Lurker Posted June 24, 2009 Posted June 24, 2009 ..has started to pi$$ me off big time. Most of the people that I work with these days seem to depend heavily on their "Google skills". I can understand when people have put in enough effort and when they run into a dead end they try to find a solution if it is out there. Instead these days people jump online first even before they have made any effort to find a solution on their own. What complicates the situation is when they pick some random solution from the web, implement it without realizing the impact and something else gets broken some place else. I dont think it is unfair to say that while generally speaking most softwares have become far more advanced the skills of an average professional has actually diminished. Am I being overly critical here?
Ram Posted June 24, 2009 Posted June 24, 2009 That is a very fair thing to say. Generally, the application developers seem to have a tendency of always wanting to find the quick-fix solution, ignoring the business and technological implications of what they do. This is the problem of working in an Industry where most times, there is a lot of churning of employees (new people coming in all the time) and where there is significant amount of outsourcing.
The Outsider Posted June 24, 2009 Posted June 24, 2009 I don't see anything wrong with it in principle with the caveat that a person knows what he is looking for and can filter out the right from the wrong information and is aware of the problem he is applying the solution to.
Brainfade Posted June 24, 2009 Posted June 24, 2009 I don't see anything wrong with it in principle with the caveat that a person knows what he is looking for and can filter out the right from the wrong information and is aware of the problem he is applying the solution to. I concur. It is important to use good judgment. I am a bit of a heretic in my academic circles because I have not banned Wikipedia for my students. I tell them that they cannot cite Wiki as a source, but are free to use it as a starting point to find information; they will have to corroborate their Wiki findings using legitimate sources. My colleagues think I am nuts, but whatever.
Macj Posted June 24, 2009 Posted June 24, 2009 When you were stuck when you were young, did you not read a book to resolve a thorny issue? 'Googling' is now the book albeit much faster retrieval of information. What bothers me is people 'use' perfidious or at best circumspect sources to bolster an argument, case in point Wikipedia which I despise. Posting issues on a public forum vastly improves learning and reaching expert level is achieved much faster.
Lurker Posted June 24, 2009 Author Posted June 24, 2009 I concur. It is important to use good judgment. I am a bit of a heretic in my academic circles because I have not banned Wikipedia for my students. I tell them that they cannot cite Wiki as a source' date= but are free to use it as a starting point to find information; they will have to corroborate their Wiki findings using legitimate sources. My colleagues think I am nuts, but whatever. When you were stuck when you were young, did you not read a book to resolve a thorny issue? Isnt that a vast difference between Academia and Professional career?? At Academia the students pay the Authority(College/University etc). In professional career workers are paid to do a job. If professional workers were paying the company to do a job, or working at minimum wage, I would have no problems at all. These are people who are supposed to know what they should be doing and instead end up googling solution. Again, I have no reservation when people first put an effort. My gripe is when people jump straight to Googling. Wiki is another such thing. Instead of reading books on subject people would search on Wiki and presto suddenly they become knowledgable on a subject. xxx
Brainfade Posted June 24, 2009 Posted June 24, 2009 Isnt that a vast difference between Academia and Professional career?? At Academia the students pay the Authority(College/University etc). In professional career workers are paid to do a job. If professional workers were paying the company to do a job, or working at minimum wage, I would have no problems at all. These are people who are supposed to know what they should be doing and instead end up googling solution. Again, I have no reservation when people first put an effort. My gripe is when people jump straight to Googling. Wiki is another such thing. Instead of reading books on subject people would search on Wiki and presto suddenly they become knowledgable on a subject. xxx I jump straight to google to find the right book to read :-)! Seriously, I stick by my assertion that judicious googling can be a good thing - even for a professional. I have been directed to good, legitimate sources including pdfs of articles from journals to which my employer does not have a subscription. Just yesterday, I was googling "spinal cord injury" "stem cells" and came across an incredible website maintained by a prof at Rutgers. He is an expert in this field, and has an online "library" of the latest journal articles, which I can now access. A couple of years ago, I scoured laboratory manuals of every sort for a particular biochemical method - none had what I was looking for. Google helped me find a paper; I then contacted the author of the work, who then shared the details of his method with me. My students are better off for it now. Where we agree is this - it is not good for one to follow blindly an experimental protocol (or implement something) written by some unknown person who decided to put it out there. The trick is to use google, but use common sense to separate the wheat from the chaff.
The Outsider Posted June 24, 2009 Posted June 24, 2009 Isnt that a vast difference between Academia and Professional career?? At Academia the students pay the Authority(College/University etc). In professional career workers are paid to do a job. If professional workers were paying the company to do a job, or working at minimum wage, I would have no problems at all. These are people who are supposed to know what they should be doing and instead end up googling solution. Again, I have no reservation when people first put an effort. My gripe is when people jump straight to Googling. Wiki is another such thing. Instead of reading books on subject people would search on Wiki and presto suddenly they become knowledgable on a subject. xxx Hang on - so if someone is paying an authority it's ok for him to use google to advance his knowledge but if he is being paid, it is not ok to use google to learn something new? You have completely lost me there! What about graduate students who get paid to do research or post docs or professors - is it ok for them to use google or not? Or even if some undregrad is on a scholarship it's not ok for him to use google and fine for his peers paying tuition to use it? There is an absolute treasure of good, well compiled material available on the web and if google helps you to reach it, what's wrong with that? Not only the material but you can find extensive bibliographies and references on the web which you can then look up in the library.
Lurker Posted June 24, 2009 Author Posted June 24, 2009 I jump straight to google to find the right book to read :-)! Seriously, I stick by my assertion that judicious googling can be a good thing - even for a professional. I have been directed to good, legitimate sources including pdfs of articles from journals to which my employer does not have a subscription. Just yesterday, I was googling "spinal cord injury" "stem cells" and came across an incredible website maintained by a prof at Rutgers. He is an expert in this field, and has an online "library" of the latest journal articles, which I can now access. A couple of years ago, I scoured laboratory manuals of every sort for a particular biochemical method - none had what I was looking for. Google helped me find a paper; I then contacted the author of the work, who then shared the details of his method with me. My students are better off for it now. Where we agree is this - it is not good for one to follow blindly an experimental protocol (or implement something) written by some unknown person who decided to put it out there. The trick is to use google, but use common sense to separate the wheat from the chaff. Actually I am all for what you are suggesting, reading quality stuff online and building one's own knowledge on subjects that otherwise one may not have access to. I myself do this time permitting. However my gripe is towards quick fixes, more so when these quick fixes become a norm rather than exception.
Lurker Posted June 24, 2009 Author Posted June 24, 2009 Hang on - so if someone is paying an authority it's ok for him to use google to advance his knowledge but if he is being paid, it is not ok to use google to learn something new? You have completely lost me there! Nope thats not the entire argument but surely there are merits to that line of thinking. Employees are paid to do a job. Part of this involves building a sound technical/professional knowledge base at your work location. How does googling help in this regard? You basically cut and paste a solution, dont even know what to do when it fails and when things go wrong you google again. I can still see a student doing this but my gripe is when people are paid to do a job...and they dont. There is an absolute treasure of good, well compiled material available on the web and if google helps you to reach it, what's wrong with that? Not only the material but you can find extensive bibliographies and references on the web which you can then look up in the library. Again, thats not the issue. I would be delighted if people are spending time online reading quality journals. I would be delighted if folks,for example, read the best way of handling dates in RDBMS systems and then implement it at work. Instead what people do is Google to find the syntax for date conversion, and when they have to do so much as change the format from MM/DD/YYY to DD/MM/YYYY HH:MI:SS they go back to googling. xxx
fineleg Posted June 24, 2009 Posted June 24, 2009 Lurker, Partly, you also need to turn the question the other way around. Are employers these days genuinely encouraging employees to learn the fundamentals and do designs and architecture with first principles in mind? I hope they do and I want them to. Infact lot of employers today insist on unreal deadlines and force employees to meet crazy dates without giving them time to do a proper and sound design validation first. Such employers are part of the quick fix problem you are lamenting about. This culture has to change to one with a long term focus on product or system quality.
coffee_rules Posted June 26, 2009 Posted June 26, 2009 I depend on google for most of my work on excel. I need to write a lot of scripts to analyse a lot of n/w performance data, I use Google readily. There is no harm in using it to gain skill and knowledge. I wouldn't use it to implement something in product code. If I am not sure, I would ask my fellow team members. I can see what Lurker is getting at.
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