I think it's a YMMV thing. I'm at google, and I'm pretty certain that a lot of my improvement as a programmer came from time spent posting/irc-ing with the SA p

I think it's a YMMV thing. I'm at google, and I'm pretty certain that a lot of my improvement as a programmer came from time spent posting/irc-ing with the SA programmer crew, to the degree that I don't think I would've made it to google without it. But, definitely spent too much time there.