Yes I do understand the legal requirement for these kind of things, I was more trying to be understanding of why there was push back from the person the OP is describing. I also think anyone would be hard pressed to find an engineer who has _never_ copied anything from SO without attribution.
Plenty of us coded before SO, but I think you're being too general. Using SO to see examples of syntax is completely different than copying a chunk/function/page of original code someone wrote to solve a problem.
I absolutely have never put stack overflow code into a prodiction code base and I dont think Ive heard anyone talking about or seen anyone do that. I dont think that is typical all.
I use stack overflow to understand a concept or a technique frequently, but always type my own code from scratch.
