I don’t remember who had posted about feeling embarrassed because they had to look up something “basic” while coding, but I just had to look up the syntax for defining a transaction with an automatic rollback in the event of an error in Oracle PLSQL at my day job. You’d think it was “something basic”, but I hadn’t done it in over a year so I wanted to make sure I was doing it right instead of trusting my memory, which is sometimes unreliable because I am, after all, only human.
10-15 years ago I would have been embarrassed. Nowadays I don’t give a fuck what anybody thinks of me looking things up. Don’t magicians often have grimoires? I see no reason to begrudge a developer their references. I’d rather see a developer look something up than assume they know what they’re doing, get it wrong, and break something that I’d have to debug.
Even if I possessed the sort of monomaniacal obsession with programming that too many people mistake for “passion” there is no way I could keep everything in my head. It was only a few days ago that I had to go through all of my old blog posts and fix the dates because I was using the wrong date format and thus producing an invalid RSS feed. Why was I using the wrong format? Because I didn’t read the fucking manual closely enough.
Fortunately, the stakes weren’t that high; it’s just my personal website. But if I didn’t read the manual at my day job and ended up writing an ad-hoc query that ended up breaking a production database before somebody figured out what was wrong, the consequences would have been far greater. If I’m going to get my ass fired, I want it to be for something more meaningful1 than writing shitty code because I didn’t check the documentation first.
It’s not just me, though I can accept that I am a merely competent generalist developer2 at best instead of a masterful specialist possessed of the deep magic. If you aren’t willing to check your manuals and references when doing basic computer craft, what are you going to do when you’ve got to perform some heavy wizardry? There might not be any documentation available save what you’ve written down yourself. You do take notes when doing stuff that isn’t well-documented by the original developers or vendor, right?
And by more meaningful, I mean getting fired for getting other consultants on board with organizing and joining a trade union. Software development and IT are skilled trades, and long overdue for unionization…↩︎
I’ve always liked the Red Mage in Final Fantasy, even if they are a jack of all trades and a master of none, and have long admired literary figures like Odysseus and Edmond Dantès. Polymaths are badass. (I don’t claim to be one myself; I am not that pretentious, I hope.)↩︎