I have spent multiple hours digging into something, found my own Stack Overflow answer and pasted it back in.
Why did you spend hours digging into something you already knew the answer to?
How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
41–50 of 243 posts
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#42I have copied the code one time in 2 years, but I ended up heavily modifying and then refactoring anyway ...
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#43One 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.)
Search is the only correct answer. SO may be the first click often but limiting your problem solving to that is not something an experienced dev will do.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#44I have spent multiple hours digging into something, found my own Stack Overflow answer and pasted it back in.
Why did you spend hours digging into something you already knew the answer to?
They didn't know it any longer. They are using StackOverflow as a second brain, offloading knowledge to it.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#45One 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.
Yeah. I'd raise an eyebrow at Stack Overflow if they didn't also include Google. Google will get me official API docs, blog posts diving in deep about it, Github issues, as you say, -as well as- anything relevant on Stack Overflow.
Maybe they meant to go -ask- questions? Which...I rarely ever do, despite being in this game for over a decade. The few times no one has asked the question I have, it usually has to do with a library or missing functionality, and that tends to get resolved (at least with an answer of "yeah, that isn't supported") via an email.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#46Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#47I do it all the time for clever tricks (especially SQL things like tally tables), but like to leave the permalink to the answer that seems best (from the share link below the answers) as a comment in my code.
If it's something I had to google for once, it's likely needed in the future and sometimes it's easier to search my own code for all SO links than follow the thread through the labyrinth again...
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#48I have spent multiple hours digging into something, found my own Stack Overflow answer and pasted it back in.
Why did you spend hours digging into something you already knew the answer to?
Because "knew" is past tense. There are a lot of things that I once "knew" but no longer "know", and it's nice when that past knowledge is documented somewhere.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#49I have spent multiple hours digging into something, found my own Stack Overflow answer and pasted it back in.
Why did you spend hours digging into something you already knew the answer to?
Not OP, but... more often than I care to admit, past me is perfectly aware of the answer to this problem, but present me has long since forgotten.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#50This is an unpopular opinion but I think the answer to this may depend on the age of the engineer. For example, I learned programming before stack overflow. I have most of the standard library syntax in my head and mostly look at spec documents. Once in a great while I will go on stack overflow if I can’t debug a problem but I don’t post on there . In the same way, I suspect some engineers like using video to learn t…
This is probably true. Having lived without the ability to search any random problem and have a snippet of code there, I'm used to searching for academic papers, RFCs, or reference documentation and then build up my understanding and make an implementation that way. There are times that I've not done this though, for example a couple of years ago I was struggling to comprehend how to convert some math from a paper in…
My secret move when I'm having trouble setting up a new library or dependency is to search for some common code from it on Github.
For example, how do I use the Python requests library (bad example because it has great documentation) would lead me to searching "import requests".