Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

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lifeisstillgood

Let me give a non-programming example.

It took me the best part of the weekend to drill twelve holes for curtains - because it is not enough to Google for the answers.

Now, if you knock on a wall and it sounds hollow - you just google for hollow wall fixings. Great. I'll go buy some of those.

Drill into the wall. And hit brick behind the plaster. Err... Ok they have invented a new type - dry lined Walls. The gap is so small my umbrella fixings cannot open up behind the board.

So I will get longer screws to go in the wall. But now my masonry drill slips on hard stones and gouges chunks from the plaster. Try harder - is that smoke coming from the drill? Eventually I find a consultant ( in the DIY store)

Aha - it's not masonry drill bits you need - you need aggregate drills. And a new drill.

Eventually I bought new drill bits, a new drill, six inch screws and I can do chin ups on the damn things.

The lesson

1. Until you understand the fundamentals of the problem, you will make poor choices time and again. Google correctly told me where to buy masonry drills and plasterboard fixings. It did not know to ask if I had the right walk for that.

2. New technology changes "embedded knowledge" - I learnt to drill brick walls from my father, But new ways of using the old can change everything.

3. Hire a professional while you go and do revenue generating work.

I cannot upvote you enough - especially on the first point. All the googling in the world is worthless without knowing what to Google for.

The "trick" of expert[^1] programmers is to know the difference, and to slowly expand the base they can build on.

[^1] An expert is merely a person who has learnt from more mistakes. There's nothing magical about it, as much as the cult of the rock star programmer would have us believe otherwise.

And this is the unstated meta problem implied (but usually ignored) in that Einstein quote.

Sure, you don't need to remember anything you can look up in a book (or Google), but you do need to know how to get to the right book again.

Beginners aren't characterised by not knowing how to type queries into Google's search box, it's that they don't know _what_ to type. Being an expert isn't about being able to solve problems without outside knowledge, but it is very much about having enough awareness of a large body of outside knowledge that you've got the right terminology in your head to know what words to start typing into that search box. A beginner trying to format a number as currency is going to spend a lot more time looking than the programmer who knows they just need to type "perldoc -f sprintf" at the command line.

"Sure, you don't need to remember anything you can look up in a book (or Google), but you do need to know how to get to the right book again."

Well, I would actually say you need to know "why" you're looking for said book/solution first. Then after you've found the right book/solution then its a matter of how to get there.

In my case, its all about having a good plan of attack. If you know where you're going, then its easy to Google for that solution to get to the next step in your plan.

I find knowing what to search for isn't that crucial. The brain is a very powerful pattern matching system, so you just look for something vaguely similar and search for that. Those results will virtually always lead you to the right terminology, at least in my experience, at which point you can modify your search query and drill down further.

I suppose learning how to use Google this way is a skill in itself though.

"Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement." I think Nasrudin?

This is a great point and a great example.

I find:

I google things I understand but don't remember.

I read books about things I know about but don't understand.

I read blogs and other streams to learn what I don't know about.

This post helped me reach clarity. Thank you.

> 3. Hire a professional while you go and do revenue generating work.

Nothing wrong with acquiring a new skill. And next time you know how to do it.

YAGNI. There's nothing wrong with not acquiring new skill either. It depends on how soon/often you will need to use the skill in the future. Also on how urgent you need to do it if the need arises.

The trick is having enough skill to be able to evaluate the professional you're going to hire. I've been bitten by this before both in my personal and professional life. If you don't know enough about the field even someone with only a marginal amount of knowledge about the topic can seem like an expert.

As programmers we see this all the time when non-technical people make very bad hiring decisions. It's a chicken and egg type problem for a non-technical (co-)founder to build a good team because(or find a technical co-founder) he/she needs a good programmer to evaluate potential hires but they can't make that evaluation themselves.

I would expect myself to encounter exactly the same problems others encounter when trying to hire good programmers when I'm trying to hire some other kind of expert in a field I have little experience in.

It also depends on the amount of revenue you can generate if you hire a professional and get on with your work.

If we assume that the professional's fee is constant (doesn't depend on your income), then someone with very high income can waste only minutes on the task before it would have been cheaper to hire a professional, whereas someone with low income can devote a few hours to learning how to do it themselves and still make up for lost earnings by avoiding the cost of hiring a professional.

You an other comments seem to only balance cost and time lost, but doing your own curtains, for many people, is also fun, rewarding, interesting, and a very good way to change focus from professional or personal issues.

I find most of the benefit of learning new skills is in how they supplement other skills. I may very well never need to drill into masonry or have dry lined walls - by knowing that they exist, I can ask better questions.

To update the punchline of the old joke for a new era:

  Invoice
  For performing 1 (one) Google search: £0.01
  For knowing exactly what to Google: £999.99

I've always believed that being a software developer taught me not to DIY my home improvement. I recognize the finer points are subtle enough that I'd rather be coding instead of frustrated by messed up drywall. I'll call an expert. Or at least a practiced layman.

Yes, but the thing is you didn't build the drill, you didn't cast the fixings, you didn't design the drill bits.

It's one thing to google for a sorting algorithm, find one that doesn't work correctly, and learn about it in the process. And from your post it sounds like you learned a bit about hanging curtains just from your google experience.

The article is arguing against thinking "I need to hang curtains" and gathering together bits of materials that you have lying around the house to try to make it work. Someone has made the drill, and maybe you don't know which drill it is you need, but the right answer is most definitely not "build your own drill".

In programming, people will quite often go and build their own drill. I guess this is less of a DRY problem than a NIH problem.

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