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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35888 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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That said, I also see in newer hires a lack of that sort of persistence both among the men and the women. Probably somewhat "Old man griping about the young'uns" here, but I've seen an increasing tendency of kids with fresh CS degrees to not really know how to independently track down the solution to a problem, including scouring stackoverflow and APIs et al. They sort of throw their hands up and ask very broad questions in channels like "Hey, this thing isn't working, can anyone tell me why?" Or "How do I do ?" ("Thing" being a fairly complicated multi-step process that requires experience mostly consisting of trying to do it and figuring out how to get past each obstacle one by one.) And they do this at every step. I have to gently point them at where to go to look for the solution to the next step, when I want to say "This is called being a programmer - read the documentation, use Google, and figure it out!"

I am amazed at how many programmers never read the documentation. I've had many coworkers, not just younger, give up if they don't already know the solution to the problem. It should be bog standard to peruse the API calls, and fiddle in test programs with anything you don't understand. But most don't.

They don't want to discover a solution, they want someone to figure it out for them, and tell them exactly what to do.

A level up from that would be reading the source code of the libraries yourself (assuming it's available). A level up from that would be studying the byte code as an absolutely last resort.

Because sometimes you do find bugs in libraries. Or annoying deficiencies. Once I was using an open source websocket library, but had to use a bearer token for authentication. The websocket library came years before the requirement for bearer tokens, and it did not support it at all. The guy who maintained it had weird ideological reasons to never include it. But fuck it, it's open source. So away I went hacking it in. No big deal. But it's remarkable how few programmers are truly willing to go wading through someone else's code.

Honestly, given the quality of the documentation provided by most libraries etc these days, it's often easier to jump straight into the source. At best, the behaviour is undocumented. More likely the documentation is from six months ago when it worked entirely differently. The devs probably notified everyone about the change in behaviour via Discord or something.

EDIT: I think being given solutions to problems tends to be more valuable when you've tried your best to solve the problem yourself already. Then the answer is like a flash of light. If you just read about a problem and a solution, it's just a series of facts to store away for later.

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