[EliRivers]

I have to resort to SO a couple of times a month, so before SO (and other such) it was 95% the same as it is now.

I probably would have found much more use for it in my first year or so as a programmer, but at least from my own experience, once I had familiarity with my tools and libraries, the kind of problems that require digging on the internet aren't the kind easily put into bite-sized Q&A.

Maybe it's different for people who did start with SO available; perhaps they're saving their cognitive load by outsourcing various snippets of information to SO, and I only internalised them because SO wasn't available.

That said, it IS good for more open-ended historical or state-of-the-art type questions; "why did language X adopt this paradigm?" or "how do people producing commercial software go about supporting multiple graphics hardware today?" kind of questions. If I get lucky, there are a handful of people with a real depth of knowledge who can give a valuable overview and insight, but those are a long way from the typical SO question.

[matwood]

I find SO valuable for 'gotcha' types of questions. Update to the iOS9 sdk and now suddenly my build breaks with error-235132. Check SO and find out, yeah there is some flag that now needs to be YES instead of NO.

SO also lets me get by in frameworks and languages without having to know them all super deep. I find it much more useful to spend my cognitive load on algorithmic level or higher architectural level items instead of Spring configuration values or random iOS .plist keys.

[archagon]

Depends on what you're doing, I guess? I do a lot of UI development and I resort to SO almost daily to figure out the edge cases of all the APIs and frameworks.