4 ms·
Here's the thing about stack overflow: How many people have worked at a location that has blocked stack overflow? Because I have worked with an organization o
by _m7bj 12y ago
Here's the thing about stack overflow:
How many people have worked at a location that has blocked stack overflow?
Because I have worked with an organization of about 2500 people, not all of which were IT. One day, management went on a mad whitelisting crusade and blocked about 98% of the internet, including the stack exchange network.
IT ground totally to a halt, across all our branches. No programming, no sys-admining, no help desk.
Stack overflow is not a programmer social network, and it is not a Q&A site.
It's the new textbook. Developers and sysadmins used to keep hundreds of kilos of dead tree libraries with them because only the textbooks contained the arcane knowledge like "component X was actually not implemented properly, and will crash under Y circumstances". Languages and libraries never advertise that on their website.
Post-stack-overflow developers and admins use stack-overflow as their source of kooky corner cases and badly explained concepts documentation. They don't have or need the dead tree books.
So considered harmful? In my experience any IT staff who say they don't rely on stack overflow are lying.
- Shog9 12y agoInterestingly, this "textbook for modern programmers" usage was one of the explicit goals for the site: > Programmers seem to have stopped reading books. The market for books on programming topics is miniscule compared to the number of working programmers. --http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/04/16.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/04/16.html
- Sir_Substance 12y agoThat's neat, I didn't know that. Mission accomplished then!
- codexon 12y agoFor IT, I find that most of the useful answers I get nowadays are from Nixcraft and DigitalOcean. Not to say that there aren't a few useful answers at ServerFault/StackOverflow, but the moderation and design has made it hostile to all but the most simple questions.
- tsotha 12y agoI would think very seriously before taking a job at a place that blocked stack overflow, both because it's saved my ass more than once and because, well, I don't like places with white lists. I'm okay with a black list - people shouldn't be surfing porn or political circle jerks when they're on someone else's dime. But it's frustrating as hell to realize Google found a site with the answer I need but I can't open it because it's not on the white list. IT managers typically give the reasonable-sounding response "It's no problem to add sites. Just let us know which ones you need and we'll add them after we take a look." To which I say "Great. Give me your home number so if I'm chasing some weird error at midnight during a big release I can call you every five minutes to get you to add entries as I look for a solution.
- mdekkers 12y agoThe amount of all-round bad advice on SO is staggering. It also encourages "copy-paste" coding and systems engineering, without the engineer really understanding the issue.
- tsomctl 12y agoExcept for those of us that learn by example. I taught myself sql the past month through stack exchange and PostgreSQL's manual. Typically, I'd find a stack overflow question that points me to the appropriate section of the manual to read.
- chrismcb 12y agoThere are a lot of bad answers. But it doesn't in courage copy-paste anymore than any other site with samples, including the reference manual. It isn't SO's fault if people don't try to understand the answers. But between the multiple comments and multiple answers it does a better job of indicating to the user that they still need to understand the solution.