As someone who started working for pay before SO and GH (damnit I'm old) what I remember is that syntax errors took longer to figure out (and more trial and err

As someone who started working for pay before SO and GH (damnit I'm old) what I remember is that syntax errors took longer to figure out (and more trial and error), but the biggest difference to me is honestly that it is so much easier to find the right library. Back in 2005 I was coding up pretty much everything from scratch myself every time (I even remember a heroic attempt at an XML parser in C++! Backwards linking and processing directives and everything) because finding the right library to use was such a pain in the neck. If it wasn't in STL or Boost, it was like it didn't exist. Maybe it's that I'm older and more experienced (and know not to try and write your own XML parser because of all the complexity inherent in that), or maybe it's that SO and GH facilitate library discovery (with SO providing the pointers and GH providing the actual code) so much better than what came before (SourceForge etc.). I'm not sure, but I suspect it's that it was the technology improvement more than it was my improvement.