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This is a tangent but is the meme about programmers being dependent on Stack Overflow really all that true? It's something I've heard about a lot -- I've been c

This is a tangent but is the meme about programmers being dependent on Stack Overflow really all that true? It's something I've heard about a lot -- I've been coding for fifteen years, professionally for seven, and certainly I have used Stack Overflow occasionally, but I go to the language documentation a lot more often, and honestly write a lot of code without looking at more than the source of the libraries I'm interacting with -- which are often proprietary so SO wouldn't be any help anyway -- or the standard library. Who's on Stack Overflow all the time? I've never even made an account. I guess I referenced it more often when I was a younger programmer but never all that much..

meekmind 6y ago
That is a good question. I think it really depends on your personality. Engineers tend to be conscientious, orderly, industrious types. Being industrious typically means being a self-starter who takes the initiative and is probably self-taught. That said, intelligence (g factor) isn't simply being conscientious. Being intelligent means that your personality is flexible and you're able to apply different aspects of your personality depending on what the situation calls for. Conversely, less intelligent people are generally stuck with the personality they have and are less able to modulate their behavior depending on the context. Anyway, I used the StackOverflow analogy because it's more likely to resonate with the HN audience. The point was more about knowledge and relying on others as a crutch to avoid having to think for yourself. It's not inherently a bad thing, but doing it too much has consequences that may not be obvious.
jfengel 6y ago
The meme isn't that we're asking questions ourselves on SO, but that SO contains answers to questions that are difficult to ferret out of the documentation. If you don't know what to call something, or need to know common practice rather than every possibility, or comprehend an error message, it's a lot easier to get it from somebody else who has already solved that problem. Of course somebody has to ask the question first, but with StackOverflow, one person can ask it, and then everybody else can find it via the magic of Google. (And I do mean "magic": beyond matching keywords, a search engine can, on a good day, point you pages popular with people having similar problems.) I'm on StackOverflow any time I need to learn a new piece of software, which is pretty common. When I'm "just programming", I can get my work done without it due to decades of experience. But keeping current with new technologies often means getting lost in the implementation weeds, and it's great when others have already been there and can give me a shortcut out.

meekmind 6y ago

That is a good question. I think it really depends on your personality. Engineers tend to be conscientious, orderly, industrious types. Being industrious typically means being a self-starter who takes the initiative and is probably self-taught. That said, intelligence (g factor) isn't simply being conscientious. Being intelligent means that your personality is flexible and you're able to apply different aspects of your personality depending on what the situation calls for. Conversely, less intelligent people are generally stuck with the personality they have and are less able to modulate their behavior depending on the context. Anyway, I used the StackOverflow analogy because it's more likely to resonate with the HN audience. The point was more about knowledge and relying on others as a crutch to avoid having to think for yourself. It's not inherently a bad thing, but doing it too much has consequences that may not be obvious.

jfengel 6y ago

The meme isn't that we're asking questions ourselves on SO, but that SO contains answers to questions that are difficult to ferret out of the documentation. If you don't know what to call something, or need to know common practice rather than every possibility, or comprehend an error message, it's a lot easier to get it from somebody else who has already solved that problem. Of course somebody has to ask the question first, but with StackOverflow, one person can ask it, and then everybody else can find it via the magic of Google. (And I do mean "magic": beyond matching keywords, a search engine can, on a good day, point you pages popular with people having similar problems.) I'm on StackOverflow any time I need to learn a new piece of software, which is pretty common. When I'm "just programming", I can get my work done without it due to decades of experience. But keeping current with new technologies often means getting lost in the implementation weeds, and it's great when others have already been there and can give me a shortcut out.