Ok, then there doesn't exist a single reputable company with a tech division and we're all unethical. Have a nice unethical day.
I’m deeply disturbed that you think this form of plagiarism is universal — I can assure you that is not the case.
I work at a FANG currently, and plagiarism is absolutely not tolerated.
In fact, plagiarism has been considered a fireable offense at every other company I’ve worked at over my 25 year long career, and prior to that, considered a serious form of academic misconduct in school.
It’s clearly unethical and I’ve never plagiarized in my life.
I’ve only run into one instance of someone else plagiarizing code in my career, and that individual was fired.
I feel like you're arguing in bad faith. So, whatever.
SO’s license requires attribution.
If you don’t want to be a plagiarist, you either need to include attribution, or you need to rewrite the solution in entirely your own words.
> You should write code sometimes to solve a complex problem
There’s a very high chance you posted your comment from a device using code I wrote.
Glueing together plagiarized code copied from SO, or stolen from OSS projects on GitHub, is not software engineering.
This thread is an eye opener for me too. Do engineers not get trained on their legal obligations? My company is old and not a tradition tech company but we have been running workshops on the issue for years. Even if they don't, what about their legal teams? Or CI tools to scan for licence violations? Some of the responses here are so naive it's crazy. I hope no one is identifying the companies they work for.
But that's something entirely different from small code snippets, changed and adapted to solve the same problem a thousand other people already had. Nothing else are developers doing going on GitHub, StackOverflow or any other website to find answers to their questions. That's not naivety, that's how coding works (partially). If you would have to re-invent the wheel everytime you build something new, good luck.
Snippets aren't exactly defined but I see them as more than just a single line like "here's how to flatten a list in Python", it's some functionality - e.g. an algorithm implementation or some task.
It's universal in any company that doesn't take measures against it. So basically startups, small, medium, and even some large companies.