Overheard a senior dev say 'just copy stack overflow' like 5 times in an hour yesterday

I was sitting near a team at a coworking space downtown and this guy kept telling his junior to grab code without understanding it, then got annoyed when it broke. Has anyone else seen what happens when you build a whole app on stuff you don't actually get?

3 comments

3 Comments

michael_bennett1112d agoMost Upvoted

Copy paste without reading is just gambling with extra steps. Seen a kid ship a whole payment system based on some random Stack Overflow snippet that had a security warning right in the comments. Took three days and a pissed off client to figure out why transactions were failing.

noranguyen12d ago

Saw the same thing at a startup I used to work at. Someone copy pasted a crypto library without checking the version numbers. Whole thing broke in production because the API had changed 3 months earlier. Management blamed the junior dev but really it's on whoever set up a culture where shipping fast matters more than reading what you're shipping. The worst part is searching for fixes takes way more time than just reading the code first.

oliver71912d ago

@michael_bennett11 nailed it... gambling is exactly what it is. People treat Stack Overflow like a slot machine, pulling the lever and hoping for the best. The security warning in plain sight part kills me too, like reading comments is apparently too much work for folks in a hurry. Three days of debugging for something that could've been avoided with thirty seconds of reading. But hey, at least the client got to learn a valuable lesson about code reviews the hard way.