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W∴ Balboos wrote: It seems, extrapolating, that if it's viral it must be good. If it's an effort, it's probably not worth it.
I agree with that! 
It's been a long, insidious process to get us where we are today. Look at the entertainment on TV for starters - most people would prefer to sit in front of a brain-dead "comedy" for 30 minutes with low-brow "humour" or "funny" statements deriding the culture and history of the country instead of watching something educational or useful or a thought-provoking (not politically correct) movie, or even - [gasp] - reading a book. Don't get me started on the education system.
Like most things in life, you get out what you put in. And here we are today! 
The whole thing's rigged to blow, touch those tanks and "boooom"!
modified 31-Aug-21 21:01pm.
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I'm going to coin a phrase for the current state of politics (non-partisan):
Competent is Boring
Begging the old saws: "Be careful of what you ask for: you may get it" and the Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times"
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Competent is boring..? We wouldn't know over this side of the pond 
The whole thing's rigged to blow, touch those tanks and "boooom"!
modified 31-Aug-21 21:01pm.
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I'd offer that in some of those distant realms of yours, even the incompetent are boring!
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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"You can starve me and you can beat me and you can kill me. Just don't bore me."
The whole thing's rigged to blow, touch those tanks and "boooom"!
modified 31-Aug-21 21:01pm.
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W∴ Balboos wrote: Going to YouTube as your source for learning?
Yes!!!!! There are a lot of great tutorials that people have posted. The Development Community in particular is incredibly generous in knowledge sharing. I've been watching a lot of tutorials on Unity development. Very well done. Youtube has a tremendous amount of great stuff on it.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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RyanDev wrote: Youtube has a tremendous amount of great stuff on it.
Agreed. I mentioned the Developer Express tutorialsin my post.
But for every upside, there is a downside: While there is great stuff, there is also utter bollox to be found. The challenge for newcomers is to judge the quality.
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You do realize that one I've been know to enjoy the dramatic. Damn - I went to YouTube (amongst other sources) to learn how to handle my dahlia tubers as, having grown them from seeds, I needed to know. I got lots of advice - much of it conflicting (hmmmmm) and deduced a consensus. For handling baby cactus, however, I looked at articles (again, though, the internet of knowledge required I deduce a consensus opinion). There's no culling the herd to help get around the piles of sh^t they leave.
But - that doesn't really detract from the implications: 'I couldn't find it on a TV show so I need to have someone show me. I don't feel like looking any harder than that.'
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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RyanDev wrote: There are a lot of great tutorials that people have posted.
RyanDev wrote: Youtube has a tremendous amount of great stuff on it.
Agreed.
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What about the inverse? That's when you google "how to ..." and the first page and a half are all youtube hits. No, I'm sorry I don't want to watch a video, I'd like some plain text instruction, perhaps even something I can print out and read/review as I go along.
Hooray for -site:youtube.com
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My guess is that many of the QA blurps are coming from either very starters, or kids who want to learn it on their own. Mind you, even after the five years I spent in this industry I come across a lot of low-quality blogs and websites which don't really help solving the problem, and while the solution would work the post as it is is worthless since the author fails to mention all preconditions / is leaving bits out on the way to the solution.
The internet has added valuable sources to find information, but also added 10 times more unvaluable sources of information. I can understand newbies who can't find information online, when they just fail to find the valuable sources. I, for example, stumbled upon CP by accident (and just got stuck here, somehow).
As for YouTube, not everything is bad, as it is always as good as the videomakers make it.
Developer Express[^], for example, has excellent video tutorials posted on there, and they really help if you can't find an answer in the documentation or the Community forums.
But in the end, I have to agree with you: While in the earlier days we were able to make our way around dips*its, douchebags and morons they cross our path on the internet without leaving a possibility for us to find our way around them (apart from using the red flag, but careful with that).
Another side of the problem might be teachers too lazy to do their job, and they tend to send their students online since "all the information is already there". But if that would work, we wouldn't need Colleges and Universities anymore, would we?
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Marco Bertschi wrote: But if that would work, we wouldn't need Colleges and Universities anymore, would we?
I have some serious concerns regarding the quality of some students coming out of University.
My advice to young people wanting to go into IT is to either do an apprenticeship while on a college course or save the money university would have cost and spend two years intensively training themselves, writing articles and visiting sites like CP as well as joining local developer communities - I learnt way more about development outside of university(given that was in the late 80's and early 90's before the internet).
I know some employers will only employ people with university degrees - however I would say that those are employers worth avoiding when it comes to working in IT, as I have met many very competent people who either flunked university or never went in the first place. Some of these people were far more competent than others I have known who had PHDs from the top universities in the world.
Rant over 
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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Fully agree with you. I don't know how familiar you are with the swiss education system, but I have found it to be excellent (at least in terms of IT education).
While there is a possibility to graduate from University without any prior IT eduction, most students take the path of doing an apprenticeship (4 years, 1 year basic training in a lab, between 3 days school (1st year) to 2 or one days school (2nd to 4rd year)) and then visiting an uninversity (while working 40 to 80% percent on the job). To me, it is one of the best ways of getting into IT.
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sounds like the Swiss know how to educate their young for a career.
It just makes so much sense - since the kids are going to be mostly working out in the world in businesses(sure there will be some who pursue an academic career in computer science) why not get them out there as soon as possible.
The British education system could learn something from the Swiss.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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Actually, a very large fraction (might be half) of the professional programmers are self taught. Many even lurk here at CP.
In some ways, it's like being a musician: Some create; some are hacks - no amount of schooling will be able to fix it.
Not intended as a put-down of 'the hacks': different folks have different aptitudes. When their work and aptitude happen to coincide, it's a beautiful thing. Unfortunately, that's not always how people choose careers.
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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I think you make some very good points.
Regarding youtube there are a lot of poor tutorials out there however in some cases I have found that youtube videos help me understand concepts better than reading an article. It's generally accepted among the teaching profession nowadays that different people have different ways of learning and for some people a decent youtube tutorial may be the way to go.
The issue then becomes finding decent youtube tutorials and it can take a bit of digging.
A lot of what I learnt regarding SSRS was via a channel called Wise Owl and I find it very generous that he put all these tutorials out there for free.
I wonder if part of the issue is that analysing/designing/developing/coding/programming is presented, by marketing departments, as something anyone can learn over a weekend/week.
When those of us who have been doing it for a few years know the huge effort and commitment involved in becoming barely competent.
Perhaps it would frighten a lot of people away if the truth of how much effort is involved came out, there again it may keep those who have the gumption in the game.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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W∴ Balboos wrote: I look at the state of politics in the US (both parties) and can only shake my head. Not side-to-side, but nodding up and down: It all makes perfect sense.
Yeah this election is like watching "The Price is Right"
...come on down your the next contestant...
New version: WinHeist Version 2.2.2 Beta I told my psychiatrist that I was hearing voices in my head. He said you don't have a psychiatrist!
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I don't know if I agree or not, because your post had more than 4 words and it didn't contain any video content so I moved on.
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You're not the first to notice: The Lounge - CodeProject[^]
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Of course they need someone to tell them what to do. Intellectually brain-dead people have been around for a long time, but previously they would voluntarily enroll as de-facto slaves, earning just enough to survive on food bought from the employer-owned shop and to pay rent for the employer-owned slave pens housing. That option is gone, so they now vote for the Communist Party and try to survive in the meantime by getting random people to tell them what to do.
There is still the option to become cannon fodder, but apparently some independent thought is required for that these days.
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You probably (and a lot of us that started programming before the internets) used books as your source for learning programming.
Most of the "learn to program" books were as bad as youtube videos.
Different generation, different tools.
You over-react.
I'd rather be phishing!
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But put in another light:
We used to make fun of the "Learn X in 21 days" books as being unrealistic.
Then came along the "Learn X in 24 hours" books.
Now we're down to YouTube videos.
Ultimately, I'll grant you that the delivery medium doesn't matter, as long as the material covered is the same. But I can't say I've come across many free coding tutorials on YouTube that I could honestly say are the modern-day equivalent of the good quality 1200 page bricks of yesteryear.
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Just another one of (the many) real life examples of yesterday's Dilbert. Yes, it is sad, but I suspect like me, you started your development career before the dayas of the internet, and were actually forced by necessity to study the documentation and learn the hard way.
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I think you're missing the forest for the trees. I don't think it has anything to do with attention span or dedication or interest, although each of those are impacted as secondary effects.
I think it's a manifestation of the entitlement mentality. Why should Joey Millennial learn to code when all these CPers already have the answers? Lil' Joey is entitled to those answers, regardless of the cost that we paid to get them.
// About 20 paragraphs left out since this isn't the soapbox
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
- Benjamin Disraeli
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I find it often the case the people who have reached some level of mastery of a skill/craft/art find it impossible to remember when they were incapable of knowing how to get started learning said skill/craft/art, incapable of discriminating truly useful educational content from useless content.
And, these same people, taking their hard-won levels of attainment for granted, tend to perceive newcomers as lazy, as well as confused.
Remember the old song: "like a one-eyed cat looking in a seafood store" ?
In CodeProject QA I believe many beginners are:
1. doing homework, and are in classes with poor quality instruction, poor class content, etc.
2. have problems learning partially because English is not a "native" language for them.
3. well yes, some are homework-shirkers, and work-avoiders
But, there may be many others who do have an appetite to learn, are eager, willing; we may not be able to detect that from their posts which may be awkward for whatever reasons.
I'm an old critter for whom technical learning is mainly done by using books, and direct experimentation; it's taken me a few years to get "used to" using on-line resources. I generally don't care to look at video content, but I know people who are evidently finding very useful content on YouTube videos.
«There is a spectrum, from "clearly desirable behaviour," to "possibly dodgy behavior that still makes some sense," to "clearly undesirable behavior." We try to make the latter into warnings or, better, errors. But stuff that is in the middle category you don’t want to restrict unless there is a clear way to work around it.» Eric Lippert, May 14, 2008
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