[digler999]

> SO hits which are mostly just noise.

I completely disagree. I'm an experienced dev from C++ learning Android/Java dev. Literally 90% of what I need is on SO (the rest usually from mkyong), thanks to google some of the answers even bubble up to the search page so I dont even have to click on them. I would be much worse off without SO.

[aquabib]

That says more about you as a developer than SO. In just about any SO answer I find numerous things that are either wrong or bad advice. The difference between me and a lot of SO users, especially novices, is that they don't know a good answer from a bad one.

A lot of people on SO seem to be answering just for points, half the time, or more, they don't actually know what they are talking about all or have experience with what they are explaining; they have often literally just "researched" the question and now they condense a couple of sources into an answer. Without having a proper understanding of the subject.

SO is bad for the whole industry. And there is not much that is worse than a "developer" copying an answer off SO and putting it into a production code base, without even understanding the answer they just copied.

[ashark]

Not going to argue the general case, but for Android in particular the documentation is also full of bad advice and half-explanations. Plus it's not uncommon to hit a long-outstanding SDK bug. SO is great for Android development to fill in those gaps, provided you can sort wheat from chaff.