No, a real engineer goes on SO to understand. A junior goes on SO to copy and paste. If your answer is "I don't know I just copied" you're not doing any engineering and it's awful to pretend you are. Our job is literally about asking "why" and "how" until we don't need to anymore because our pattern matching skills allow us to generalize.
At this point in my career I rarely ever go to SO, and when I do it's because of some obscure thing that 7 other people came across and decided to post a question about. Or to look up "how to do the most basic shit in language I am not familiar with", but that role was taken over by LLMs.
At this point in my career I rarely ever go to SO, and when I do it's because of some obscure thing that 7 other people came across and decided to post a question about. Or to look up "how to do the most basic shit in language I am not familiar with", but that role was taken over by LLMs.