I was sitting down with a very experienced C++ engineer a few months ago to work on a problem. There was something we needed to do a web search on.
He opened Chrome, clicked in the address bar (which already had the keyboard focus, but never mind that), and typed "google". This did a Google search for Google, and the first search result was www.google.com. Then he clicked www.google.com which took him to the Google home page, and there he typed in the search terms.
I'd say it's muscle memory. Back 20 years or so before the address bar became a search bar it was common for browsers to just successively add '.com', '.org', '.net' to an invalid address and take you to the first one that came up.
It's a coincidence that modern behaviour is the same for certain domain names.
If he's an experienced C++ engineer he's probably of that vintage, and has probably been in demand enough in the meantime that he hasn't had to address this "niggling" behaviour.
Perhaps it was muscle memory? I could see that happening to me if I had recently installed the browser and it won't auto-complete the searches based on past history. Also the fact that my IQ drops by 50 points when someone is watching my screen and I look like an idiot.
> Also the fact that my IQ drops by 50 points when someone is watching my screen and I look like an idiot.
I've heard this a lot, and have basically trained myself by rote not to hover over people's computers when we're looking at something together, but I still can't say I understand it. I don't know if it's an inarticulable phenomenon, but do you have some sense of what drives this and/or what it feels like?
Surely we're all seeing this on Zoom calls these days?
People sharing their desktop/app/window, then breaking out of that sharing selection to bring something else up, while they're talking.. and searching, and things aren't working exactly as expected, so they go into rabbit-hole mode, etc...
Everyone's got a million things going on in their brains, and an audience changes things, and "presenting to an audience" is different than sharing with an audience.
I switch between my Mac and a Windows machine, between Safari and Chrome, between ctrl- and Command-, etc etc. Half the time things I'm connected to are broken (VPNs, endpoints, services...) so I find myself half-stabbing my way through little time windows during the day. And if I'm talking to someone, while trying to do something I've done 1000x before, I'm probably covering my bases by stabbing at the keyboard even more.
I do presentations a lot too, it's a totally different mode.
I am not sure what causes it. Maybe it's the anxiety? I've dealt with it most of my life. Even basic things like going outside, talking to a clerk at a store, talking on a phone would make me a nervous wreck, where I could barely function.
Perhaps it makes me really uncomfortable when what I am doing is the center of attention. Like the nervousness normal people feel while performing something on a stage in front of hundreds of people, but on a micro scale, even doing something in front of a single person elicits the same response from me.
Perhaps Google should serve its home page, instead of returning a SERP for "google", if the search URL indicates a search from a browser address bar. If a user really wants to google for "Google", they can then search on the google.com home page.
I trained myself to use ctrl+k for searches vs ctrl+l for the url bar, from back in the day when I used Firefox and they had separate search/URL bars. Chrome respects these shortcuts, but it distinguishes searches from urls by pre-pending a question mark.
I don't hire or interview people (and also don't google google to open google), but just want to comment that we are all humans and not robots. We all posses certain quirks and behaviors that are suboptimal. Seriously considering such episode in a hiring is like measuring during interview how far from the paper he put down a pen, because putting it too far is suboptimal and he wasted several microseconds reaching for it to pick it up. It is ridiculous metric and HRs need to be self aware is they are using such metrics in real life, as opposed to real metrics like ability to solve work problems.
Of course we all agree that technical interviews are often broken and interviewers use ridiculous metrics.
The distance from their pen to their paper is an example of a ridiculous metric. And expecting humans to be robots is a straw man to what I'm asking.
The candidate's ability (or effort) to understand and use the tools they use 100 times a day to do their work is not an irrelevant metric.
Doctors need to have a basic understanding of how stethoscopes work. If they start by listening to your elbow, and only then proceed to listen to your chest and back, something is amiss.
It's not a matter of suboptimal behavior or poor efficiency.
I'd agree to some degree if you could be confident that this was his actual routine, instead of a brainfart caused by nerves or distraction or any of a thousand other things that makes an interview environment different from a day-to-day work environment. I remember my dad getting annoyed at me when I was in high school because he asked me what time my soccer game was and I looked at my watch: he thought I was about to make a smart-ass joke[1] in the middle of us trying to figure out a schedule.
That doesn't suggest that I don't know how calendars or timekeeping work: I was just distracted and glanced at my watch on autopilot.
It is debatable whether web browser is a work tool, in the context of specialized tools. I'm using DDG for 3 years already but I still don't use bangs, even for often used websites like wikipedia, instead I always do a normal search and then click on a wikipedia result. It is obviously suboptimal and I'm doing it in the web browser, am I unfit for my job because of this?
The question to the hypothetical person who will select candidates based on googling google - did you yourself optimized ALL that can be optimized in your workflow? (this is a rhetorical question, answer to which is 100% "no", regardless of who is that person)
I was sitting down with a very experienced C++ engineer a few months ago to work on a problem. There was something we needed to do a web search on.
He opened Chrome, clicked in the address bar (which already had the keyboard focus, but never mind that), and typed "google". This did a Google search for Google, and the first search result was www.google.com. Then he clicked www.google.com which took him to the Google home page, and there he typed in the search terms.
Yes, he Googled Google to do a Google search.