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Post #4847 · source on Telegram
When you learn devs really copy StackOverflow code, fish disbelief ensues
Description
A single-frame Spongebob Squarepants reaction meme shows a blue-green, spotted fish standing on a sandy Bikini Bottom street, eyes wide and mouth slightly open in shock. Large white uppercase text across the top says “WAIT YOU GUYS”, followed by a white search-bar style strip that reads “actually steal code from stackoverflow” in smaller black type. Bold white uppercase lettering at the bottom exclaims “I THOUGHT IT WAS A JOKE”. The startled expression visualizes the moment a developer discovers that colleagues literally copy-paste snippets from Stack Overflow, poking fun at pervasive community reliance and the potential impact on learning habits and code quality
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14Comment deleted
Our SBOM review got awkward when I had to list “Stack Overflow Accepted Answer #1234567 (circa 2012)” as our largest third-party dependency - apparently copy-paste accrues legal debt too
The moment you realize that 'Stack Overflow Driven Development' isn't just a meme but an actual architectural pattern, and that half of production code is essentially crowd-sourced solutions held together by upvotes and the desperate hope that the accepted answer from 2012 still works with your current framework version
The real senior move isn't admitting you copy from Stack Overflow - it's knowing which answers are from 2012 and need three dependency upgrades, two security patches, and a complete architectural rethink before they'll even compile in your modern stack
The real joke: that SO copy-paste outlives your greenfield rewrite in prod
In our org, Stack Overflow is a transitive dependency with no semver, murky CC BY-SA licensing, and APIs that deprecate faster than our incident postmortems
SO-DD in action: ship the accepted answer to prod, then treat the comment thread as your only documentation and transitive SBOM entry
From the questions too baby Comment deleted
That's true 💁♂ Comment deleted
ctrl+c; ctrl+v Comment deleted
ctrl+c, ctrl+c, ctrl+c, ctrl+c ... ctrl+v Comment deleted
copy seven times, paste one time Comment deleted
That would be counter-productive. Better do quite the opposite — paste each snippet at least 7 times — to increase your LoC count and thus get paid more for using the code you did not even write! 🤑 Be copy-positive! Comment deleted
Bbbbut what it Ctrl c didn't work the first time? Then you'd be paying previous loc Comment deleted
Then that would form a solid foundation for future bug-fixes! 😎 Comment deleted