5mo ago

Googling

107 comments

With misinformation about and how shit Google search is lately, it's definitely a skill worth learning.
- "I used to be able to Google like you, but then they changed what Google was and now what I can do doesn't work, and what you have to do seems weird and scary to me."
  
  I used to google onions, because it was the style at the time
  
  I used to be able to Google like you
  …but then I got enshittification in the knee
  
  And it'll happen to you!
- For reals. I never bookmarked anything as I'd just regoogle what I was looking for but as of six months ago I can't find shit. It's like it never existed and all I get is spam websites that's are skinned to looks genuine. I'm honestly going back to Askjeeves.com.....
  
  If it is any consolation, a good chunk of those bookmarks would lead to deadlinks or domains bought by someone else.
  
  Try DuckDuckGo - I believe its selling point is that it is not as bad as Bing.:-)
  
  Yeah. It shows me first result article that copypasta from other place which is straight out wrong. Went to ddg and it start to show result that makes sense. It's no wonder people look up reddit thread for info. It also doesn't show too much oldschool forum, or at least it's buried down 20page later. It's unusable.

“I’ve got 10 years of googling experience”.
“Sorry, we only accept candidates with 12 years of googling experience”.
- I have like 18 years experience googling boobies.
  
  Boobling

Not only is "Googling" one of my most important job skills, now that I'm doing professional services, my entire job basically consist of "Learn product ${FOO} faster than the customer's employees can." Which of course primarily consists of knowing what to search for, how to find it, and how to interpret and use what I find.
- So you’re that contractor that always shits out code that looks like the guy who wrote it was just learning the language?
  
  Yeah pretty much. I mean I do the best I can (and I do have resources to look to for help).
  
  Did it work tho

To be fair you could call this "search optimisation" and the people on Linkedin would eat this up
- I might actually put this under my skills. I'm fairly good at googlefu.
- Or prompt engineering.

A few years ago... Okay over a decade ago 🤕 Google offered a free course on "googling" with a certificate for completion. You're damn straight I put that on my resume. Of course they've disabled half the tricks they taught us but now.

"Prompt Engineering": AKA explaining to Chat GPT why it's wrong a dozen times before it spits out a useable (but still not completely correct) answer.
- That's actually a valid skill to know when to tell the AI that it's wrong.
  A few months ago, I had to talk to my juniors to think critically about the shitty code that AI was generating. I was getting sick of clearly copy-pasted code from chatGPT and the junior not knowing what the fuck they were submitting to code review.
  
  Should start asking them like, why did you do this? Why did you chose this method? To make them sweat :p
  
  I'm trying to convince a senior developer from the team I'm a member of, to stop using copilot. They have committed code that they didn't understand (only tested to verify it does what it's expected to do). I doubt it'd succeed...
- If there exists an answer, as gpt will tell you the answer exists till the very end, even when it's not so

Ask them if they know what udm=14 means.
- Thanks for the heads-up
  
  Oh my fucking god. Thank you!

I have multiple people in my IT department who henpeck when they type. If you don't want him, please send the CV my way.
- I knew a compsci grad who used a physical magnifying glass to read screens
- You didn't have to do us henpeckers like that
- I will be honest as a late GenX it's going to be interesting as my cohort retires because we were the last generation to remember before The Internet and grew up to understand the technology not just use it.
  If you're my age or older please make sure you're teaching your young coworkers how to break things and put them back together without the aid of all the tools and resources they have at their fingertips now. Creativity thrives in adversity. Creativity is at risk when tools like ChatGPT are at their fingertips now.
  /rant
  
  Get off your high horse old man. Millennials were born into technology, molded by it. We live and breathe it, and also grew up in a world where things most definitely did not just work.
  I think you significantly underestimate the ingenuity and problem solving abilities of the younger generations. My Gen Z coworkers are extremely smart and hard working and understand how things work just as well, if not better than older generations.
  
  Counterpoint, image gen ai has afforded me far greater time and ability to access my creativity than I've ever had before it. Different people can be creative in different ways, and have different Muse's for their creativity
  
  Dude Socrates was convinced that reading and writing would ruin everyone's memory who grew up with it. Whining about
  <innovation>
  somehow handicapping the next generation by making them "too dependent on technology" or whatever and couching it in reasonable-sounding terms is as old as language, and time always makes fools of those who indulge in that sort of masturbatory delusion. You're just jealous we had cooler toys, own it.

When I interviewed junior devs for my team, I had zero theoretical questions, and only two coding questions which were basically code that had to be debugged, and once it was running, for them to implement some minor things that I asked them to implement. I said I don't mind if they googled, I only wanted them to share their screens while they worked, so that I can see how they worked and how they googled/adapted the answers to their code. I interviewed over a dozen people ranging from freshers to 4 yoe, and you should see how terrible they were at googling. Out of all them, only one fresher came close to being good in the interview. Even '4 yoe' devs who 'spearheaded' various projects sucked at basic python and googling.
- I would 1000% become dumb as a rock with someone watching me not to mention in a high risk setting such as an interview
  
  Yeah. We do a ton of screen sharing guided mentorship in my role, and everyone can't think straight while sharing their screen.
  We get through it, and feedback says it's worth it. But it still sucks in the moment.
  
  I tend to do the most embarrassing sitcom shit possible when someone is watching me do something I'm an expert in.

Knowing when to cut your losses swallow your pride and ask for help is legitimately an incredibly important dev skill. I've met otherwise decent developers that could disappear in a hole for a month on a simple problem that anyone else on the team could help them work through in a few hours because they didn't want to look dumb.
- I'm torn about this because I have good mentors but I genuinely want to try to learn how to code and not just have the answers given to me right away. At least I'm only working on volunteer project so being slow isn't really holding anyone else up.
  
  Don't be torn - solve it yourself until you can't! It's not helpful to be someone who constantly runs to other folks to fix their stuff and neither is it good to be someone who will just frustrate themselves struggling without progress.
  If you're a junior developer you will probably get time boxed tickets, just try and catch yourself if you're spinning your wheels (and that isn't easy, it takes practice).
  As with most things in life balance is important, you don't want to be at either extreme.

Holy shit, this guy only Google searches with {google:baseURL}/search?udm=14&q=%s

Actually finding something on Google often requires some knowledge and the application of the right strategies and tricks.

Definitely a senior.

Lucky guy. Tolerance for calling a spade a spade is a big green flag.

adding googling to my cv rn
- Might add Duckduckgoing or web searching
  
  Careful, HR npcs will not know wtf that is
- Can I Google myself in your office?
- Prompt engineering is a better looking term these days.
- When I took handwriting lessons I had to draw each number 100+ times in a row, so I guess I could say I've been googoling since 1987

Clearly fake. Nobody's hiring nowadays.
- There is always shortage of highly-skilled unpaid labour.

Isn't this a repost? I remember seeing this a while ago.
- u/repostsleuthbot
  
  Oh fuck

...the rest of that resume must be absolutely insane. Or he's applying to be a businessman.
I'm out here with a Master's degree and 3 years of work experience and I'm not even getting a first call. Shit's tough out here.
- Have you tried adding "Googling" as a skill?
  
  Fuck, I'm ready to try anything at this point.

Holy hell!
- New job skill just dropped

I put "Simple Green" on my resume skills section. Cleaning isn't a huge part of the job, but I knew they used that specific brand across the industry.
The interviewer mentioned it with a laugh. I got the job.

I have so many weird things on my resume just because that's what job descriptions ask for. Like 10 job descriptions I was applying to ask for number key skills, which doesn't seem like a skill to me but if they want it on there I got to have it on my resume or I won't get an interview
- I leave space in my resume template, and every job I run through chatgpt for a list of skills. Add them in, spin up a cover letter same process and send.

I make myself stand out by phrasing it as "my google-fu is strong."
- I've had a person not get what is google-fu
- If you apply for Microsoft, you gotta say bing-fu.

I moved a guy forward in an interview process once who had literally zero corporate experience at all. It was for a senior website engineer position, and the guy had somehow never had a job before in his life at like 45 years old. He played in a band for a while, and was a stay at home dad after that. I moved him forward because he was a really interesting guy, he seemed passionate about creating things, and his technical aptitude was passable and could be improved. He didn't make it past the other stages of the interview process, but I was definitely ready to give him a chance.
- That sounds like good traits for a junior or internship role.

he can find all the memes, all the lost media and all the classified documents

107 comments