Meh, it's just another resource. Sure you can make a case it encourages help-vampirism, but I would argue that help vampires are largely incapable of becoming

Meh, it's just another resource. Sure you can make a case it encourages help-vampirism, but I would argue that help vampires are largely incapable of becoming competent anyway. Basically, anyone that will become a competent programmer has a hunger to learn and fit all the pieces together, and will be frustrated by endlessly googling and posting questions that take hours or days to receive a reply; no matter how much googling/documentation is involved, ultimately they will learn to synthesize solutions efficiently. Meanwhile there are many people who believe being able to program is just a question of accumulating enough facts and they never progress past asking whole-cloth questions. I'm sure some are capable of crossing the chasm, but if it doesn't happen early I don't think it ever happens. For a help vampire, even SO is not rich enough to make them competent. For a competent developer, SO is not efficient enough for them to learn helplessness.