The issue does arise when you aren’t able to understand the problem space enough to realize that what you copied from stack overflow has a mistake or doesn’t fit the requirement you need (e.g. perhaps it doesn’t match your error handling architecture or so on).
That said, stack overflow can be a great source and I’ve written plenty of code with a comment pointing to a SO link to further explain a pattern or snippet for a future reader.
"The issue does arise when you aren’t able to understand the problem space enough to realize that what you copied from stack overflow has a mistake or doesn’t fit the requirement you need "
Yeah sure. A stupid programmer will remain a stupid programmer, even if he reaches a certain productivity by living off of stackoverflow ...
There is nothing wrong with copy pasting code from stack overflow.
I do see two kind of people doing that. One group learns from the code in order to become better, and can use it over and over to be more efficient. The other group doesn't care how it works and just wants to have a snippet that works.
The second group usually misses a curiosity, of which the effects show up in many more places than just copy pasting from stack overflow. They also tend to have a flatter learning curve. I don't want to generalize, but in this group you will encounter people who don't care about the difference between a list and a set, or think that code works when it compiles. In both cases the juniors know very little, but one grows and the other one doesn't (or less)
There is space for both in the world, but I prefer the first group in my team.
That said, stack overflow can be a great source and I’ve written plenty of code with a comment pointing to a SO link to further explain a pattern or snippet for a future reader.