Stack Overflow’s merits
Stack Overflow is a painful experience
Stack Overflow is known to be a painful experience where emotionless people criticize your way to pose questions and downvote your low-effort posts down to the abyss.
This harsh approach can be quite demotivating but I’d say it’s rather efficient. Every new user who finds himself in the uncomfortable situation where multiple users denigrate the way he posed the question rather than answering it, will often put more effort on the following questions.
Sometimes they will never post again but those who resist, will often make sure to properly document their successive questions and put some effort on trying to solve their problem alone first.
I get it, it is upsetting when a question is marked as irrelevant or duplicated and closed without an answer when you are just starting to code and have many doubts. However, if you didn’t make any research and didn’t try to solve your own problem before reaching for help maybe it’s sane that someone addresses your mistakes and invites you to read the friendly manual.
The merits
I believe that the Stack Overflow experience is not as bad as it is pictured and in fact, it can help you a lot to improve your communication skills which is the basis of a successful software engineer.
This is even more true today, where a good prompt
with enough context and a clear goal can make the
difference between a good AI generated answer and a bad
one. I don’t love the Prompt Engineer
narrative, but it is undeniable that prompts can be good
and bad, and a good prompt will increase a lot the token
efficiency of a model providing better results with less
tokens spent and less wasted time.
It’s obvious that good writing skills are useful in many contexts, however, I’ve seen many not-so-junior developers having great difficulty to precisely express themselves.
Let’s consider, for example, a task definition: in some cases it is important to be as precise one can be so to be sure that every behaviour is aligned with the request. Leaving too many unspecified conditions or omitting key elements is unfortunately very common and if Stack Overflow user base highlights those problems, the AI will implicitly assume everything and provide a convincing answer that often is correct from the standpoint of how the question is posed but ultimately incorrect when confronted with the original request.
Conclusion
Stack Overflow is not the only way to improve your writing skills, of course, but is the only method that seems to be so hated. This is perhaps due to the overextended gamification mechanics that make certain threads pretty quickly toxic, but the platform is full of nice discussions and valuable insights and I don’t think it deserves all the hate.