"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."
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.....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
While the generational diss train is fun and all I think it has more to do with design patterns of the most popular hardware at any given point.
Now at this current state, unless you're seeking out a desktop an individual is going to have most of their "technology time" on a phone which have been overwhelmingly been designed for simplicity and ease of use.
When a barrier for entry and usability is low, it can be used by a wide range of people but that also means that most common operations are going to default to being fairly quick and easy. If the barrier to find "good" information is higher than the barrier for the entry point of the technology you'll find most people settling for what's probably "okay" information (even if that information isn't actually correct)
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 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.