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Comment by SoftwareMaven | Hacker News Reader

Not all questions have a single, definitive answer. Many engineering questions have trade-offs that need to be evaluated and different people have different experiences with those trade-offs.

SO is a great site for the first five years of a developer's career. After that, it's value wanes as the questions become less "how do I do this?" and more "how should I do this?"

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That's spot on. Questions like "How should I do this" are harder to answer, require extended research and investigation, and a lot of communication back and forth. Stack Overflow is not a good platform for this. What it is is a great platform for finding solutions to simply expressed stumbling blocks, or nuggets of domain-specific knowledge.

The problem is, being a good site for both things would be difficult. There are plenty of places out there that cater to extended discussion within expert groups. Forums have been around in one form or other almost since the dawn of the web. The problem with these is that they're bad at one-shot Q&A (as the answer to a question might be pages after it was asked, or not there at all, or out of date, and it might take you a long time to work this out). This failing is exactly what Stack Overflow is about, and exactly why it's not good for deeper engineering questions.

I'm unfamiliar with the state of IE Web Dev support at the moment, is it currently a good forum for extended discussion?

That's kind of what I found codereview and programmers stackexchanges are more useful for. I've also started drifting towards more and more mailing lists for specific discussions on particular topics, though that can be hit or miss depending on the community.

That's calling for "closed as not constructive"?

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