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Comment by cottsak | Hacker News Reader

This is a good point and is one possible explanation for the apparently lack of movement in the SO poll 10 years on

The SO survey is an absolutely awful representation of the community, because it mainly represents the young inexperienced engineer and students who can't do much without googling.

The longer you are in the industry, the less time you spend googling stuff. I'd say I probably end up on SO once every 2 months. There's probably huge swathes of devs who didn't even know there was a survey or never visit SO because they can generally get on with their job

> The longer you are in the industry, the less time you spend googling stuff.

Only if you stay in your comfort zone. Memorising all the symbols in Framework X isn't going to help when you have to use Framework Y.

I disagree. Even if you make a complete left turn and only work on something tangentially related, you still likely have a wealth of knowledge that you can build on. I doubt you're going to make many moves in your career where you 100% start from scratch

Mostly disagree - With basic background knowledge of the overall ecosystem, problem domain & tooling, figuring out a new framework or API is as simple as newing-up each type and exploring the public interface via something like intellisense.

I can learn some dependency faster by throwing it into a blank unit test project than I can by reading over the (likely outdated) documentation.

> I can learn some dependency faster by throwing it into a blank unit test project than I can by reading over the (likely outdated) documentation.

Does your greater experience also come with the emotional intelligence that allows you to see how arrogant that sounds?

I'm definitely not some wizened master but I'd also agree with the statement. Good updated fully reflective of use documentation is not the majority of libraries and even the ones that do manage to do a good job often miss some critical change till someone raises an issue or a PR.

> Does your greater experience also come with the emotional intelligence that allows you to see how arrogant that sounds?

How something sounds is largely a function of the person listening to the thing.

In fact, the primary determinant of how X sounds to person A is the nature of X; otherwise we would be unable to use data to make inferences about the nature of our world.

Intellisense will find you a solution but it won't find you the solution.

I have learned to Google things even when I think I know the answer and I've done it that way many times before, because often there's a better way that I've been missing out on all this time.

> Intellisense will find you a solution but it won't find you the solution.

Yes, and what is the penalty for finding a bad solution and then having to try another one?

For me, the cost is only my time. My customers don't see any of these fuckups because they only live on my computer until I get things sorted.

Disagree. If you’re not using a Framework X or Y, suddenly SO becomes a lot less interesting. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re staying in you comfort zone.

As an aside, totally subjective, but Google’s results have been degrading for a while - it’s not that you won’t find what you’re looking for, but it’ll often take a bit longer. Better resources exist.

A few people have already disagreed, but I want to add that in some areas the more you specialize, the more unique your work. "Memorizing new framework" is fully within my comfort zone, it's just API surface.

Finding useful information to actually build those frameworks is much tougher, and only gets tougher the deeper you go. StackOverflow is very much suited for newcomers and engineers working at the top of the stack. My work became harder and thus less googleable (which bums me out, honestly).

Also older devs might engage less with SO community and platform. Get what they need and move on. Where as younger one might think there is something to gain for being more active there.

I super rarely use SO and even googling is relatively limited. Am in my first year out of University as a Software Engineer in a reputable conpany and get nothing but praise in my performance reviews. I have no idea what these memes about copy&pasting code from SO mean? Like, are they serious?

I think you’re probably right. I’d bet that most of the survey respondents are relatively new, or frequent and established contributors. The data are likely skewed towards these individuals and not representative.

I may end up on the site if I’m googling something, but I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve asked a question, posted a reply, or voted on an answer in the past 5-6 years.

SO is still a valuable resource, but, and I realize this is selfish, community participation stopped being interesting or useful a long time ago.

For my day-to-day job, I've visited SO under a dozen times in the last few years. Too much of what I deal with is some proprietary vendor SDK or chip where the data sheet is only released under NDA for SO to be of much use.

I'm an embedded C developer. Right now, there are 366,183 questions tagged "c", 9,312 questions tagged "embedded", and 2,282,444 questions tagged "javascript". I don't use JS. Not that many embedded C developers are using SO. So I tend not to bother with SO.

I'm an embedded dev too and I just barely use SO. Too often the questions are either out of date, not relevant or questions get flagged as duplicates because a tangentially related question has been answered for a different architecture and compiler

The other one being who is being asked; do 30+ year olds still frequent SO and participate in the surveys?

And the other one is, do the SO polls mention how many people replied?

Exactly. Especially considering that the plot shows only percentages.

For the author of the blog post it would be better to draw conclusions about 'developers disappearance' from a plot showing absolute numbers.

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