Honestly? Your coding professor sounds kind of awesome. Because that is the most useful skill you can learn as a programmer/coder.

There are two (now three-ish) ways to solve a problem like 'I need to integrate this new library" or “I am trying to do X with Y” and the like. You can spend hours learning every nuance of every library and algorithm to figure out exactly what corner case you are in. Or you can ask for help.

And when you ask for help? You need to know how to vet those answers and figure out what is useful. This is true wither it is Jane on the Frontend team or xxx_420_JustBlazeIt on Stack Overflow. And sometimes that is going to involve dealing with an asshole and trying to key in on the useful bits.

Adding on to that is the idea of using an LLM like ChatGPT (which scrapes stackoverflow…). Which is mostly the same end user experience.

One of the hardest and most annoying things to teach people is how to ask for help. It pisses me off to no end how many “weekly standup” meetings I need to schedule just because I know that there are those people who will not ask for help unless I specifically ask them “oh, okay. What is the source of that delay and how can we help? Hey Fred, you have a lot of experience with X, right? Can you and Jim try to sum this problem up for the rest of us?”. And if we don’t have that meeting, they are going to sit by themselves silently trying to parse shitty documentation for weeks.