I Swear They Know When Your Task Manager Is Open Or Something

Content There's a thing called "Rubber duck debugging" in which a programmer explains the code to a rubber duck in hopes of finding the bug

Content 8 hours of debugging 1 minute of reading documentation

The brutal honesty of modern programming tutorials has reached new heights! This gem shows a "self-taught programmer" with the cheerful advice to "Kill Yourself" while sporting the classic YouTube dev setup: beanie, microphone, and obligatory dark-themed code in the background. It's the perfect encapsulation of that moment when you've watched 47 tutorials, still have no idea what you're doing, and the tutorial creator finally admits what we're all thinking: maybe learning to center a div wasn't worth the existential crisis after all.

Chess and programming - two games where you're perpetually outmaneuvered. The single error is right in front of you, practically taunting you with its simplicity. Meanwhile, the 585 errors are lurking just out of sight, waiting to ambush your code when you finally fix that one obvious bug. It's like fixing a leak only to discover your entire plumbing system is actually made of Swiss cheese and wishful thinking.

Content When you fix the bug and the imposter syndrome goes away

Content I've interviewed a lot of people over the last year (Java), and my favorite test is to throw a Stack Trace at them and ask them to figure out what the problem is. The answer is actually quite clear, however. Half of them don't know it's called a stack trace. Some don't know what they're looking at (BYE!). Several focus on the wrong section of proprietary code. Some ask to "open a debugger". however the answer is right there in plain english if you just read the method names. Many don't realize the line numbers are RIGHT THERE, and then start focusing on the lines ending with "Compiled Code". Then there are the ones who work their way up from the bottom, starting with the application container code, and lose their minds. Some who figure out what is happening don't have a solution to prevent it from happening. No, I'm not sharing the trace; suffice to say it's been reviewed by more than 5 of my peers and they all passed. Like Reply 1h Edited I mean, it isn't hard to eliminate people with a coding question. Do you find it impossible to teach people how to read text stack traces, or is this a skill without which they will be unable to do anything of use, or do you just not want to hire anyone? 1 am serious. 1 can come up with dozens of useful programming skills I can test a candidate on that most perfectly skilled programmers would fail. Start with eliminating people who can't code at all. Then find out what they can do that could be useful. If I have 5 people who can already take a printed out stack crash dump, I probably don't need another, and if I do, a qualified candidate can be taught that skill by someone who knows it in under a week. Then again, maybe you work for Stack Trace Inc, and your entire job is looking at stack traces. If so, by bad. Like Reply 22m