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Comment by minkles | Hacker News Reader

I really do miss the days I was locked in an office with no internet connection with a free coffee machine and could be productive. Things were small, understandable and had documentation on paper.

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Yes, the best time to be a programmer. I remember being several hours doing productive programming. Nowadays you cannot spend a few minutes without having to search for some information that is not available locally.

Is it possible that the information you need is available locally via interactive help functionality, but the attention harvesting complex that is the modern web has tricked you into habitually reaching for a browser when calling the help function or reading the code would do?

Asked because it's gotten me a few times.

The overwhelming majority of the time it's not available offline. It's even got me like "Welcome to the hidden offline documentation. Stand by while we download it... <error downloading from server>".

everytime i code i feel like i need to complete side quests. you find one problem and the solution online requires to solve another 2 problems and so on. add to that the fact that our brain can't help and get distracted, by the time you finish the side quests you need time to remember what brought you there in the first place.

What? You are much more likely today to have shorter interruptions to productivity because it's so much quicker to search Google or whatever for answers than to get up from your desk and ask the office greybeard or consult paper books or worst case have to actually fiddle around until you just figure out some possibly undocumented behavior in some library you're trying to use.

If you were actually a professional programmer in pre-internet days (as I was) I don't think you would have any nostalgia for it.

back in the day , started my first job as intern (VC++ dev) and I was so excited to get a stack of MSDN CDs for reference.

I wish I have such a job, maybe some manuals too. Ah...

I spent a fair bit of my career in that sort of environment writing embedded software on MSDOS. Have fond memories of that but I wonder if I re-created that today would I be able to mentally cope? Might be the technology equivalent of becoming a monk in remote Tibet with the same needed commitment and rewards.

A younger self used to look forward to the latest (paper) shareware catalogue arriving by (snail) mail, posting back the order form and waiting for the floppies to arrive. True story :-)

I have my doubts you were around in those days, because believe me, on average people were no more productive and certainly code quality was lower.

I was indeed around then. I built a fair few non trivial things on MSDOS and Windows with MASM 6, PDS7, VB3/4 and MSVC++. All offline. Mostly on airgapped networks. That and enbedded stuff with various tool chains.

We were definitely more productive. An order of magnitude more. As long as you picked appropriate tools. For example, I wrote a whole statistical analysis package in month (VB4). An ERP package in 6 months (access).

Code quality, which is difficult to objectively measure, was not really a problem.

Today I can barely even find a consistent UI toolkit which doesn’t fall to pieces, doesn’t require a server to run and doesn’t pull in 200 meg of untrusted JavaScript.

No more productive as in banging keys per second maybe.

But there's something valuable in figuring stuff out by yourself, I wouldn't trade that experience for anything.

You still have to figure out things for yourself today. Novel things instead of tedious things like "why doesn't this function work the way the docs say it should."

Again, anyone who was actually a programmer back then and is now today would never have nostalgia for those days. It was not better before.

Did I say better? I'm just saying it wasn't all bad.

Yeah, but figure what out? How to get wildly complicated thing A to talk to over-engineered piece of crap B, most likely.

For you maybe, otherwise a very broad sweeping statement.

I miss that too. Where can I find such jobs in Canada? I don't care too much about pay as programming usually gets paid well enough.

One of the few places these kinds of jobs still exist is within the universities, in various labs or research cores. Pay is often lower, but quality of life and work often way higher, with much more freedom under responsibility.

Thanks, does that need a PHD?

Not at all for developer roles, in my experience.

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