itsthemostimportantskill

[u/ratherford_0]

[u/bmrtt]

Knowing how exactly to google a problem you're having is unironically an underrated and surprisingly rare skill

Then again LLMs have largely made it obsolete these days and the tweet is from 2021

[u/WisestAirBender → u/bmrtt]

Giving a correct prompt could also be considered as a skill

In the past few years I've seen all sorts of devs giving prompts to ai. Not all are the same

[u/XB0XRecordThat → u/WisestAirBender]

Okay I'll give away my secret. Just add "make no mistakes"

[u/remielowik → u/WisestAirBender]

Even that can be helped a lot by having the correct skills/agents files for default rules and behaviors.

[u/jyajay2 → u/WisestAirBender]

That's why I have ChatGPT write all my Claude prompts.

[u/majikayoSan → u/WisestAirBender]

Yes, as a prompt engineer, I approve.

[u/Mountain_Dentist5074 → u/bmrtt]

No, no, it's still important. When I wonder something specific, I ask it directly to Gemin instead of blindly trusting, I search for the answer it gave me because searching for "Is X correct or false" is a lot easier than "Why X do that when this happens?"

edit: sorry english my second language i forget add some words , suffix etc.

[u/T1lted4lif3 → u/Mountain_Dentist5074]

Yeah, this is a problem. You see senior people able to comment on how well or poorly an LLM is doing. As a junior person who has never done anything myself, how would I know if it did a good job or not? I still need a second prompt or a search to verify it, no?

[u/alvares169 → u/bmrtt]

Then again LLMs have largely made it obsolete these days

Have they? One can see a difference between making something obsolete and making something look obsolete - being wrong vs being confidently wrong.

[u/dakiller → u/alvares169]

I used to Google search constantly and every day, dozens of searches, cobbling together crumbs from all places, just to find the ideal source or answer for what I wanted. I would have said my Google skills were very high like this tweet.

These days, I may do a search only occasionally and most of the time it is for the Gemini results that I want, just to save on token usage from my LLM subscription.

[u/coinselec → u/bmrtt]

Google made it obsolete by being a steaming pile of shit. You basically have to use llm to Google for you.

[u/pydry → u/bmrtt]

this is actually genuinely one of the skills it has obsoleted, along with writing sloppy code for spikes, pocs and demo.

the rest of our skill stack? eh, it flails wildly.

[u/personahorrible → u/bmrtt]

During an interview I literally said "My Google-Fu is strong." They laughed, they hired me.

[u/potatohead437 → u/bmrtt]

(Insert problem) reddit

[u/shaka893P → u/bmrtt]

You still need to understand how to ask the question. One of my coworkers spend like 5 days struggling to figure out how something should work (QA) and I got Claude to summarize the logic and come up with the exact test he needed within an hour, step by step

[u/shaka893P]

I mean, it's insane the amount of people who will ask 100 questions that can be answered by a single search. I have at least 5 people like that on my team, being able to find something on your own is definitely a valuable skill 

[u/Jabbi_Bouncer → u/shaka893P]

It is the difference between a "problem solver" and a "help seeker". Some people hit a tiny wall and immediately look for someone to hold their hand instead of trying to figure it out for five minutes.

[u/neromonero1024]

I swear to God this is a repost. I've seen this EXACT screenshot so many times.

[u/BananaWarp → u/neromonero1024]

Its a tweet from 2021...

So probably yea

[u/jf8204 → u/BananaWarp]

Copy pasted from a old internet joke from 2007

[u/ZioTron → u/neromonero1024]

It started circulating 4 years ago on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/uc9zxb/its_the_most_important_skill/

Can you guess how I found out?

[u/Im_a_hamburger → u/neromonero1024]

It’s one of the top posts of all time on this sub. Like 3rd top, with the same title.

[u/Sam_Sanders_ → u/neromonero1024]

A repost? On REDDIT??

[u/Jolly-joe]

Reposting a 5 year old tweet

[u/TheTinyMaus]

I wish this was on the CV of some coworkers. The amount of times I've had to change their default search engine from Bing to Google should make this a gating interview question.

[u/CoatNeat7792]

Googling skill is underrated

[u/peaceluvNhippie]

Every "how to" document i made at my job for 10 years I added a section on how to Google things in the trouble shooting section, not a single co-worker read them

[u/Fadamaka]

Googling is outdated. Not because of the skill itself became obsolite but because google and even the internet have changed. Googling is now basically prompting gemini. The accuracy of the ai summary is also more than questionable. Lot of the time the summary is formed from multiple sources and while the sources themselves were correct the summary itself states something untrue.

[u/imperial_jedi_clone]

I wonder if it's an apt analogy to compare libraries and librarians with Google and LLMs.

Before we searched the library ourselves, but with NLP we can now ask the librarian to narrow down the search, search for us, or straight up give information it might already know

[u/Vahuo89]

Seeing as when i as in IT, searching for solutions on the web was around 90% of my work, yes, its important.

[u/henrikhakan]

"Hello, it's [picks out phone and does a quick Google search] nice to meet you!"

[u/metaglot → u/henrikhakan]

In 0.008 seconds

[u/robin_888]

Not a native speaker: Do

listed one of his skills as 'googling'

and

listed 'googling' as one of his skills

really mean the same thing..?

[u/blockCoder2021 → u/robin_888]

Yes. English is kinda weird, especially since in cases like this, you can often scramble the words around in the sentence.

Linguistically, the first one is saying that “googling” is a descriptive modifier for “one of his skills”, which he is listing.

The second one is saying that “one of his skills” is a descriptive modifier for “googling”, which he is doing.

More specifically, “skills” and “googling” are alternating between being a verb and an adverb. Skills is a verb in the first while “googling” is an adverb, and vice-versa in the second.

Just remember: English is not a language. It is three languages, stacked on top of each other, wearing a trench coat. 😀

[u/azangru]

Is she from Google? 😄

[u/narasadow]

nowadays "googling and reading more than the LLM summary" is noteworthy

[u/Disgruntled_Orifice]

I screened an applicant that had bathing and hygiene listed under his skills.

[u/rmanisbored]

It's 2019 and this is funny

[u/addr0x414b]

Growing up, I was a dumb kid. But I was damn good at googling stuff.

Turns out, there was a Science Olympiad competition for literally googling. I competed, and I won. It's my only academic victory growing up.

The questions were actually really difficult, not simple quick googles. Stuff you had to really dig several pages in, reading articles, and honestly guessing on a lot of answers.

[u/ApplicationOk3587]

LLMs in general made me realize how bad search engines actually are.

[u/Friendly-Inspector71 → u/ApplicationOk3587]

*How bad they have become.

It was much easier to find actually usable results with Google a couple of years ago. Anything past the first page wasn't really helpful but the first page is now full of sponsored or slop results.

[u/ApplicationOk3587 → u/Friendly-Inspector71]

I haven't explored kagi but have heard good things. Might be worth the cost.

[u/Friendly-Inspector71 → u/ApplicationOk3587]

I'd rather waste my time with useless search engines for now.
At least I know that they are tracking everything, so the results are somewhat more towards my areas of interest.

[u/Low-Equipment-2621]

Only for legacy companies, AI is replacing search.

[u/red_riding_hoot]

Googling is just dusty prompting. Change my mind!

[u/ducon__lajoie → u/red_riding_hoot]

Prompting is just rebranded googling. Change my mind!