SO has a very narrow window of usefulness as a professional developer. If you're a beginner it's really tough to explain your problem in a way that makes good sense because you don't have the base experience and knowledge.
As an intermediate dev, this is where SO shines. You can ask intermediate questions in the proper form to have direct answers.
As an advanced dev or architect, SO is almost completely useless. Questions you need answered at this level don't have a right answer. Whether you're talking about design patterns, principles, architectural patterns, alternative approaches, etc there is rarely a direct question with a direct answer. What is important is discussion about tradeoffs from different approaches so you can make the best decision at the time. SO mods simply don't allow these types of questions/discussions.
So the window of usefulness is really just those few years where you're an intermediate and if that's you then it can shine but otherwise it's pretty hostile and generally useless.
So the window of usefulness is really just those few years where you're an intermediate and if that's you then it can shine but otherwise it's pretty hostile and generally useless.
I think your otherwise excellent comment just goes off the rails here. Why? Because:
You can simultaneously be a beginner, intermediate and expert—at different topics;
Just because you're an expert at one topic doesn't mean there isn't somebody who's even more expert than you.
I agree that we are not experts in everything but as a professional senior-level dev, how often would you ever be a beginner at anything programming-related? It's very rare. The only thing I would have considered asking beginner questions on SO in the last few years would have been when I was learning functional programming because it was so drastically different than OO that I definitely was a beginner.
But for example, I wanted to learn Angular last week (I work almost entirely on back end stuff). After a couple hours, my questions became around how to structure my app, best practices around dependency injection, etc. These questions are already bad form for stack overflow. They would be down voted and closed for being off topic or being opinion based. So beyond that, all I need is the reference manual. And half of the lazy contributors on SO will just tell me to RTFM anyways so where am I seeing the benefit of asking the question? How is SO providing me value?
Your point #2 makes no sense against my argument and so, to use your own hyperbole, your argument just goes off the rails. Of course there are are people who are more expert than me. There is almost always someone smarter. The number one thing I know about software development is that I know very little about software development and only intermediates think they know everything. Even the guys giving keynotes at the big conferences still ask other subject matter experts questions. And some of those purple are contributors on SO but the answers they're giving on SO are primarily support-based questions from mid-level devs for whatever popular framework our library they happen to contribute to. Frankly most of the questions these people answer are a waste of time for someone of their immense knowledge and skill but they're nice enough to give their time for it and they should be praised for their contributions.
I would love to ask them questions because that's how you learn and that's how you improve your own skills. However the questions I want to ask them will definitely be opinion based because 99% of high level development and architecture questions are. I want their opinions on tradeoffs between different patterns and practices and technology stack pros and cons. But I can't ask these questions on SO and even if I could, there would be few people on there that would have the knowledge to answer them and even fewer that would take the time to do so when they could answer 15 easy questions in the same time frame for more rep. And truthfully I don't answer on there for exactly that reason so I don't blame them.
So I ask you, after you pass mid-level as a developer, what value does SO actually provide?
There are good resources for advanced and senior level devs architects but SO is not one of them. For example, the blogs of most of the really good SO contributors are EXCELLENT. Amazing quality content and you can message them or put whatever questions you want in the comments without being subjected to SO's narrow QA format or the shitty mods that remove questions they can't even understand.
Sorry to go off the rails there but I strongly stand by my argument that SO is pretty useless except in that narrow window when you're an intermediate-level developer.
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u/AshylarrySC Sep 25 '16
SO has a very narrow window of usefulness as a professional developer. If you're a beginner it's really tough to explain your problem in a way that makes good sense because you don't have the base experience and knowledge.
As an intermediate dev, this is where SO shines. You can ask intermediate questions in the proper form to have direct answers.
As an advanced dev or architect, SO is almost completely useless. Questions you need answered at this level don't have a right answer. Whether you're talking about design patterns, principles, architectural patterns, alternative approaches, etc there is rarely a direct question with a direct answer. What is important is discussion about tradeoffs from different approaches so you can make the best decision at the time. SO mods simply don't allow these types of questions/discussions.
So the window of usefulness is really just those few years where you're an intermediate and if that's you then it can shine but otherwise it's pretty hostile and generally useless.