find the solution is the best proxy I've found for developer productivity.

Some people don't search for anything, even after prodding them 3 times that it's 100% fine to search and they definitely won't lose points. They still won't do it, because it's just not how they reason about problems.

Other candidates will immediately identify the problem, search with good queries, quickly navigate through a bunch of sites, find the relevant info, copy/paste, and solve the challenge.

> The speed at which someone can process search results and stackoverflow responses to filter out crap and find the solution is the best proxy I've found for developer productivity.

That's interesting. What is your experience with harder problems - ones that can't be just googled? Do you find that those same "googlers" still outperform the more "independent" developers?

I'm one of these people. The other skill is endlessly breaking a problem down into steps small enough to stumble through with this approach.

And the other other thing to know is when not to do it, like for the core business logic, or for anything that needs to be really fast.

If by "these people" you mean the "googlers", yes, I'm one of them too and I think the same applies to most developers so I know how to approach harder problems. However, I was curious about the employer's perspective, whether maybe "independent" developers have some advantage with problems that can't be readily googled.

I wouldn’t be surprised if people feel uncomfortable googling in an interview even when told it’s fine.

You’re being judged for your knowledge (in part at least), googling something fairly basic doesn’t feel great even if it’s completely normal to do that in normal development.

In a given day I code in 3 or 4 different languages, and sometimes I'll brain fart and totally forget something like how to get the character at a specific index in a string for THIS language.

Sometimes my google queries are so entry-level that even I chuckle, but I do worry what my employer would think if they saw "how to create a date in java"

How long are you interviews? How long are you watching the developer before you prod them to Google search?

I like to think about a problem at least a little bit before giving up and asking for help. I have to at least be able to understand the problem before I can effectively find a solution.

And hell, these days it's only a 50/50 shot whether searching will actually help with my problems or I'll just end up in a rabbit hole of SEO spam.

If it's not documentation, I go to my team first. We almost never need outside help for how to solve something. And it gives us another chance to talk about design.

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