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Comment by pharmakom | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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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