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Jeffrey Palermo (.com) » Newsgroup rant - am I preaching to the choir? - level 100
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Newsgroup rant - am I preaching to the choir? - level 100

The following is a basic skill that every developer should have - even those who have been developing for just a few days:  Searching the Internet.

Yes, that's it, folks.  How many developers still don't have this skill?  How many newsgroup posts could be avoided by a simple Internet search.  A favorite developer search is Google because we can do a search, and if an article doesn't pop up, we can “group” it, and somebody is bound to have made a newsgroup post about it already (with an answer).

I've answered many newsgroup posts just by doing the google search for them.  Am I helping them or hurting them?  For instance, in the ASP.NET newsgroup yesterday there was a question as to what other ASP.NET IDEs were out there besides VS and Web Matrix?  Wow, what a tough question.  Let's do a search and find out instantly. . . or I can post a newsgroup post and hope to get an answer by the next day or day after that.

What's worse is to find a newsgroup post of this level posted by someone with MCAD or MCSD by their name. . . *gasp*

Posted 11-08-2004 1:36 PM by Jeffrey Palermo

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Comments

Richard Dudley wrote re: Newsgroup rant - am I preaching to the choir? - level 100
on 11-09-2004 7:59 AM
My favorite is:

'can u plz give me code for X'

where X is a project worth at least a couple of mortgage payments.

Since a lot of these requests are foreign, I have to wonder if these are the guys who are being outsourced to.
Bobbo wrote re: Newsgroup rant - am I preaching to the choir? - level 100
on 11-09-2004 8:37 AM
Yes, it is quite worrying the number of people who will just post a question without even trying to search. Sometimes putting the exact text of their question into google will give you the answer in the first link!

Another worrying thing is the people who DO seem to have jobs - I am helping a guy at the moment who is struggling to edit and maintain a website developed in a combination of Javascript and PHP - and he doesn't even know ONE of these languages. He has no idea how and where JS and PHP operate (so he tries some stupid-ass things like posting an array to PHP from Javascript, using a javascript 'if' to control PHP execution, etc)... and yet this guy is somehow employed? While smart knowledgeable people can't find jobs? What the hell is going on?