Do people really use StackOverflow for answering job-related programming questions? The only time I found the questions on there useful was when I was a first year student learning programming. Maybe I am just bad at searching / asking.

I did, you just abstract the problem out.

Some programming language and frameworks have more active communities on StackOverflow than others.

So in my sprints, I would typically have 3 tasks in progress at once: 1 I would work on myself, 1 would go on Stackoverflow waiting for the answer, and 1 would be something that required progress from a different team in the company (like a new API endpoint so I could do something on a frontend, or different service)

It was pretty efficient for me. In some communities, the real thought leaders and framework developers are on stack overflow, watching the hashtag like a hawk.

You can also use github issues on the actual package you have issue with pretty well too, alongside it.

So you're really crowdsourcing a lot, and evaluating if that solution is correct enough for your implementation.

But so many times, especially with frameworks, the answer is a good copy and paste job. your mileage and use case may vary.

I graduated 5 years ago and I still use it daily.