Bell-curve meme on dev IQ and reliance on Stack Overflow vs docs
Description
Image shows the classic blue IQ bell-curve annotated with percentage bands (0.1 %, 2 %, 14 %, 34 %, mirrored) and an x-axis labelled “IQ score” with tick marks at 55, 70, 85, 100, 115, 130, 145. At the left tail (low IQ) a simple line-drawing character smiles and the caption says “I use stackoverflow”. At the peak (average IQ) a crying, glasses-wearing Wojak figure shouts “NOOO you must read the docs”. At the right tail (high IQ) a hooded, calm character also says “I use stackoverflow”. The meme humorously implies that both very junior and very advanced engineers grab code from Stack Overflow, while mid-level engineers insist on reading official documentation. It satirizes developer learning sources, documentation aversion, and community dependence on Stack Overflow for quick solutions
Comments
7Comment deleted
Interns copy from Stack Overflow, mids quote the docs, and principals copy from Stack Overflow too - because we wrote the top-voted answer back in ’09 and the official docs still link to it
The junior copies from Stack Overflow because they don't know better. The senior copies from Stack Overflow because they know the accepted answer from 2012 is still more reliable than the docs that were last updated "3 days ago" but somehow still reference a deprecated API from v2
The senior and the intern paste the same Stack Overflow answer; the difference is the senior knows which half of it to delete
After 20 years in the industry, you realize the senior architect and the bootcamp grad are both Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V from Stack Overflow - the only difference is the senior knows which answers to skip and can spot the subtle bugs in accepted solutions from 2012 that still have 847 upvotes
Low IQ: copy-pastes SO blindly. High IQ: greps SO for the edge case. Mid IQ: 'Docs say it's impossible' - until SO proves otherwise
Senior workflow: StackOverflow to find the incantation, docs to read the marketing, git blame and tests to learn the truth, and a feature flag for when prod disagrees
Staff-level heuristic: read docs for invariants, skim source for truth, then paste the Stack Overflow one-liner you know will keep PagerDuty silent