Some background: due to the whole “autistic recluse hermit” thing I’ve got going on since very young, I’ve always been the sort to search for info in books or the internet instead of other irl humans. So I don’t even have personal experience to draw from on how that changed for myself.

I’m currently mentoring some young (adult) programmers and preparing some coursework for them, and I’ve always been confused by how much difficulty beginners have with “just” searching for solutions to their problems online. (I put “just” in quotes there because I realise that it’s actually difficult for them.)

This leads to a lot of situations where they’ll ask me things and I’ll literally just send them one of the top 5 duckduckgo results that I find on a quick search, which is usually exactly what they need. Besides creating learning bottleneck (i.e. if I am otherwise busy they could be left waiting too long), I worry that they won’t develop the independence to find the solutions themselves in the future.

But I definitely don’t want to tell them to “Just Google DDG it” or RTFM. Not because I don’t think they actually should, just because I think they might take that as some sort of insult or think that I’m not interested in helping (when in fact I’m always more than happy to help even with trivial stuff like this).

I recognise that one part of the problem is that they’re not all comfortable with their English, and native language search results are usually not very good. But I reckon there’s more to it that I’m just failing to understand, and if I don’t even properly understand the problem, I won’t be able to come up with a proper solution. I don’t think this is a local issue, so I believe others here might have encountered this in the wild too and understand it better than me.

What am I missing here?

Edit: Great comments all around, I’ll ponder all the suggestions and insights here and see what I can do. Thanks comrades!

  • D61 [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    4·
    11 months ago

    Maybe narrow the search window by finding some quality resources that are drilled down a bit already and having your students get in the habit of searching those specific sources first before searching at random on the internet.

    My issues when i’ve tried to look up problems through random internet searches:

    1. I have no idea what the thing I’m trying to do is called or how to describe it correctly. Ill only know what the outcome is supposed to look like or can only really describe what I’m “seeing” which means I’m going to be using the wrong words to describe things.

    2. Places like StackOverflow can be okay for finding helpful solutions, but the questions that have already been asked look similar but are different enough situations that the solutions aren’t 1:1 with my problem, which just leads to more researching. This could be cool if I wasn’t under any deadlines or other time constraints, but this is rarely the case so it leads to a great deal of frustration.

    3. In the off chance I find some post with a really close 1:1 match with my issue, so many of the comments/solutions will ignore things the OP posted about and will wind up being not solutions at all. As an example: Recently I’ve been looking around for ways to figure out 1) where are nonprinting characters in my spreadsheet ripped from some website application generated report and 2) which nonprinting characters are they so I can remove them to see if that is what’s messing up my ability to get the silly spreadsheet to sort my silly records in nonsilly ways. All I’ve been getting as answers are 1)download somebody’s spreadsheet macro (which I’m not allowed to do because… reasons) and 2) “jUsT uSe =cLeAn() or =TrIm(), iT wOrKs EvErY tIme!” But they don’t work because clean() only works on a preset list of nonprinting characters that doesn’t include all nonprinting characters and trim() only works on “space” character.

    4. Lots of search results where its just SEO/AI generated blogs which all pretty much have copy pasted each others information and little of it new or helpful.

    5. Answers to a problem with a workflow that doesn’t explain what do when there is a problem encountered when trying to follow the workflow. (For me this usually looks like: “Hey, follow this workflow to get into the workbooks settings and then click these check boxes” but whatever version they’re using doesn’t match my version so it becomes another research project to figure out “where did this check box move to in my version?”)