In the spirit of offering some constructive feedback/raise awareness,

Developers are not the only ones using AI. Nowadays recruiters use AI ao automatically filter potential good fits for a position based on whatever signal they can gather. This means CV but also cover letters, portfolios,etc. sites such as LinkedIn even started offering a quick fit assessment based on the metadata you provide in your profile.

What this means is that, from a candidate perspective, it’s crucial that you start your application with a CV that you create specifically targeting the position you’re applying to. Your first barrier to entry is the AI assistant that is tasked with assessing fit.

You can still create your CV by hand, but your CV must be created with the express purpose of being parsed and evaluated by AI assistants, and you need to present yourself in a way that ticks the boxes that the position want to tick.

Nowadays, 95% of the job adverts don’t represent a position that will be filled. In those 5% that do, you need to make your application count. I had recruiters reach out to me for positions that I am clearly not a good fit just because my profile ticks the right boxes, and I had FANG recruiters reach out to me and let me know that they literally don’t read past the first page of a CV. To get them to pay attention, you need to make your case that you are the ideal candidate for that very specific position. Otherwise, others will.

But you will not have learned much, if anything, by copy/pasting the answer.

Your ignorance is showing. The whole point of using SO to help troubleshoot problems is avoiding the troubleshooting stage and all the iterative work of cross-checking docs with parametric tests. The main deliverable of SO is not a magical code snippet but a root cause analysis on a particular failure. You end up with a nice summary of someone else’s prior work troubleshooting the same issue, and a clear indication that X causes Y because of Foo.

And you do not get that by reading official docs documenting the happy flow. You’d know that if you had any relevant experience developing software.

Your comment shows some ignorance mixed with lack of experience. Errors do happen due to many reasons, and there is no project on earth that is nearly as documented as you pretend them all to be. This is one of the reasons why googling for error messages ended up being a very basic and mundane technique in software engineering.

What makes your comment stand out is the fact that you are completely unaware that some projects even use Stack Overflow to help users troubleshoot issues, with project maintainers taking the lead in providing answers. But here you are, pretending that reading docs is a silver bullet

I (and other actually competent devs I’ve talked to about it) have always gone straight to official documentation first.

This is silly posturing. Anyone that is troubleshooting a problem tends to start by googling the error message, and more often than not Google will return SO hits, not official documentation.

No left at the company even knows how to work the erp properly. Because the person who set it up and customized it didn’t document or train anyone and then left…

That’s not technical debt. That isn’t even the definition of legacy code. That’s a mess and a whole set of problems, but technical debt ain’t one of it.

Is it really unethical if it benefits the organization? Even if that’s not really the goal.

The blogger acknowledge that the use of the word “unethical” as a hyperbole ton drive engagement.

The real-world issue is that we need to get stakeholders on board with the idea of having to do extra work that is not required to deliver a feature. If you tell a manager that you need to spend a month rewriting a system that was just launched, they will laugh at you.

Technical debt is very real and can complete fuck companies.

Even though the situation you described is unfortunate, I don’t think it has any relationship with the concept of technical debt.

The term “technical debt” conveys the idea that a resource is invested in a way that requires to be repaid later. The whole concept revolves around the idea that taking shortcuts doesn’t eliminate the need to actually do the work to make things then right way. Rushing to a deliverable can leave a mess in your wake, but cleaning up that mess is also work that needs to be done and doesn’t magically go away.