How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

I disagree. From your perspective I must be a liar, and that is fine by me.

As, I can't recall the last time I found anything helpful on that platform, that any of my questions were actually answered and certainly not that I copied & pasted any code. I am not claiming that it never happened. It is just so rare that I wouldn't answer your interview question that way. To me that platform is an internet points farm combined with Groundhog Day of basic questions. I might be an extreme outlier of our craft. Just keep in mind that we exist and that not everybody answering the question "incorrectly" is a liar or an idiot. In fact, I would say that only those candidates who answer differently are truly interesting.

Hey there - I work at SO. Understand your concern and wanted to share some details.

Browsers fire a copy event when you copy, just like a click event fires when you press on a button. We just added analytics to it like we would any other feature on the site.

We didn't track the content of your copy (browsers don't let you see the text content) but we did track the following:

Meta data about the post and it's parent post like the id, owner, score, tags, if it was a question/answer, if it was accepted

If your copy was from a code block or from text content

The Referer header

Standard analytics properties like the date/time, approximated location, account metadata

Here's our privacy policy on analytics: "Analytics information Stack Overflow uses data analytics to ensure site functionality and to optimize our Product and Service offerings to you. We use web browser and mobile analytics to allow us to understand Network and Apps functionality. In doing so, we record information including, for example how often you visit the Network, how often you contribute content, Network and Apps performance data, errors and debugging information, and the type of activity you engage in while on the Network or in your use of our Products and Services. We may on occasion share this information with third parties for research or product and services optimization."

It's a shame that most manuals have evolved to web pages that you can't download as PDFs or eBooks. Now you usually have to go online to find that keyword, and as you're online already, might as well google for the whole answer.

One of the most productive times in my career was programming for the IBM i in the 90s. There were manuals online, but you could also download indexed PDFs versions. IBM did a superb job with their documentation, there was hardly any need to look up anything in the Internet, whatever you needed was in the manuals, examples included.

Of course you still used the Internet at work, but mostly for mingling with your peers and having technical discussions, although too many people still blindly copied/pasted from the forums.

Eh depends on the language. For elixir I go to the elixirforum not stackoverflow

Solving a problem once doesn't guarantee it's added to your knowledge. Learning needs repetition, if you solve that problem once a year, you'll learn it very slowly.