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Comment by icelancer | Hacker News Reader

StackOverflow has been the opposite for me. I am someone who reads the man pages and does a lot of experimentation before turning to a Q&A site, I fully document what happened, the expected result, and the deviations between the two, and my hypotheses on why it happened, then post.

As a result something like 85% of my questions go unanswered or are eventually answered by myself. I have stopped answering my own questions on SO because some of the questions I ask and do legwork on I feel I should be paid for since it's shitty lack of documentation from the vendors, so screw them.

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Exactly. If you have complex question (the actual problem) it will be unanswered or downvoted to oblivion. That is logical because inexperienced engineers don't know what they don't know and experienced ones will be wisely silent. And the worst thing is that some answers are wrong but since they are upvoted so they seem "right" (the joke is that all javascript questions are answered with "use jQuery").

So in short: if you are novice engineer (or novice in certain field) then StackOverflow might help. If you are experienced engineer, stackoverflow is useless.

Does John Carmack count as experienced? Because he is the guy who made the claim we're talking about.

tlogan was not saying SO was not valuable, he specifically said that it did not provide much value for experienced programmers. SO can still provide value to the masses of less experienced programmers out there and be extremely valuable.

In my experience I have found this to be true. When first starting out stackoverflow was crucial to my learning process, now it seems I've answered all of my own questions the last year or so. And I wouldn't even claim to be extremely experienced. Thus, SO has certainly become significantly less valuable to me, but I would have never gotten this far without SO.

I know. My point was that the fact that John Carmack was the one who said this suggests that he still finds it useful for himself, even though he is an experienced programmer. That is not conclusive proof, of course, just something to think about.

My take is that experience only lowers the value of SO for the particular platform(s) you have experience in. I've found SO very valuable in the last couple of years even though I'm (in general) not a newbie anymore, because I've had to build software for many different platforms like ruby, mac cocoa, ios cocoa, and windows (C#/WPF and C++).

Nobody is expert in all fields.

A more constructive way to think about StackOverflow is you give in those areas where you know more and take where you know less.

> I am someone who reads the man pages and does a lot of experimentation before turning to a Q&A site

I feel similarly. I'm uncomfortable asking for help on stackoverflow, a mailing list or IRC if I haven't tried everything I could think of to work something out. I always have this[1] in mind when I do end up writing a question. I almost think it should be required reading.

[1]: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

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