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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

They have to know how to get help outside of an office or even a project team when working remotely and alone. Aside from Stack Overflow, which dominates the Q&A platform for programming market, there are documentation and code repositories that a professional programmer must know how to navigate. Those who previously only relied on colleagues and friends will now lose to those who know how to learn from the entire Internet.

Wouldn't programmers know how to code it themselves without req. Stack Overflow? I would be pissed spending $100k /year on programmer who uses Stack Overflow.

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Have you ever employeed a programmer, or worked as one?

Stack overflow is a valuable resource. I'd be pissed if my boss told me not to use it.

I have done both. It's valuable if you are a novice and need help creating a loop or an event or something like that. If I'm paying then I'm assuming you know how to do those things. Would google hire a coder who uses Stack Overflow instead of knowing how to code without it? I cannot imagine a JavaScript coder who works for Google needing Stack Overflow for JavaScript problems.

It's unreasonable to expect people to retain knowledge of every little corner of a programming language when there's an easily available reference they could use instead.

"How often they need to refer to reference material" is a pretty terrible metric for measuring the abilities of a programmer.

Its not an unreasonable metric, if a round trip through Stack Overflow is in your thought loop then you will be significantly more limited than someone who doesn't need that. If you are doing something very obscure then its reasonable, but most programmers don't do obscure things on a daily basis.

Its similar to being unable to do math in your head. You can get away with always using the calculator but you'll be outperformed by someone who can do it without dropping their pencil.

Both will be outperformed by someone with a computer.

I hope the programmers are given computers by default :)

This is somewhat similar to the reasoning that leads people to use tiling window managers. It's more efficient than a traditional window manager so they think it makes them more productive.

They're not wrong about the first part. Tiling window managers are very efficient. They are wrong about that making them more productive, though. It certainly makes them feel more productive, but this kind of micro-optimization is solving something that wasn't actually a huge productivity problem to begin with. You can add up all the time I spend switching windows in a slightly suboptimal manner on Gnome or Windows and all of that time will be lost by an extra 5 minute coffee break or the mental deficit from sleeping less than 8ish hours a night.

Similarly, a person who doesn't have to look at Stack Overflow may seem more productive, but the tiny amount of time it takes to look something up instead of remembering it is a very, very small part of the developers day. Even if they have to do it 100 times a day it's unlikely to make any meaningful difference in the big picture.

Not needing documentation would be helpful in a world where a programmer sat down and didn't stop typing for 8 hours, but that's not the world that we live in.

How long would you estimate it takes to search your question, find the result and read the answer? I think it's optimistic to think it can be done in a minute if you actually time it.

100*1 minute is an hour and 40 minutes. That is not a trivial portion of the work day. Even if it were 30 seconds that's still almost an hour.

If that is truly a micro optimization then I shudder to think of the waste elsewhere.

The question was likely whether Stack Overflow was a requirement for coding.

Suppose candidate A tends to communicate in terms of specs and reference implementations. Candidate B tends to communicate in terms of accepted answers and discussions on Stack Overflow.

All other things being equal that should be an easy choice.

From a quick scan of your comments on this page, if Donald Knuth came in for a job interview at your office you would 1) encourage him to spend less time on algorithms and more time learning "hard" stuff like ajax+css+php. 2) offer him $90k if he passed the rest of the interview. 3) fire him on his first day if he googled anything.

Stack Overflow is an excellent resource for developers of all skills levels. I would break it down into four categories of usage:

1) Posting general questions about "coding", like syntax questions, ie- "how do you create a loop in JavaScript"

2) Posting specific, targeted questions about specifics of something the dev doesn't do on a regular basis, ie- "how do you use Google OAuth for logins"

3) Searching existing SO posts for general questions about "coding", ie- Google search for "what is the difference between let and var in JavaScript", read first SO result

4) Searching existing SO posts for the specifics, ie- Google search for "how to manage cross-tab communication using javascript", read first SO result

I would argue that a competent dev would (and should!) utilize SO using the 4th strategy on a regular basis (maybe weekly for a web dev) and occasionally the 2nd when all other resources have been exhausted. If you are paying someone $100k, yeah I agree that the first usage pattern is inappropriate, but saying "a developer shouldn't need to use StackOverflow" is a gross oversimplification of the vast knowledge that exists in SO.

It's a shame you were so downvoted. I can call several occasions watching 90% of the software developers walk out of the office if the internet went down. Many of whom had jobs not involved with maintaining or developing remote hardware.

I have also seen entire teams that would not really notice if the internet was working.

Stack Overflow has a place in productive development, but I agree - people should be able to function without it.

TFA's major argument is coders are really just library stringertogetherers these days so your example programmer would be required to memorize the documentation for every dependency in order to pass muster by your standard.

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