That is pretty much the reason for Stack Overflow's existence isn't it? Requests for debugging whatever problem you have (for free), and offers to do the same for others. You make it sound like a bad thing.

This is the biggest reason why people fault Stack Overflow. As Joel and Jeff have always said, it's about making a repository of knowledge to questions that are helpful for everyone. So you still see questions which are about "I was trying this but get this error" since they are useful when the error is something general and a lot of people might run into.

OTOH questions like I am trying to do this very specific thing that interacts with multitudes of other systems and cannot get it to work are therefore not considered StackOverflow worthy.

Stack Overflow is about creating a wiki of knowledge for future visitors. If you have a question that is only relevant to your specific implementation, and that will never help anyone else in the future, then it doesn't add value to Stack Overflow.

It's sometimes hard to know in advance whether your situation is unique or going to be of use to someone in the future however.

If it is completely unique and is of no use to anyone else, then it still of use to one person and still worth answering. Maybe SO just needs a flag for questions as 'unique situation' so it doesn't appear by default in future searches.

Also, SO isn't really a wiki. It's not designed that way. It's built around "this is my problem; what is the best solution?" interactions.

I had to chew a guy out the other day. He freely admitted that he wasn't a Python programmer and was looking for working code that he could run without modification. He tried to justify it by saying he was only asking for someone to "share their expertise".

"pls send the codes"

or homework questions

But for every response of, "What code have YOU tried?", there's someone who posts the answer to the question, and the user gets their one-time answer and never comes back

So what? Someone earned money off of a snippet of code. What's the big deal?

It's a question of motivation. Being used as a source of free labor is very demotivating. That's not why I contribute to the site.

I didn't know it was that kind of a setup. Then you were right to tell him off.

Remember JavaScript.com? SO is that but for every language and with snippets of code that have been validated by names that are so well recognized for being brilliant that would I start to mention one then I would have to name everyone and they are too many. So we shouldn't frown upon people who take those snippets of code to try to make a buck. Is all I'm saying.

That's the thing, he wasn't looking for a snippet - he wanted a fully operational application. I don't mind providing useful tidbits of code, even if they get quite large.

Good of you too chew him out. Gatekeepers are what we need to keep those who do not belong from entering into our domains.

OP "wrote up [a] code example" as is generally asked on SO, and that's somehow now bad asking "someone to debug your code for free"?