[whamlastxmas]

Doing hard things as a group helps you stick to it. It's why meditation retreats are a thing, even though you can sit and do nothing at home without any problem. I think paying the amount these places charge for it is ridiculous, but there's a valid reason for some people to want the group setting.

There's also lots of people that don't know how to problem solve with Google. The concept just doesn't exist for them.

[danso]

> There's also lots of people that don't know how to problem solve with Google. The concept just doesn't exist for them.

I currently teach at a university, and to be fair, learning via Google and Stack Overflow is not such a straightforward proposition. This is directly related to the screeds that are occasionally written about how complex JavaScript, etc. has become.

Yesterday, I was Googling around for answers on Bash minutiae -- how to read arguments with flags, the difference between single- and double-bracketed conditional statements, how to assign a heredoc to a variable -- but finding those answers was easy because I knew exactly what to look for, and more importantly, how to filter out irrelevant answers, because even with good Google queries, I had to read more than a few erroneous StackOverflow pages to get what I wanted.

Beginners in programming do not have similar advantages. Assuming they even know what they should be searching for, which in my experience they don't, they lack the ability to formulate what they need as a Google-friendly query. And they're pretty much completely lost when it comes to judging the content of competing "solutions". The hardest part are the unknown unknowns, e.g. beginners don't know to be aware of software dependencies, platform-specific behavior, etc. etc.

Google is invaluable to folks who are reasonably competent in their fields. But I wouldn't say that it's obviously adept for problem solving, especially for beginners.