Here's the thing about stack overflow:<p>How many people have worked at a location that has blocked stack overflow?<p>Because I have worked with an organization of about 2500 people, not all of which were IT. One day, management went on a mad whitelisting crusade and blocked about 98% of the internet, including the stack exchange network.<p>IT ground totally to a halt, across all our branches. No programming, no sys-admining, no help desk.<p>Stack overflow is not a programmer social network, and it is not a Q&A site.<p>It's the new textbook. Developers and sysadmins used to keep hundreds of kilos of dead tree libraries with them because only the textbooks contained the arcane knowledge like "component X was actually not implemented properly, and will crash under Y circumstances". Languages and libraries never advertise that on their website.<p>Post-stack-overflow developers and admins use stack-overflow as their source of kooky corner cases and badly explained concepts documentation. They don't have or need the dead tree books.<p>So considered harmful? In my experience any IT staff who say they don't rely on stack overflow are lying.