This ignores the ladder of abstraction, which you apparetly need to be reminded of exists. Not all programmers need to work at the same level of abstraction: so

This ignores the ladder of abstraction, which you apparetly need to be reminded of exists. Not all programmers need to work at the same level of abstraction: some programmers need to write original code all day long because their subject field is close to the metal and there are no premade solutions. For those folks, the idea of copy-pasting from SO is pretty ridiculous, although SO might have questions and answers that allow them to write their own code solutions based on the insights of others. Because we're not going to dismiss highly respected experts in our fields just because they helped answer good questions with good detailed answers on Stackoverflow, are we? A few rungs up on the ladder we still have programmers but now the kind whose job it is to write as little code as possible, where their worth comes from knowing exactly how little code glue is needed to, necessarily and sufficiently, make other people's libraries work together to functionality that is larger than the sum of its parts. These folks aren't solving unique problems, they make things work with as little code as possible, and copy-pasting from SO for problems that have been solved countless times already by others is 100% fine: their expertise is in knowing how to judge other people's code to determine whether that's the code they need to copy-paste. And then, of course, there all the folks in between those two levels of abstraction. The biggest mistake would be to hear "programming" and think "only my job is real programming, all those other people are just giving me a bad name". Different horses and different courses, and different courses for different horses.