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I feel like this is a smug joke about a problem which doesn't actually exist. Effective engineers know how to look things up. Stack Overflow is one very effec

by pmorici 11y ago

I feel like this is a smug joke about a problem which doesn't actually exist. Effective engineers know how to look things up. Stack Overflow is one very effective way to look things up or at least provide pointers to authoritative sources of information which might otherwise be difficult to uncover or not obvious from the original source.

cpayne 11y ago
I've certainly seen great slabs of code that have clearly been copied from somewhere, perhaps not Stackoverflow. Unless there is some type of reference, you have no idea of what is going on or why...
InclinedPlane 11y ago
Not everyone is like you. There are devs who use the internet to understand things, and when they see some code on the web they use that as a template to help with their particular problem. There are other devs who barely deserve the name, who struggle with everything they run up against and who blindly copy/paste code without an understanding of how it works or what it means in an effort to get the problem to go away. And of course there are folks of varying levels of talent in between. Yes, it is a bit of a smug joke, and a bit of self-deprecatory humor as well. Since plenty of people leverage the expertise of folks on stack overflow and are still effective devs in their own right. But it feels like you would be shocked by the notion that a significant number of professional developers would struggle with, say, the fizzbuzz problem. But everything I've ever seen indicates that there is a huge class of developers who earn decent wages doing coding for a living at lots of places who nevertheless struggle with coding at a basic level.
- pmorici 11y ago
  Not shocked at all. I don't think people that can't do fizzbuzz are using stack overflow at all. Part of why they can't produce anything is because they can't use reference resources effectively and thus never learn anything.

by pmorici 11y ago

cpayne 11y ago

I've certainly seen great slabs of code that have clearly been copied from somewhere, perhaps not Stackoverflow. Unless there is some type of reference, you have no idea of what is going on or why...

InclinedPlane 11y ago

Not everyone is like you. There are devs who use the internet to understand things, and when they see some code on the web they use that as a template to help with their particular problem. There are other devs who barely deserve the name, who struggle with everything they run up against and who blindly copy/paste code without an understanding of how it works or what it means in an effort to get the problem to go away. And of course there are folks of varying levels of talent in between. Yes, it is a bit of a smug joke, and a bit of self-deprecatory humor as well. Since plenty of people leverage the expertise of folks on stack overflow and are still effective devs in their own right. But it feels like you would be shocked by the notion that a significant number of professional developers would struggle with, say, the fizzbuzz problem. But everything I've ever seen indicates that there is a huge class of developers who earn decent wages doing coding for a living at lots of places who nevertheless struggle with coding at a basic level.

pmorici 11y ago
Not shocked at all. I don't think people that can't do fizzbuzz are using stack overflow at all. Part of why they can't produce anything is because they can't use reference resources effectively and thus never learn anything.