That comes from months of research including customer discovery interviews. It's a fact that over 90% of new coders waste hours on Stackoverflow searching for answers.
I'm sure that a lot of people spend a lot of time reading through Stackoverflow's answers. Not sure you're taking the parent comment to heart when you classify that time as wasted. Stackoverflow might not be the optimal solution for finding answers but it certainly adds enough value to the community that they deserves some respect for their approach.
This. The SO community is not very open to newbies and it's very difficult to get a well thought out answer that teaches the issue. Someone asks a simple question and you get a link to a Google search or some sample code that couldn't possibly make sense to the person asking.
Maybe this is natural to answering such questions on forums or maybe it's the results of everyone fighting for points and upvotes. My money is on the latter.
Point is there is MUCH greater value in talking directly to an expert so long as you can get in touch with one which is a tough nut to crack.
That is because 99% of newbie questions are already answered... and when someone just asks the same "what is a pointer in C" question, without even taking time to search if it's already been answered, it pisses off the community and they get negative feedback as a result.
I don't think a one-to-one chat with an experienced developer is a better solution for noobs, quite the contrary. But time will tell, maybe the guys who sign-up to coach on askadev will never get tired to explain the difference between an integer and a float type over and over and over again.
This is something an intermediate who shouldn't really be answering questions would say.
99%? Not even close. A large majority of unanswered/downvoted questions are HARD questions that people can't answer themselves and opt instead to simply post the first link they found after copying/pasting the question into Google.
Often times when answers aren't accepted because they suck and the poster asks further questions or says they're looking for something more that leads to more downvotes because that's what pisses of the community. Being told they aren't good teachers.
Most people answering questions on Stack Overflow are average students who just want the points by again, posting what they find on Google (which RARELY answers the question) or posting a link to a library without explaining a thing which is also massively unhelpful.
Imo it's a very good thing that they have to spend a lot of time researching. Along the way they will see and learn many different things and in the end provides experience. Thus I agree with _almosnow.
It's been proven that spending more than 45mins searching for a solution damages learning. That what developer bootcamps are based on. (I'll see if I can dig out research on it).
