Are 'Google Programmers' the New 'Next-Next-Finish Programmers'?

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:

Back in 1998, Ellen Ullman wrote in Salon about The dumbing-down of programming: "My programming tools were full of wizards. Little dialog boxes waiting for me to click "Next" and "Next" and "Finish." Click and drag and shazzam! — thousands of lines of working code. No need to get into the "hassle" of remembering the language. No need to even learn it. It is a powerful siren-song lure: You can make your program do all these wonderful and complicated things, and you don't really need to understand."

Twenty-four years later, PVS-Studio has published a translation of Ivan Belokamentsev's cautionary tale of how modernizing his interviewing process from coding on paper to a computer led him to inadvertently hire 'Google Programmers', who dazzled him in interviews and initially on the job, but soon reached a plateau in productivity that puzzled him until he had a gobsmacking realization.

From their article:
It was like somebody hit me on the head with a sack of flour. It took me about two days to process it. How is it really possible? The beautiful, well-optimized code they showed me at the first interview was from the Internet. The explosive growth of productivity in the first months was due to the solutions that they found on the Internet. Those answers to user questions after the magic "We'll call you back" from these guys — were found on the Internet. They were coding without understanding the basic constructs. No, they didn't write code — they downloaded it. No, that's not it, either. To download the code is like running "npm i", it's ok. They copy-pasted the code. Without knowing how to write it.

That's what angered me — what the...? Well, I understand when you surf the net to figure out how a new technology works. Or when you need to use some exotic feature and not to bloat your head with unnecessary information. But basic things! How can you copy-paste basic things from the Internet?!

The article meditates on the mindset of "Google" programmers. Rather than learning about basic objects, types, and the constructs of a programming language, "Any information is available to them, always and everywhere. They've learned how to find this information quickly — whether it's the address of a store with cookies, pants on sale or generating a query."

But long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo now pushes back:
This is dumb. Not everyone has a great memory, and these days there are so many different tools and frameworks that nobody can remember them all anyway. Back in the day when it was all C, you could reasonably write useful code on paper. These days most of that code will probably be interacting with libraries that you have not committed to memory.

If your developers are not progressing, help them. Give them training or mentoring. Challenge them.
And there's also this advice from Slashdot reader Iamthecheese: "Stop selecting for low ethics in your hiring process."
There is a stupid, stupid idea out there among the pointy hair types that it's possible to hire top tier candidates for peanuts. This idea has been put into their heads by massively over-promising companies selling HR solutions of all shapes... They're actively selecting people with just enough ability to pass these specific tests and who are unwilling to show their true levels of ability by hashing it out on their own. So you have these untrained people who look for easy ways past problems, but you were expecting "rock stars".

Their suggested solution? "Stop looking for easy, cheap, already trained people and start looking for trainable, people." And then, "show them a little loyalty. That way you'll have people to train new hires, who also know what they're doing on the job."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.