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Comment by yamtaddle | Hacker News Reader

> How much do you use Google Search throughout your day? Do you consider that exhausting as well?

Oh my god, yes. The way it makes everything possible means you never get to feel like you actually know WTF you're doing, because the edge is always expanding. Bring back the days of having a small shelf of 5-10 books that contained 99% of what you needed to know to do your programming/sysadmin/whatever job.

Yes, it's absolutely exhausting. If you've never experienced or even seen what came before, it may not seem so just because you don't have a point of comparison.

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There was a certain joy in buying a Borland product and getting a 25 cm cube of a box that contained a detailed reference manual, a getting started guide, a quick reference booklet, and a bunch of diskettes or (later) CDs. Flipping through the reference manual and discovering new things just as you needed them was so much fun.

I was less productive than I am now, but making something was more satisfying.

I don’t know, sometimes I was more productive then, because you used what you had.

Today.. .. first one has to get up speed on whatever the F changed this week

> Bring back the days of having a small shelf of 5-10 books that contained 99% of what you needed

Before the internet could pose a challenge to my bookshelf, I had over fifty that I referred to fairly regularly (my office library had about 100, my total library several hundred), ~5 of those covered 80% of what I needed for a given project, but which 5 those were changed from project to project.

Are you saying that using Google to answer a question is more exhausting than parsing a book? That makes zero sense

> Are you saying that using Google to answer a question is more exhausting than parsing a book? That makes zero sense

My point is that we couldn't possibly do our jobs now without Google, but that we used to be able to do it just by knowing the stuff in a few books really well and knowing where—in the books or in e.g. manpages—to find what we didn't know. A small shelf of books is way better than Google, if you can be reasonably certain that the answers you need are in there.

Yes, this situation is far more exhausting.

Yeah you couldn’t do you job without Google because it’s vastly superior to a shelf of 5 books

That very much depends on what you're doing. The existence of Google has brought about the expectation that we do our work in a way that requires Google.

I think Google is a net positive

How much is on Google itself vs Google search linking you to, eg, StackOverflow. A side question: how much of your job could you do only referring to https://devdocs.io/ or other reference?

For me, the part that's most exhausting is the constant struggle to remain competent with the ever-changing landscape of frameworks, libraries, and services that are used in modern software development.

This is made worse by their size and scope. Spring Boot is a giant ecosystem, as is .NET, as is Azure, etc.

Also, search results tend to be a sea of data which might, or might not, contain some crucial bit of information that will help.

So, all too often, "using Google to answer a question" becomes a 2-hour or day-long research project to figure out how to solve some small, arcane problem like why the POST to some service doesn't have the Authorization header.

And when there's internal and external pressure to be productive, meet deadlines, and not feel incompetent, sometimes it gets frustrating and stressful and tiring.

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