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by lokar 978 days ago
I’m curious what you are doing that leads you to lookup stuff 10 times a day.
2 comments

I'm curious what kind of programming job you could have where you look up stuff less than 10 times a day.
If much of your development is spent on implementing business logic in a language you are familiar with, and you have a decent IDE, I don't know what you use stackoverflow for at that frequency. Occasionally you may need to consult stackoverflow for a specific issue in string manipulation or API usage, but that's not something you run into a lot.
I rarely ever need to use SO on a daily basis. I've been programming on the .NET ecosystem for a while now and usually if I need anything I just directly go to the docs.

I used SO a lot when I was a junior engineer. Most of my issues now stem from biz logic or internal design that really can't be googled for.

Something they are actually competent doing, I suppose.
That seems needlessly harsh.

But, generally, yes, I tend to know the details of what I'm doing already. If anything I might check some API docs for a library.

StackOverfow is great for questions that are very basic for people who work in the corresponding domain but can take some time to put together based on the docs along.

For example, "how to insert multiple multi-columns rows dynamically using psycopg2" It is trivial if you are writing sql everyday but may take longer to find the right postgres docs. StackOverflow gives you the answer in 5 minutes: several variants with different tradeoffs (readability, performance, security).