I look for the clearest, cleanest shortest solution and then I make it better.
How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
21–30 of 243 posts
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#22Pastegrammer
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#23Often enough to inspire this: https://github.com/drathier/stack-overflow-import
This seems like a terrible idea!
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#24One of the interview questions I ask is, "if you run in a problem you can't solve, where do you go online to find answers?" Anyone that doesn't answer Stack Overflow is - in my opinion - either lying or very, very new to the industry. (This is for .Net/C# jobs so maybe it's different for other languages.)
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#25I once had a brief contract helping out a two-person Rails consultancy where pretty much all they did was follow RailsCasts.
They got very angry at me several times for not doing things "the Rails way". We were on Rails 4, which I already had loads of experience with. The RailsCasts they were following were written for Rails 2. They literally had no idea all of the ways Rails had moved on between those versions.
Their codebase was an absolute mess as well. This was an application that was supposed to contain medical records and it had broken routes that were leaking data everywhere unauthenticated. And they were mad that I spent two weeks cleaning all of that up and bulletproofing their application.
I was happy to move on from that one, but it taught me a lesson about just how valuable sales skills are. These two people were living a comfortable lifestyle off a single paying client (essentially getting money indirectly through DARPA) and were punching way above their weight technically.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#26I have spent multiple hours digging into something, found my own Stack Overflow answer and pasted it back in.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#27Personally, I try not to copy & paste things I don't understand—unless there's not enough information around the code to explain it, in which case I first copy & paste it, then tweak it and test it enough that I do understand it.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#28Don't paste from stackoverflow and do not hire people who paste from stackoverflow or anywhere online. This is literally how software is compromised. I worked with people at another company who had compromised a small part of Google and several banks this way. They contacted the security department later but they were surprised by the number of companies they were able to compromise just by posting instructions onlin…
I would add - unless it's a very short snippet and you understand exactly what it does. My top SO answer is how to convert and IP address from string to integer representation in Python. It's one or two lines, it's perfectly fine to copy that sort of thing. I've actually copied my own code from SO on several occasions.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#29IMO its not even that we're copying people's logic, its just that stack overflow acts as a weird sort of crowd-sourced centralized documentation for programming languages.
For example if I forget the name of a function for something in a particular language I don't even go to the docs, I just google something like "python reverse list" and click the first SO link.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#30One of the interview questions I ask is, "if you run in a problem you can't solve, where do you go online to find answers?" Anyone that doesn't answer Stack Overflow is - in my opinion - either lying or very, very new to the industry. (This is for .Net/C# jobs so maybe it's different for other languages.)
to be honest, I use my search engine of choice, yes stack overflow often comes up in the results, but also GitHub issues of people having a similar issue, often for other projects that use the same tools/libraries I do.
so I go to my search engine for answers, not stack overflow directly.