I often joke that my ability to formulate good Google queries is the single most important part of my software engineering skillset. Except, you know, I'm not really joking.
Don't undercount that you also have the skill to determine whether an answer on stackoverflow (etc.) is actually correct and worthwhile.
(I taught intro to CS for the first time last year, and watched people get very hung up by subtly broken things they found on the innertubes. To the point where we simply told them not to - we'd much rather have them asking the course staff, until they've developed the experience to sort out the wheat from the chaff themselves.)
I tried to learn openGL ES from the official android tutorial, which is subtly broken all over the place. It works but shouldn't. The funny thing is that when I googled it, there were lots of complaints about it being broken, and the author responded and fixed them... but years before...
I eventually got things working, though I feel far from confident about openGL ES. Actually, embedded shader code, packed arrays, limited debugging and my rusty matrix algebra doesn't make it easy.
Google is also very good at what I call "meta-guidance." If I search for something and don't find any good results, there's two possibilities: a) I'm not asking the right question, or b) I'm trying to solve the wrong problem.
Couldn't agree more. I'm a lead web developer at a company and whenever I'm asked to interview a potential employee I give em' a short coding task. Internet access is allowed. The only restriction I give em' is not to clear their search history.
If the candidate knows the problem he/she is facing and can formulate good query to look for a solution; that's a ++
I often find that by the time I've written a clear enough explanation of the problem I'm trying to solve (in a stack overflow text edit box, usually), I figure out the answer on my own.
This right here, man. I start off going "I'm trying to do X. How do I do it?"
Then I have to exhaustively Google to make sure that it's not an obvious Google search away. Then I start listing the steps that I've tried before, and I realize a possibility that I hadn't considered before.
The possibility works, and I close the window. Oh.
These days, I usually just walk the dog. By the time that I get back, I've usually figured out the answer or figured out how I'm going to look for the answer. The dog doesn't mind that his owner is babbling about code for the entire walk because he's a dog.
Having the skills to know what question to ask is important. How, for example, would someone with 0 computing knowledge look for answers to a problem they want to solve where, say, some form of ML would be the best solution? How would they evaluate the search results?
One thing I didn't mention is that I sometimes make dozens of queries for a particular problem before I find the right formulation of words that will give me a useful result. Often those words/phrases were ones I encountered in previous unfruitful searches. In many cases finding the answer turns out to be easy, but figuring out the right question was hard!
Related is being good at debugging. There's something about having a certain intuition (in reality probably experience) on what it is that you are looking for that is critical.
I find that experience and a rigorous approach is vital for debugging efficiently. It's like being a detective, where often the most effective technique is _disproving_ your theories.
Yes. I see people getting hung up on irrelevant issues. It happens to me on occasions, but some people seems to get stuck on side effects and irrelevant errors and messages.
I find it to be very irritating if it happens for people that should know better...
The important thing to remember is that as sure you are that they're wrong, they're sure that they're right.
In general I find that asking them to explain why they think this is causing the behaviour you're seeing they can usually work out they're wrong/convince you they're right. Of course this only works if they don't scream "I've found the bug" every time you step forward.
It's valid for other things too. Over the last couple of years I find it 'easier'/'faster' to google "that thing you do when you do that in Photoshop/Illustrator/AE/Premiere/Nuke..." and I get results I want immediately. It's faster than trying to remember, fumbling around the menus and whatnots.
I was about to say that you can really only learn this by experience, but I'll bet you'd be able to learn a lot by watching someone else work and listening to them talk about their thought process out loud.
