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Comment by booleandilemma | Hacker News Reader

A common meme I've seen recently is "no one knows what they're doing".

I think people like to believe this because it helps them cope with impostor syndrome, or maybe they think it puts them on even ground with people who do in fact know what they're doing.

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My model for people who "know what they're doing" is that they tend to have a well-organized hierarchy of rules. At the base are principles; at the top are opinions.

The foundation tends to be pretty simple, deeply held, and unchanging, while the higher levels are increasingly fluid and specialized. The higher you get on this stack, the more "making it up as you go along" it becomes, but every improvised part is perched on something more stable.

They key to "knowing what you're doing" is organizing this hierarchy well, having the right supports in place to successfully guide improvisation and course-correction while steadily fortifying the foundation.

It's clearly not true in all circumstances. You can bet that an airline pilot has a very clear idea of what they are doing, and so will your dentist. Closer to home there are plenty of sub-fields in software where I'd be completely lost but when (say) we have to add a new endpoint to the webservice I work with, I absolutely don't have to make it up as I go along.

Your assessment of why people like to believe this seems spot on.

Even worst is the meme that “programming is just copy+pasting from stack overflow”

Because good senior programmers are rare (as can be observed if you post a job listing).

Most of this stuff comes from students / junior developers, where yes, they probably visit stack overflow every 20 minutes

They should try programming on an airplane or without internet connection. For some the productivity drops to zero without stack overflow.

i grew up a long time before stack overflow. actually used man pages and read books. there is just _no way_ to program in Rust or Go without access to a search engine and the package libraries.

I've done various rust and clojure projects by downloading a lot of git repos ahead of time for reference while on a long-haul flight. This works pretty well, but you need to do a bit of research ahead of time on which libraries you might want access to. This is probably slower, as you have to read source code and think more about the type signatures (rather than looking at some misc example), but if you have 15 hours, what else are you going to do?

You can spin up godoc locally and access it locally fyi. Wont help pull in a new package. And you can always drill down into the stdlib implementation right from your editor if you have jump to declaration. I wrote a custom consensus protocol implementation in Go on a flight for work sans wifi.

"For some the productivity drops to zero without stack overflow."

And it is bad to be a newb? And even for experienced devs to go to stackoverflow regulary ... isn't it productive, to not always reinvent the wheel?

I can solve allmost everything on my own. But if I have a new problem, I assume someone else already had - I would be stupid, to figure it out on my own, when I could get a working solution in 5 min googling.

But I actually programm without internet connection most of the time, as I like being outside, away from noise (and wifi)

The issue does arise when you aren’t able to understand the problem space enough to realize that what you copied from stack overflow has a mistake or doesn’t fit the requirement you need (e.g. perhaps it doesn’t match your error handling architecture or so on).

That said, stack overflow can be a great source and I’ve written plenty of code with a comment pointing to a SO link to further explain a pattern or snippet for a future reader.

"The issue does arise when you aren’t able to understand the problem space enough to realize that what you copied from stack overflow has a mistake or doesn’t fit the requirement you need "

Yeah sure. A stupid programmer will remain a stupid programmer, even if he reaches a certain productivity by living off of stackoverflow ...

There is nothing wrong with copy pasting code from stack overflow.

I do see two kind of people doing that. One group learns from the code in order to become better, and can use it over and over to be more efficient. The other group doesn't care how it works and just wants to have a snippet that works.

The second group usually misses a curiosity, of which the effects show up in many more places than just copy pasting from stack overflow. They also tend to have a flatter learning curve. I don't want to generalize, but in this group you will encounter people who don't care about the difference between a list and a set, or think that code works when it compiles. In both cases the juniors know very little, but one grows and the other one doesn't (or less)

There is space for both in the world, but I prefer the first group in my team.

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