As funny of a joke “all programmers copy and paste” is, after 9 years that impostor syndrome should be gone, and if you still can’t figure out a solution without copying and pasting, maybe it is time to go back to the basics and learn how to code.
The difference between a junior and senior developer is that a senior developer actually understands what he’s copy pasting
Pretty much. I try to tell juniors that the things I’m teaching you is things I made a mistake on. I have a decade of failure and I’m trying to help you shortcut it.
But who’s the guy that originally wrote the code that everyone else is copy pasting? I think Nathan Kellert desires THAT level of expertise.
I’ve only been programming seriously (for work) in the last two years and honestly don’t get the copy pasting memes. I get copy pasting a 1-3 line terminal snippet sometimes, but idk how people are getting away without actually writing their own code.
Real answer, learn how to paste several code snippets from stack overflow into a ChatGPT window and ask it to do what you need. Sprinkle in some copilot to tweak as needed. Congrats, Mr Programmer.
Wait, that’s a thing??? I can earn programmer money just by using copy & paste??? Maybe it’s time I changed jobs…
Copying and pasting: $1
Knowing what to copy and where to paste it: $999
It’s all imposter syndrome, all the way down
I get the joke, ok?
Sarcastic image
Depends on the language. I’m not gonna find shit to copy-paste for what I’m doing in Scala 3 or F#, but in Rust or C++ I’ll frequently Google an issue I can’t figure out and someone will have some fancy black magic hacker solution with super-iterators and turbofishies and weird type inference that I couldn’t think of myself and just throw it in my code with some minor modifications :)
To become a real programmer, you must install Copilot and let it copy and paste for you.
I feel like im slowly losing my ability to program between copilot, phind, and chatgpt…
I’ve been professionally programming for 18 years now. And honestly, I hate writing code from scratch. I copy/paste code from other parts of my codebase and just tweak as needed. Writing code from scratch feels like I’m doing something wrong.
Honestly, I hate these memes. As an old school hacker/programmer who has been doing this for many decades, I can usually just start thinking in code and start dumping out everything I need from my brain through my fingers to the keyboard. I never copy-and-paste code from online for something I’m coding (I don’t count something like copying a script to do a quick shell task of some-sort; for something like Amazon’s directions for installing Corretto I’m not going to type all that out manually; and I don’t really consider that “programming”).
But as a tech manager (and former University comp.sci instructor), I know this happens more often than I’d prefer. But some of the worst code I’ve had to review has been copy-and-paste jobs where the developer didn’t understand the task correctly and jammed in something they found online as a quick solution. I get that I started in a generation where you had to understand the problem and code the solution from scratch (because the Internet crutch wasn’t what it is today) — but the fact that so many younger developers revel in the fact they copy-and-paste code on the regular makes me sad.
+1 ai tools are fine if you already know what you want to write and it speeds up the process of coding. But when ai tools are writing code you don’t understand, you cannot verify that any of the code is actually correct and doesn’t introduce bugs. Ditto for copy-pasting.
I feel like most of my googling of simple code is because I know what I’m trying to do, but I don’t remember the correct function name and or language structure for the language I’m currently using.
Funny, I’ve been in my current support/devops role for 9 years and every year I wonder more what the hell I’m doing. It somehow seems like I get dumber/lose knowledge/the field expands much more rapidly than my broken mind can keep up with.
I feel like a glorified script kiddie most of the time. I couldn’t program my way out of a wet paper bag if my life depended on it.
Do people really constantly copy-paste code? If I don’t know something I’ll look it up, but then I’ll read the answer and apply it to the code I’m writing rather than copying it directly. I rarely see a piece of code that I can copy over directly into what I’m doing, and even if I can it’s usually not thr best idea because the naming etc would be inconsistent
