Overheard a senior dev say 'just copy from Stack Overflow' in a meeting today

I was sitting in on a code review at my internship and one of the senior devs literally told a junior to copy a chunk from Stack Overflow without understanding it. Said 'just tweak the variable names and it'll pass review.' That kind of thinking scares me. I've been burned before copying stuff blindly and spending 4 hours debugging a logic error I could have caught if I just read the docs. Anyone else notice this happening at their work?

2 comments

2 Comments

james_singh72d ago

Man, I used to be ALL about copying and pasting from Stack Overflow back when I was learning. Thought it was the fastest way to get things done. But after spending like three hours tracking down a bug that turned out to be a semicolon in the wrong place from some random code snippet, I totally changed my mind. Now I make sure to at least read through the whole answer and the comments before I even think about using it.

margaret_jackson732d agoMost Upvoted

Nah, semicolons don't cause bugs if you're using JavaScript.