Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hutzlibu 1850 days ago
"For some the productivity drops to zero without stack overflow."

And it is bad to be a newb? And even for experienced devs to go to stackoverflow regulary ... isn't it productive, to not always reinvent the wheel?

I can solve allmost everything on my own. But if I have a new problem, I assume someone else already had - I would be stupid, to figure it out on my own, when I could get a working solution in 5 min googling.

But I actually programm without internet connection most of the time, as I like being outside, away from noise (and wifi)
1 comments
javagram 1850 days ago
The issue does arise when you aren’t able to understand the problem space enough to realize that what you copied from stack overflow has a mistake or doesn’t fit the requirement you need (e.g. perhaps it doesn’t match your error handling architecture or so on).

That said, stack overflow can be a great source and I’ve written plenty of code with a comment pointing to a SO link to further explain a pattern or snippet for a future reader.

link
hutzlibu 1850 days ago
"The issue does arise when you aren’t able to understand the problem space enough to realize that what you copied from stack overflow has a mistake or doesn’t fit the requirement you need "

Yeah sure. A stupid programmer will remain a stupid programmer, even if he reaches a certain productivity by living off of stackoverflow ...

link
MikeDelta 1849 days ago
There is nothing wrong with copy pasting code from stack overflow.

I do see two kind of people doing that. One group learns from the code in order to become better, and can use it over and over to be more efficient. The other group doesn't care how it works and just wants to have a snippet that works.

The second group usually misses a curiosity, of which the effects show up in many more places than just copy pasting from stack overflow. They also tend to have a flatter learning curve. I don't want to generalize, but in this group you will encounter people who don't care about the difference between a list and a set, or think that code works when it compiles. In both cases the juniors know very little, but one grows and the other one doesn't (or less)

There is space for both in the world, but I prefer the first group in my team.

link