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While I understand the feeling of frustration, by accusing an entire generation you are putting an awfully lot of people in your crosshairs that don't deserve to be there. I know plenty of older devs that do the same thing you are complaining about, and plenty of young devs that don't do what you are accusing them of doing.
There have always been people who go for a quick fix over true knowledge and there always will be. It's not exclusive to a particular generation. -
I see a lot of generalized accusations without any evidence of being true.
With that being said, you come across as one of those "kids these days" and "back in my day" assholes. Not a good look bud.
Why should we read a whole fucking book for something specific when there's an exact answer to your question already out there?
Sure, not reading the documentation is bad. But this is 2018. We have anything we want to know available at the tap of a few keys. Why use antiquated methods of finding that information?
Time is money and money makes the world go round. So why waste time and money when there's tools available to make your life easier. -
The percentage of people who read the docs properly and really, really know what they're doing has always been pretty small. Earlier only those people could be software engineers. Now anyone can. That doesn't mean that software engineering is going down, it's just the more popular stuff, because they lack rigour. But that will always be true for popular stuff because you really can't expect everyone to show the same level of rigour.
I know several people from my college who totally go against this so-called degeneration of the field - one guy used to make compilers dance with Haskell and LLVM before I could barely program a simple recursive descent parser. So yeah. And my college wasn't anywhere near the best in my country. -
So you're basically describing a newb, or sometimes a n00b. (I hope I don't have to explain the difference)
...
Dude...
We were all there.
Just... spark your memory a bit. Look through some of your old e-mails or something. People forget, but trust me, we've all been dumb newbs or even n00bs. We've all asked stupid questions, had stupid opinions, and were too lazy to RTFM.
And dude, when I was in school, I didn't know what a TAR file was, and now devs are looking up to my opinion on dev subjects to the point that it's making me uncomfortable.
Yeah, the barrier of entry is becoming lower because highly skilled devs are doing the hard stuff so that the rest don't have to. And that's fine. There are a ton of developer tasks, and only a few require top notch skills, while the rest are boring to highly skilled people. Let anyone join, there will be enough work for them if they have enough skills. -
Some are meant for working on the details, others on managing a bigger picture, and then there are those that work with the details that want to expand into managing a bigger picture and those managing the bigger picture wanting to expand into the details. Both are going to be new and struck in their way of thinking at first but that changes with time of course.
As many already pointed out here. -
@Stuxnet
OP's point (as I understood) is that a lot of people (this doesn't absolutely means everybody, so don't act like they are talking of you) is going for "the easy way", because, as you said, "why should we use antiquated methods to get info"? Well, someone has to do it. Someone will have to be antiquated, read those boring manuals, learn how things work and then help other people by giving answers. If everybody stop reading manuals, then there will be nobody to give answers.
Besides that, even if it take more time and effort, I think going through manuals is still the best thing. You think, analyse and develop a solution by yourself, instead of just copying it. (Ok, there are limits for that, it isn't necessary to reinvent the wheel every time..) -
@AndSoWeCode say it a little bit louder for the people out back.
The level of arrogance and mental superiority that radiates from many in the IT/programming field is fucking cancerous. I guess they expect us to all be like Gates from birth or something. But it's not practical at all. -
@taglia My example is dealing with a specific problem, not an entire language.
No shit you should read a few books when learning. But I'm not breaking out some 700 page book in hopes of finding an answer to my specific question in the book. That's the definition of insanity and stupidity.
And as I said, you should read documentation. But at some point, it's more practical to take advantage of modern tools instead of unnecessarily wasting time and energy. It's just pointless and dumb. -
@Stuxnet some problems are bigger then one language or one machine or one program.
700 page book is like nothing, just need to read an index on the back.
Read the basics man. -
@rusty-hacker tell that in face to all cobol financial system developers, I’ll be waiting for 2038 hell or maybe before before we get smashed by hardware spyware
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You're right about me putting my crosshair on those who doesn't deserve it but I'd rather drop a bomb than aiming at each and everyone that derserves it with a stick.
@Stuxnet you got the thinking backward, maybe your problem wouldn't have happened if you would have read the proper stuff.
Even though I totally understand that sometimes it's way quicker to just Google for stuff but nonetheless we still need the people with the knowledge, this is the truth we can't avoid. -
i like to disagree here and join in the others, its illogical to use time resources like its candy. I KNOW that i am pretty mediocre with all the stuff i touch at work, but people ask me to automatize stuff, so i write a few VBA scripts with interface, there are probably holes in it, but it works and i spend reasonable amounts of time to make it fool resistant.
people want to display information on a screen, i tinker a solution with a barcode scanner, a raspberry pi and some patch work of jscript/jquery, php and html for the looks..could i have done better, sure. But my time is valuable, i write down where i see holes and try it to make it as good as possible within given parameters.
everything i do has one philosophy: "as good as necessary, as cheap as possibly"
and this also applies to hobby projects, if i would spend countless hours to understand something of what i only need one piece, nothing would ever get dont
time = valuable /rant -
@Stuxnet I didn't said to read the whole documentation every time, but there is people who never read one. I think OP is talking about them.
Obviously, you are not one of those people. -
@taglia Actually kinda am lmao.
I've never read the documentation completely through or even 75% of it before. I find the documentation for my specific problem and read that, then move on.
But I agree. Not reading it is a god awful thing to do. It's just pointless to read someone else's regurgitation of the documentation for a small issue. -
If it makes you feel any better, not everyone blindly codes without reading the documentation. I try to always read the documentation for whatever language/framework/library I'm using before implementing it and when my code doesn't work the way that I expect it to, the first thing I do is dig right back into the appropriate documentation.
There are times that I get frustrated that the documentation might assume a certain level of understanding that I might not have yet and so there's some parts of the documentation that gets lost on me, but I try to take a step back from it and realize that documentation is a really difficult thing to pull off - you don't want to put every little thing in there and annoy the people who are looking for specific information relevant to them and you don't want to exclude information that would be crucial to a newbie who might not grasp your logic as well as a more experienced dev. Though I wrote a ridiculously long README for my labs project, so ... -
Agree partly: I started coding with the age of 13, started the classic way with books, getting ideas and code code code... Now I have my apprenticeship as a software developer and i am the only one in my school class, who is working on own projects instead of doing the small coding tasks we get. (tasks like a basic calculator or like writing a pwgen that generate pseudo random numbers and use ascii table to get the chars... I made a simple oneliner in python which uses os.urandom)
They show no interest in coding. They don't code out of school or work...
I'm alone in a group of "I want to learn software development because of the salary"
I know there are more and more people getting into software development without interest, but not all.
Related Rants
Programmers are the wizards of tommorow. Period
Software engineering is doomed.
The next generation of developers is going to suck as fuck
I've come across a lot of situation that made me think this way.
The most notable examples are right here on devrant.
I've seen a shit ton of rants blaming languages for "bugs" when in fact those "bugs" wouldn't have happened if those fuckers would have read the specifications of said languages.
This new generation doesn't read, when they've got a problem they just fucking go to Google for answers, they don't bother reading specifications, language books, rfc, etc, they don't bother reading where the true source of information are. The documentation ? What's that ? Let's go to stackoverflow first, let's think second.
Same back in school I've seen people in the highest grades that couldn't fucking decompress a tar archive.
In the coming decades we will loose the high skilled people, the people that made the software world as it is today we will be left with fuckers only able to blame things for stuff they don't understand.
This is my first true rant. This is me being pissed off.
rant
wk127