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Comment by jamesmontalvo3 | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps there’s a point at which you become advanced enough to not need SO. I’m certainly not there after a decade of software development. Do I have to dig a bit sometimes and go beyond the first few results on google? Sure. And if that doesn’t work I submit a question. I normally get an answer fairly quickly.

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> Perhaps there's a point at which you become advanced enough to not need [something like] SO.

Not really, no, which is why it's so infuriating when people ruin it with "How do I do X?" "You aren't supposed to do X, here let me tell you how to Y instead.". The HTML/regex Zalgo rant at least had some style, even if it was utterly useless at answering the question.

I think the subset of programmers who don’t need something like SO’s value proposition is vanishingly small. Surely there are a few hundred people who have near perfect recall bolstered by perfect reference techniques.

At least speaking for myself, almost two decades in, I didn’t outgrow SO because I don’t need that kind of guidance. I outgrew SO because it doesn’t provide it effectively anymore.

There are topics on which Stack Overflow is worse to useless to me, mostly because I could probably name most of the experts who are better than me in the field and of course have ways of getting in touch with them on that. But I doubt there is anyone out there for which this is the situation for all topics.

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