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Comment by dragonshed | Hacker News Reader

I suck at excel, but confession: i know how to make Installer programs and I don't tell anyone anything about them, EVER. I learned how to make MSIs packages and NSIS installers about 15 years ago and it didn't stop until I completely redacted the info and experience and changed jobs.

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Know your pain, I know how to use grep/awk/sed/..., now I am "logs investigation" expert too often, ugh..

I feel like grep/awk/sed (actually just perl) should be taught in High School just due to how often I find myself using them in day to day life. Maybe not even the entire programs/languages, but just regular expressions.

I'm not sure which is worse. Being that awk/sed guy or being that Git guy.

Who uses "guys" anymore? Didn't stackoverflow replace that?

SO often can take hours to weeks for a good answer, and that's assuming it doesn't just get closed as a dupe when the other one doesn't answer the question.

A good "guy" (or girl!) is a phone call away and can often solve the problem in minutes.

Totally agree, that network of SMEs is a huge productivity multiplier

I find that a surprising amount of people actually don't use SO where I work for anything beyond simple things.

It's usually faster (and safer) to ask a 'local expert' first.

Does depend on the situation, I work in a large-ish team where people have specialized in different technologies. So if I encounter something I'm unfamiliar with, asking someone locally is better than spending time finding a solution on Stackoverflow that might not be what I want.

You would be surprised how much some technical people are lacking in Google, SO skills. When I am lazy I sometimes just shout them what they should put in google to get an answer. Thankfuly it is minority in my gigs.

Nah being the Git guy is easy.

Step 1: Look in .git/logs/HEAD and roll them back to whatever state they were in before the mess they're in now.

Step 2: Forward them the e-mail you keep handy that lists the only 3–5 commands they should ever use, verbatim, without deviation.

Yeesh. It took about one day of poking about, maybe a decade ago, to realize that Windows installers are a one-way ticket to crazytown.

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