[_m7bj]

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.

[tsotha]

I 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.

[Shog9]

Interestingly, 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

[Sir_Substance]

That's neat, I didn't know that. Mission accomplished then!

[mdekkers]

The 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]

Except 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]

There 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.

[codexon]

For 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.