Comment by deepGem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deepGem | Hacker News Reader

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why “being able to quickly google the answers to questions” is inferior to “learning, knowing and remembering the answer

At least in the world of programming, this is not necessarily true. There is so much flux that you do need to rely on Google for the semantics at least. In some instances or in time crunch, it is a make or break scenario and how fast one can get to a solution trumps everything else. So the ability to quickly Google what you want is indeed not inferior. To quickly quote an anecdote, a couple of my fellow programmers couldn't start a Flask application on AWS to listen on all interfaces. Smart guys but they couldn't figure this out. 'What' to google for is also valuable.

Of course, the ability to learn, know and remember is tremendously useful and this is what most of the interviews test for, but the ability to quickly Google and find answers in the nick of time is not inferior at all.

Not necessarily.

Being able to write, debug, and understand programs is the "deep" skills that you know and remember the answer to.

Googling your answers is what you used for less frequently used set of knowledge.

Understandable that you’d want to exploit any resource that can give you answers during a time crunch.

But if given enough time, going through the pain of debugging and fixing something on your own – with at the most some documentation – is still superior.

If one has learned, knows and remembers the first principles of their domain, then knowing what to Google becomes less valuable (not saying your colleagues don’t know their stuff). You can rely on yourself for even the trickier situations you get into.

Agreed, this is what I strive for but rarely do it in practice. Somehow, you are always in a hurry, you always want the solution now!. I think this has to change, the initial time spent on the understanding the debugging process has immense long term benefits.The time to solution decreases with time, in my kind of approach it remains linear or sometimes even increase.

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