Comment on Why is stack overflow so horrible?
early_riser@lemmy.world 18 hours agoYes. I tell people that IT isn’t about knowing the answer right away, it’s about knowing which questions to ask, where to ask those questions, and how to interpret the results. These skills are in no way obvious if you aren’t familiar with the system you’re working with.
MerryJaneDoe@feddit.online 16 hours ago
Another thing about seasoned professionals - they have top-down and bottom-up knowledge of how their product works. They can discard a lot of superfluous information out of hand, which allows them to narrow the scope very quickly.
So when a newb is parsing an error log, they look at any and all related errors. 90% of their mental capacity is being used to judge each entry, asking themselves “Is this thing relevant to the problem?” Chasing red herrings.
Meanwhile, the senior engineer can glance over and see the 100 lines of network errors are just an uncaught exception from a deprecated module because a line of code never got commented out. Or some such shit.