The Joel on Software Discussion Group

Do the employers allow their developers to search online on how to code certain things?

Are you allowed to google and, in general, to search for information on how to programm different aspects of your assigned project?

The reason I am asking is because I am fresh out of uni and at my first full time job doing .net development. I am planning to quit this one and find a new one because what I am doing is extremelly boring.

The only "cool" aspect of the current job is that nobody around me knows anything, and I can spend most of my time googling on how to get stuff done. For example, my recent task was to create a custom page handler (ashx) that outputs an image based on a specific query string passed. I had no idea how to that before I found a solution online, and within an hour the problem was solved. Actually, most of my time I am learning stuff for myself, it doesn't have to be about my current job assignment.

What about another workplace?

Do majority of places expect the developer to know how to do most of their work "by heart" and because the developer is a "professional", looking up how to do certain things online is a big no, no?

If there are workplaces that do not "freak out" if they see that I am reading somebody's blog post on how to create a strong typed dataset or how to use a SQL cursor, then I would feel comfortable leaving my current position.

I worked for a company like that.  They actually monitored all of our googling and I had my boss ask "why are you searching for this?  you should know it!"

I was once chewed out for asking why we couldn't normalize a database...  because I was "questioning authority".  I was even polite about it.

Get the hell out as soon as you can.

It's allowed where I work and I've not come across anywhere where it wouldn't be allowed. I think that being able to find out things when you need to is more important than having encyclopaedic knowledge of an API.

It all depends on your relationship with your employer. Anything is possible and anything may be done in real life.

Some employers have an "applied blue collar mechanic" attitude about development. They will assume that if they see you in an internet session, you are wasting their time surfing the web. Other workplaces confer trust, see SW development as a professional activity, and assume that you are doing anything necessary to get the job done. A situation that is somewhat in the middle of these extremes is "benign ignorance". Managers have no idea how you spend your day, and as long as you produce what they need, they don't really care how you arrived at the result.

>> They actually monitored all of our googling and I had my boss ask "why are you searching for this?  you should know it!"

And if my boss *knew* enough to critique my research techniques, I would ask him "Ok King Turd, since you know so much why don't you do my job for me?"

With my characteristic tact, I would call the guy an a-hole to his face and clean my desk out.

Research Sure.

We also have access to the MSDN, but I honestly use Google about 95% of the time.
But as with the Internet as a whole, you just have to be careful about your sources.....

But we are a small company, I'm the only real programmer.  I'd imagine that larger companies have internal libraries...but we don't have the means for that and the internet is the next best thing.

Let's be clear about this: If you need to use Google before you can get the job done, you need to work on your programming skills.

It's understandable in your case, since you are fresh of out uni, and as yet have little on the job experience.  Here's the sort of schedule you ought to be aiming at (as well as getting your assigned work done) - although obviously the particular things you learn in each week will depend on the types of skills you're aiming to build.

Week 1: Gain full knowledge of Windows API

Week 2: Gain full knowledge of .net class libraries

Week 3: Learn C, C++ and SQL  ANSI/ISO standards

etc.

By full knowledge, I of course mean knowing all functions, class hierarchies, parameters, error returns etc., for APIs/class libraries.  And a similar level of knowledge for standards, e.g. you should be able to parse some code and say it doesn't comply with section 4.1.3 of the standard or whatever.

Once you getting going, I'm sure you'll find it easy to pick up new things like this... and will look forward to many happy years in software development.


Actually I'm just kidding... software development is about communicating with other people, and problem solving... rote memory is not really a required skill.  If an employer has the attitude that it is... find another employer

Back when I worked for a government contractor (at a research lab, maybe that had something to do with it) I used to spend more time researching than doing actual work.

Now I have lots of work to do, and little time to research.  However, my employer does not mind if I use the web.  He just cares that I am using the web for productive reasons.

The more specialized your role, the easier it is to remember some key things, but it seems like the more you try to cram in your head, the tendency is for certain things to fall out.  The greater the variety of projects, tools, languages, etc., you have to use, the more time you will have to spend with references (either on the web or in books).

Certainly use google for research - no-one can memorize everything you need to be an effective programmer nowadays. However, beware of the mindless cut-and-paste of sample code without fully understanding what it does. I often study sample code but I almost always then write my own code.

Research, reading, and trial and error are pretty critical part of my coding efforts. At all stages. It's just important to respect the client by ensuring you know when to give up on a dead-end. Google is not RentACoder. Don't expect it to code for you. Learn what you can and move the heck on, don't rob yourself of hands-on time required to really understand the solution (and the problem).

That said, sometimes you think a little research is most definitely going to pay off great, in very practical ways, in the long run--in that case--champion for a little more R&D time is sensible.

Googling stuff is perfectly normal and I'd be very dubious of any employers who object to this.

If you can do the work in a reasonable time-frame then it's none of their business if you need to google to remember the details of some API call.

If you're not getting any work done because you don't actually have the experience you claimed to, that is another matter. But sounds like in your case they'd expect you to take a while to get familiar with things.

KC, your situation is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard.  I don't think a jury in the world would convict you if you helped this person to an early visit to the afterlife. :)

OP, you sound like me. i'm also the only person in the company with CS background but they allow me to do research altho our problem is not unique but it is more complex and that require me do more research and learning. my employer know that i apply for entry level job so i don't think they care if i use the internet to google certain problem.

i also plan to leave as soon as i hit one year mark and find a better/real programing job.

The Internet is a resource. I don't know why any employer would deny an employee a resource to do their job, such as a reference manual.

I've actually seen far too much of the opposite: someone will be working on a project and seem to be off the mark, or getting no where, or they just plain did it wrong.

I ask them, "what did your Internet research tell you about this problem?"  Their response: "what Internet research?"

I just have to shake my head.

Any employer who denies employees the opportunity to do research on the best way to do their job is foolhardy in the extreme.

>> Any employer who denies employees the opportunity to do research on the best way to do their job is foolhardy in the extreme.

I have witnessed a certain "sheltered workshop" mentality where this happens - typically with control freak owners and managers. The attitude is that the employees, and even "professional" staff like programmers, are basically idiots and will wander wastefully and chaotically if allowed the discretion to use "off label" knowledge.

Another mentality at work is fear of the internet combined with ignorance of the technology. With such a regime, you can't cut and paste sample code because the management believes that anything originating on the internet may contain viruses.

I worked (as a contractor) with a place like this. The business went tits-up because the employees were dumbed down into uselessness. So there is a moral there.

This is an interesting talk. About ten years ago I worked at a place that allowed email ONLY, and all subscriptions to mailing lists had to be approved by the VP engineering, and only ONE developer would be allowed to subscribe to any particular mailing list, so if you had a question for the Win32 mailing list, you had to talk to the developer who was the 'contact point' for that mailing list and have him submit the question on your behalf. Of course he would just ignore your request and go back to what he was doing. If you tried to subscribe to some other mailing list off a LISTSERV, the VP would say "Anthony is already subscribed to a Win32 list, why do we need a subscription to another one?" Please note that there was no cost associated with these, it was just a matter of sending an email with a line that said 'subscribe'.

Anyway, internet access was FORBIDDEN. Some of the developers set up phone taps to their desk line and would connect to their home dialup accounts just so they could look up reference information. One guy was found out doing this and was fired. So then people could only do it at night after management had left, which was OK since we were working 16 hour days, 6 days a week at the time.

We got invited to participate in a working group for a standards committee for some things that we were key in. After I got back from the first meeting and reported on some advances that I had learned our competitors were working on, this caused a commotion in management. They met with legal and then I was asked to sign a paper saying that I agreed contractually not to speak to any employees of competitors at the meetings. I pointed out that every single person at the standards meeting was a competitor. So they said don't talk to any of them. I said there was no point going to the meetings then. So they sent the company attorney instead. He had NO knowledge of engineering. He would make uninformed remarks at the meetings and take notes, then return and discuss the results with the vice presidents. The engineers were placed out of the loop regarding what was happening in the standards committee and when they finally agreed on a standard, our hardware could not support it and we ended up making no sales after a $11 million investment and the company went out of business.

Scott, excellent story!

It boggles the mind that companies can think this kind of lockdown does anything but screw over all development ..

Are you sure there was no cost? Perhaps they were paying from bandwidth or ???????  Very strange behavior.

"Let's be clear about this: If you need to use Google before you can get the job done, you need to work on your programming skills."

You're joking, right?

As for the original poster: Personally, I haven't worked any place where googling was forbidden.  Common sense says nobody can know _everything_, so finding articles on how to do things you're not familiar with can save a lot of development time, and finding newsgroup messages about strange errors can save a lot of troubleshooting time.

Obviously you need to be disciplined; there's a big difference between researching and just wasting time browsing around for fun.  But any employer who cuts off Internet access because you _might_ waste time browsing for fun will _definitely_ waste time in development or troubleshooting tasks that take longer than they need to.

To Scott::::

That kind of myopia in business DESERVES the bankruptcy axe!

-------------------------
<<<Week 1: Gain full knowledge of Windows API

Week 2: Gain full knowledge of .net class libraries

Week 3: Learn C, C++ and SQL  ANSI/ISO standards

etc.>>>


Are you F&^$%^ing kidding me? In the absence of possessing a photographic memory, this rote approach to learning software development does NOT work.....

I am quite surprised in this discussion of having access to critical and correct information when and where you need it that NO ONE has underscored the importance of maintaining YOUR OWN code library!

EVERY unique coding experience that I've had in software development has been documented in my own personal code library for future reference.

While Visual Studio 2005 does have a code snippet library, I don't think it provides enough reference material to be used effectively as one's personal coding library.

I cannot tell you how much time I've saved in software development as a result of using this tool. In addition, it's a great advocacy tool to be used when interviewing for a job. You can tout how much development time you save as well as convey a very strong message to prospective employers that you are on the ball and committed to your craft.

In addition, I have a 1 GB flash drive that currently holds about 800 MB of mostly software development material BEYOND just my coding library. Helpful applications I've collected over the years, website material, whitepapers - you name it, and if it's software related, I've probably got something of it on my flash drive.

I have found my own code library to be an indispensable tool; wherever I go vocationally, it goes......

Did you miss the bit that said S. Tanna was joking?

I nearly jumped on him too until I read the last paragraph. I felt the rage boiling up and wanted to reply before I got to the end. Looks like a couple got caught :)

hehe, Brice.  S. Tanna was only joking.  I went from "OK, this guy has to be joking", to "Wait...you mean he's serious!", back to "Whew he's joking" when I got to the last paragraph.

The problem is that there's an extra line break before that last paragraph and so when you scroll down, it seems like the post just ends!  So I was still in "Wait...you mean he's serious!" mode before I clicked the scroll down a couple extra times. :)

Tanna may have been just kidding but he (or she) did not have a real solution to the issue (i.e. a code library).

..that was my point...

My coworkers have discovered that I'm good at finding things on the internet. So sometimes I'm asked to research stuff for them.

Fiddlesticks.  The trouble with so much online reading is I tend to skim things.  :(

Heh, great post Tanna. Was just about to skip half of it so I could quickly get down to flaming you. Lucky I perservered to the last paragraph! lol :-)

Coincidentally, I was just last night reading in "Software That Sells" by Edward Hasted a paragraph entitled "Leave Grazing to the Project Manager":

[START QUOTE]
"Nothing is worse than a stuck programmer delving into the Internet, finding a bit of code to get him around a problem, embedding it in the program and plodding on. You have no idea of the implications of quality, source, support, updates, and copyright, to say nothing of the license fees. You can't expect new programmers to understand these issues. Finding solutions via the Internet is a black art and uses up a lot of time. It's far better that the developers tell the project manager what the problem is and for him to find, screen, and assess any potential solution." (from page 82)
[END QUOTE]

Personally I think thats a load of rubbish. I _would_ expect progranmmers to understand such issues, or at least to be able to tell when such issues might be in question with something they find. Ive yet to meet a project manager with the bandwidth to do that. They are usually far too busy casting spells with their powerpoint to keep upper management off the developers back for one thing.

Bottom line is, if you can't do research on the net to find solutions then you cant do your job. If you cant do your job you are likely to get fired, so its probably better to move on if you fail to get the restrictions resolved through discussion with your manager.