No One Knows How to Do Anything Anymore

Originally posted 2015-09-15/Modified 2016-01-06

Do you think you know how to use piece of software X? No you don't. You've just learned enough of the facade of X that you can often get by without having to look for directions.

Much of modern software development (and life in general, for that matter), is crawling through the vast trove of information available on the internet to find a pre-made solution to a problem at hand. My observation, at least, is that programmers rarely take (or have) time to develop a thorough understanding of a problem or tool. Rather, we rush through assignments and tickets, pasting together components until it seems like we have what we need.

Forget algorithms and datastructures, the most important skill for a modern programmer to have is – google skills.