I joke with a friend about this all the time. ‘We are surrounded by Google programmers‘ he said, and I couldn’t agree more.

There is a difference between a ‘Google programmer’ and a ‘programmer that works at Google’. Google programmers simply search Google for a piece of boiler plate code and stick it into their app. It wreaks havoc later and causes trouble for a lot of people.

I chanced upon this blog post a while back that was complaining about lazy developers at stackoverflow. The complaint being that some developers ask silly questions, the answer to which a Google search will easily reveal. It seems some people are so lazy to use google that whole websites are dedicated to Google something for you

So there are sections of the programming population that do not want to use Google, they will ask a question in a forum, expect a silver bullet for a reply and nag till they get it. The other section Googles for some code, copies it into the application and god knows what will happen when it goes kaboom. There is a third section of developers that do use Google and do see code that comes out of a Google search, but do not inject the same code into their application. Instead, they understand the code and research a little more to arrive at a good solution.

Now although I agree with the sentiments in the blog post mentioned above, why single out stackoverflow alone ? A comment left in the post agrees that the problem is prevalent across other sites

We have this problem at dream.in.code as well. I think it’s a problem that creeps in to most Q&A type sites.

The rest of the comment makes a suggestion that programmers that are not employed in the US are lazy, but lets ignore that. Laziness transcends all barriers. The comment is quite true that most Q and A sites have people come in and ask very basic questions. The problem might not be with the people who ask the questions but with the people who answer it. When a slacker asks a question with an obvious answer, the right thing to do would be to point to a javadoc or a user guide pdf instead of giving the answer straight away. This will encourage the person that asked the question to lookup the answer next time.

When some one asks you a question with an obvious answer, do not be rude; give them a direct answer; or ask them to RTFM without giving them a link. For all you know this person may really be a newbie that has absolutely no clue about the subject. Instead post a helpful link and nudge them. If they repeated ask silly questions, simply ignore it after a while. Quoting a text from the post

This behaviors will produce tons and tons of copy&pasted code in our programs and will create a generation of developers unable to think by themselves

These programmers are already here. But I don’t think that we are creating a generation of them. Those that are lazy and simply want to copy and paste code will always do so. They can be ignored after a little nudging. Those that are ‘cats on the wall’ can be nudged to the right side. Then there are programmers that will research code and use Google in ways that it should be used. These are the programmers that will triumph in situations that involve solving classloaders problems / SSL handshake exceptions /performance issues etc etc.