StackOverflow is a machine designed to do one thing: make it so that, for any given programming question, you will get a search engine hit on their site and fin

StackOverflow is a machine designed to do one thing: make it so that, for any given programming question, you will get a search engine hit on their site and find a good answer quickly. Yes, and that is an incredibly valuable service. I haven't participated in StackOverflow actively, neither asking nor answering questions, for various reasons, some perhaps related to some of the OP's complaints, but it has saved me many hours of searching through documentation and mailing lists just by being there. I suspect the contribution to global programmer productivity is enormous. It's true that it may tend to reduce the amount of very detailed knowledge about very narrow topics that people need to memorize but I think that externalizing this type of knowledge is the way to go. As long as your mental models about the basic workings of the software you're using are essentially correct I don't think there's much harm in depending on external resources for specific details.