Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?

&gt;&gt; Third, try programming for a day without Googling. Then two days, maybe a week. See how it feels. Remember that there was a time we programmed without copying our work.<p>It&#x27;s not usually, or even often, about copying work for me. I google because there is no freaking way I can remember all the details of linux, python, bash, regular expressions, flask, elasticsearch, redis, haproxy, postgresql, mongodb, Google Cloud Platform, kubernetes, logstash, kibana, Java... that&#x27;s a real list from my last project. If you were going to hire me for a position doing roughly the same thing, and you stuck me in a room and picked questions off a list related to those things I set out above, with the understanding that I am good enough for you if I can answer the question, and not good enough if I can&#x27;t... it&#x27;s a crapshoot. 100%. I may have spent hours preparing for the interview. You may have spent hours preparing for the interview. And then you ask me something like &quot;In an elasticsearch mapping template how would you retain the untokenized value of a string for use in a returned list of aggregates?&quot; and maybe I did that yesterday and remember, or maybe we should just both go back to whatever we were doing before we met.<p>I&#x27;m interviewing right now, and if you can&#x27;t tell it&#x27;s frustrating. I&#x27;m not valuable unless I am experienced and capable with a huge list of technologies, and hey, as a reward you the interviewer get to pick anything you want from that huge list and try to trip me up with it! ;)

Been talking about this a lot with friends&#x2F;peers recently. Personally I think half the skill is knowing <i>what</i> to Google.<p>My mum&#x27;s husband is a painter and decorator. Every house is different, but he has built up a set of skills over the years he&#x27;s been active that allow him to broadly apply his knowledge to understand <i>how</i> to solve a problem.<p>Similarly, I can&#x27;t always solve the problem, but I do know where to start asking questions, and I do know how to follow those up <i>efficiently</i>. Is this when I Google for the docs, for answers to a problem, for a place to find help? And then after that, it&#x27;s about knowing the next steps, knowing which part is likely to be the next relevant thing to Google&#x2F;research.<p>Do I get stuff done? Sure. Do I remember how to do it next time? Sometimes. But sometimes it&#x27;s just enough to know how to start solving the next problem. I think we just feel a bit fraudulent because Google is easier. I&#x27;d be surprised if anyone ever said &quot;Am I good at xxxxx or just good at going to the library, choosing the right books and reading the required parts?&quot;

I feel like the whole impostor syndrome thing has gone too far. At this point, we have legitimately talented developers questioning whether or not they are &#x27;good&#x27; enough and it is actually quite frustrating to see.<p>I sort of understand it from the students&#x27; perspectives, because they have a professor to compare themselves to and aspire to, I think in that scenario it spurs self-improvement but in the workplace it seems like it would only be counterproductive at best to compare yourself to other coworkers or even other people in the field.<p>I remember when I first started, I never thought &quot;Shit, will I ever be as good at Scheme as Sussman?&quot; I just worked the exercises and kept moving forward.<p>Nowadays, there seems to be a real strong pressure to be aware of all the new technologies, newest libraries, and all this material that nobody could ever possibly have time to completely understand, and it drives people crazy, I think.

I feel ridiculous saying this, but my secret is that I read the documentation of whatever tool I&#x27;m using. Google answers beginner questions so well that I never even thought to do this when I was first learning, and when googling started to fail me I would just fall back on the scientific method to figure out how a library worked. Perhaps it was a good exercise in critical thinking, but it was terrible for productivity.

As someone who has been programming in Rust since before 1.0, I have been through the probably rare experience of working with an un-Googleable language. I relied solely on docs and occasionally the mercy of helpful folks on IRC, and it turned out OK.<p>A side effect of this is that I still never Google for Rust answers, even though there are tons to be found now.<p>However, if I was programming in Javascript, which has been the language I&#x27;ve known for the longest and done the most in, I would still Google everything because I&#x27;m lazy. I&#x27;m pretty sure I don&#x27;t need to, it&#x27;s just faster. It&#x27;s possible to be a Google-programmer out of laziness and not necessity.<p>Diving into an un-googleable language (or ecosystem -- many closed-source ecosystems at work would be un-googleable or undocumented; I recall that understanding the codebase for my internship required me to either read tons of code or ask people with arcane inside knowledge) can help hone these skills. Or just promise to not use Google for something.

People need to focus more on getting results. We&#x27;re collectively so steeped in posturing about technology stacks and idiosyncratic decisionmaking that we&#x27;ve missed the bigger picture: get something done. For instance, anyone who says they factored in all the tradeoffs and then chose Haskell isn&#x27;t trying to get things done or build a sustainable business - they&#x27;re trying to orchestrate a technological boondoggle.<p>At the end of the day no one cares if you&#x27;re a good developer. They care that the service looks good and works well. Googling is how you build a better service ergo do it and don&#x27;t worry about it.

Not gonna lie, I couldn&#x27;t make heads nor tails of this blog post until I reached the very end, and realized they were using &quot;Googler&quot; to mean &quot;doing Google searches&quot;. I kept thinking &quot;Why would being a good developer and being a Googler be mutually exclusive?!&quot;

Say you&#x27;d like to upgrade your laptop but you are limited to maybe a few (not easy) hardware tweaks where gains are really not that significant. You&#x27;d have to work really hard for a few extra cycles, a few extra MB. So, through the years you just become very efficient at using these limited resources at particular and highly specialized tasks, after all, more than 8 programs running at the same time just freeze the poor thing.<p>One day you discover a new gadget, an external HD. That is great news, you buy one and move tons of unused data to the gadget. Your laptop is not faster now but you can do software tweaks to virtually give you more performance.<p>Just some years later you discover something awesome: many others have decided to hook their HDs together and share information stored on them. With this discovery you realize that your laptop can now be almost completely devoted to running algorithms, almost no resources are wasted in saving and retrieving data from internal memory. You even develop a program to search and find data on the hooked HDs which brings the responses almost instantly, allowing you to become even better at running your algorithms. Even more so, this search program constantly learns and improves at finding the right answers. At some point you just code a few scripts to go get the answers of recurrently asked questions, why saving the answers you say.<p>This laptop upgrade works dandy...until The network of HDs break :(<p>Did I answer the question?

Can anybody shed light on how Googling for programming answers is seen in the workplace?<p>I&#x27;ve always been a solo &#x2F; start-up developer (for now), and sometimes I sit back and think about how my (often zealous) use of SO and Google would bode with a team of developers in an office.<p>Would I be considered (to use a loaded term) an <i>impostor</i> if I was seen to be using SO a lot, even if I produced good results?<p>-- I think that last point — of good results — is key, but I am curious to how co-workers perceive this kind of productivity...

I programmed before google and before stack overflow. The povotal change was that nobody post the forumization of support bothered to write documentation worth reading. You didn&#x27;t need google for simbian or for the java runtime of for stdio. Everything was laid out in beautiful completness including race conditions to watch out for and all valid parameters enumerated before your eyes.

Flip the question. Am I being a good developer if I&#x27;m not Googling it?<p>You are a creative problem solver. You have to understand your problem and put together a solution. Within defined constraints of time, budget, and quality, you must solve your problem.<p>Solid understanding of good developer practices and general algorithm or application design principles marries WELL with talent in processing information from the web. Bringing them together, you get past &quot;solved&quot; challenges in completing your current task or project done.<p>I&#x27;d argue that being adequate at both is better. Relying too much on either facet is worse than being good at both with a talent for bringing the two together.

If I&#x27;m doing something I don&#x27;t normally do (data access code, XML parsing, etc), yeah, I&#x27;m going to look it up. And not feel any shame about it.<p>This might be because I started out in the engineering program in college, and one of the tenets there is &quot;don&#x27;t trust your memory - look it up. Otherwise people die.&quot;

A good developer will Google for direction to help get a little clarity on a problem, maybe to review alternative ideas and solutions.<p>A bad developer will blindly copy and paste and use that. Painting-by-numbers, Coding-by-google.<p>I have seen the problems with the latter, where a team of offshore devs built a monster Java codebase by &quot;doing the needful&quot;, which in this case was cutting and pasting from the first result in Google. One of the devs was different, he would cut and paste from bing. Fun times.

I think it would be a mistake to try programming without Google in the first place. A smart developer should make the best out of the tools available. Besides interviews I really can&#x27;t imagine a real-world situation where you are forced to develop without access to information (Google).<p>Also, our brain does not need to act as a data storage, it actually sucks at it and we solved that problem a long time ago, by writing down information.

This topic is very interesting to me from a little different perspective. I am a senior member of technical staff at a very large company and often managers will have me sit in on job interviews with candidates to cover the technical side. Recently, I sat in an interview and I had my list of questions. It was a telephone interview (1st round, not uncommon), I noticed that I could hear subtle typing in the background as the manager asked various questions. When it came time for the technical questions, I could hear a lot more typing. It occurred to me that the candidate was probably googling the answers. After the interview I mentioned it to the manager and she said &quot;so, isn&#x27;t that how you guys do it anyhow ?&quot;. I was a little taken back and have to admit I did not have any response. But, at least for this manager, how good someone is at googling the answers is a legitimate point of evaluation for a prospective candidate. I admit I use google, stackexchange and etc. to find answers, but it is not my primiary source of information and I just don&#x27;t think it is a substitute for knowledge, is it ? This bothered me very much.

Wait... big difference between Googling, even a lot; and copying code. If you mindlessly copy code and it works, even once, without really understanding (e.g. could you teach the pattern&#x2F;trick&#x2F;concept&#x2F;etc to a teammate?) you are a bad developer.<p>All things being equal, if you are a great Googler (or doc reader, or whiteboard question asker) that is an aspect of being a strong dev.

I&#x27;ve recently started defining my skill set as an engineer rather than a developer. The difference, to me at least, is one of execution vs implementation. Implementation can be done by a good Googler. Execution requires good communication, recognizing and challenging assumptions, making worthwhile tradeoffs, etc.<p>It&#x27;s been a little bizarre to see how this focus has changed my development. I sit in on team discussions about coding style and design patterns and find it quite uninteresting. I code as much as the next person on the team, so I&#x27;m not aspiring to be an ivory tower architect or anything, but I find weighing in on engineering decisions adds far greater value.

Walk into any large engineering organization and you&#x27;ll see stacks of engineering books and reference materials everywhere. Companies also send engineers to courses, seminars and conferences.<p>Reaching for reference materials and guidance is as much a part of engineering as it is to remember the theory. If you don&#x27;t have the implementation for a Finite Impulse Response filter or a Binary Genetic Solver committed to memory, that&#x27;s OK. I care far more about whether or not you understand when and how to apply them than whether or not you are a living engineering database.<p>So, yeah, Google away.

A good engineer uses any tool that makes them a better engineer. You think people who can recite algorithms also have the ability to learn a api, library, or framework without googling or reading documentation?

Being a googler will often reveal solutions to specific problems. However it rarely reveals if you should choose that solution, or the architecture that it fits in, or anything larger than an algorithm.

This kind of &quot;imposter syndrome&quot; in software development is for me rather foreign. I&#x27;ve never been born with a silver spoon and I&#x27;ve seen lots of people who are math and programming geniuses but I&#x27;ve worked very hard at learning development and know how to do a good job now. I find it waste of energy to philosophise on whether one is good or not. To my ears it sounds almost like humble brag. Or a question from a girlfriend &quot;am I ugly?&quot; where the correct answer is not yes... :)

Let&#x27;s say we need to fix a car. We know that the yellow sprocket is broken and needs to be replaced, but you don&#x27;t know how to do it off the top of your head. If you knew you could google how, would you fix it yourself? Now, would you call yourself a mechanic for being able to google how and do it?<p>Google is an excellent tool. Programming, which can use google heavily, is still a skill.

It&#x27;s the same thing when people ask me for help with computer problems. The first thing I ask is &quot;Did you Google the error message?&quot; And then I normally Google it for them and the first result is typically a forum post with someone else who had the problem, and someone else has usually posted a solution.

I learned programming by reading user manuals, books, and magazines. It was kind of like Googling, except less random-access. But your documentation was much more complete, because the tools were comparatively smaller.<p>Now fast-forward to 2016, and take something like Docker, which seems conceptually simple but has lots of sharp corners like capabilities for mapping mounts to userspace fuse volumes. The documentation would go obsolete while it was being printed.<p>So don&#x27;t be so hard on yourself -- most of us are just hot-gluing components together, and if you are lucky enough to get paid writing that red-black tree they interview for at Google&#x2F;Facebook, then consider yourself lucky, and also consider ripping someone else&#x27;s version with unit tests.

Gosh, this is a pretty old post. Maybe add (2013) to the title. Source: I wrote the post.

I google for solutions all the time, does that mean I can be replaced by anybody who can type a question into a search box? If that would be the case then, companies would not hire highly skilled developers, they would just hire people who can type.<p>You need to know:<p>* what the actual question is<p>* how to pick the good answer<p>* how to integrate the solution with what you already have<p>Being a good googler means you can solve almost any problem because you are able to learn the solution on the fly, which can make you more effective than people who have a lot more knowledge in their head but lack the skill to find solutions to new problems.

As a developer you can&#x27;t know everything about everything. We commonly have to solve problems we are have never solved before. We have to use APIs we have never used before. Google makes a huge difference in learning how.

15 years with positions from analyst, engineer, to architect and I still Google something for work every day. I don&#x27;t feel bad about this at all.<p>I remember when I couldn&#x27;t Google. Those were tough days.

This is basically the Stack Overflow debate that comes up every few weeks on HN, but I think it&#x27;s a false dichotomy.<p>The implication is that &quot;real developers&quot; don&#x27;t need SO&#x2F;Google&#x2F;etc., and that our profession is plagued by incompetents who somehow get through the day by copy&#x2F;pasting code they found on the Internet without understanding how it works.<p>Thing is, SO&#x2F;Google&#x2F;etc. are critical resources for most developers. Not using the web as a research tool when appropriate is incredibly inefficient. No one knows everything, and no one can know everything. Those resources don&#x27;t just help us find solutions for our problems, they&#x27;re critical to learning.<p>I think the to-Google-or-not-to-Google debates are really people bothered by other people who copy&#x2F;paste things from SO without understanding the code they are pasting. You should be getting 2 things from that exercise: you find the solution to your problem, and you learn how it solves similar problems in the future.<p>This isn&#x27;t just for your benefit, it&#x27;s for the benefit of the other people you work with, and for the benefit of the shared code base if there is one. Especially if it&#x27;s a large, complicated code base that will live on long after you move on to other things.<p>Everyone does the first part (using the solution), and almost everyone does the second part (understanding the solution) to one degree or another. However, there are a few people who will not only deny any responsibility for the second part, but will actually be proud that they&#x27;re not &quot;wasting time&quot; by internalizing what they just did. Instead they&#x27;re moving on to the next problem to solve that they don&#x27;t understand. They&#x27;re optimizing for quantity over quality of output, and for the appearance of efficiency over actual efficiency.<p>So we all have a That Guy in mind when we feel guilty about finding solutions on SO (&quot;I don&#x27;t wanna be That Guy, but this solves my problem so I should probably use it...&quot;). We may also have worked with one or more That Guys on a shared codebase and gotten burned by it. It sucks to inherit code from That Guy, because That Guy optimizes for scripted demos and perceived functionality.<p>TL;DR I propose that the eternal debate about whether or not Google and SO ruined software engineering is really just one group of people complaining about That Guy, and another group of people who think they&#x27;re being unfairly accused of being That Guy. The fire is fueled by a small number of actual That Guys sprinkled throughout the industry, but they are usually not participants in these debates.

Also writing good code (easy to maintain, few bugs, easy to extend) is a craft not something you do spontaneously when you need to fix a problem. It takes time to develop and get a good sense for it. This is the key thing I see with all these bootcamp grads - they know the terms and they know how to throw crud apps together but they struggle to write clean code that adheres to SOLID that isn&#x27;t littered with antipatterns.

My sorry attempt at wit: Was Vermeer a painter or a photographer who traced<i>?<p>Is it not the product and&#x2F;or result that counts; not how you got there?<p></i>Vermeer traced his subjects using optics; it was not painted freehand: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vanityfair.com&#x2F;culture&#x2F;2013&#x2F;11&#x2F;vermeer-secret-tool-mirrors-lenses" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vanityfair.com&#x2F;culture&#x2F;2013&#x2F;11&#x2F;vermeer-secret-too...</a>

It doesn&#x27;t matter.<p>As long as you can do what you want to do with code you are a developer. Whether looking up code on google or in a reference book.

As an old guy who used to program in the 1980&#x27;s, I can&#x27;t explain how amazing stack overflow is. How we lived before it: - Used tools and systems we knew and knew worked. - Found people with experience and made friends with them. - Read books. (To be fair, certain bookstores used to be much better.)

Good developers <i>are</i> good Googlers.

Google is just an extension of our memory nowadays - it&#x27;s not worth it memorising stuff you know you can google, eventually if you google it often enough it&#x27;ll stick. And googling will do you no good if you have no idea what you are doing.

Programming itself has changed. It used to be more about logic and design. Now, it&#x27;s more about gluing together an ever-proliferating bunch of open source libraries, frameworks, and tools.<p>It&#x27;s no wonder devs need to keep Google at the ready.

protip: flashcards. If you ever find yourself reaching for a detail you think you should know offhand, make sure you add it and study on a regular basis. You&#x27;ll stop feeling like an impostor.

I suppose at some level how good of a Googler you are affects how well of whatever you want to be good at .. So you might say being a good Googler is part of being a good developer.

I think this hits on a tenet of modern development, which is that if you find yourself actually implementing an algorithm, be it a sort, compression, crypto, or whatever, you&#x27;re probably programming badly. That&#x27;s not to say that your implementation won&#x27;t work, but that there&#x27;s already a library that does it and a well-worn design pattern that takes advantage of it, and you can find both of those in a few minutes on google &#x2F; stackoverflow.<p>Edit: I am in no way saying you shouldn&#x27;t try to understand the algorithm. Coding it yourself is fine exercise for a rainy Sunday morning, but it&#x27;s (usually) not the best way to do your day job.

Not sure if it makes any difference, but I tend to Google syntax rather than solutions...<p>I often know &quot;what&quot; I want to do, I just can&#x27;t remember the &quot;how&quot;.

A question for Win32 API developers - are you able to program [with Win32 API] without literally copy&#x2F;pasting the code from MSDN, SO or other sources?

I propose an extension to DRY (don&#x27;t repeat yourself) called DRO (don&#x27;t repeat others), meaning if anyone has ever done it you shouldn&#x27;t have to do it again.<p>Then it&#x27;s easy to tell whether you&#x27;re googling or developing: &quot;am I writing something nobody did EVER &#x2F;trying to improve the state of the art of xyz?&quot;<p>If yes, you should understand deeply and &quot;develop&quot;, if no you should be searching and changing variable names.<p>If you&#x27;re writing a new framework - then by all means! actually understand the code.<p>If not, you shouldn&#x27;t have to.

Who cares about the label? Just know what you can or can not accomplish and act accordingly.

To be a good googler, first they need to be good developer