I just got this eMail: 10 years StackOverflow. How did the developers survived before this? 😱

Simple: They just did their shit. I rarely use Stack Overflow, I don't get what you're talking about. Also, SO isn't the first forum about code whatsoever.

Before SO, we relied on the documentation and a little creativity with problem solving to sort things out.

Now any man, woman, or bird can be a developer by just copying error messages into google and having the answer spat out from SO.

IRC? mailing list?

I used IRC and Forums.

Manuals

They fucking LEARNT things. The real way. Books, lectures, all that stuff.

They THOUGHT about stuff back then.

SO has lightened society's cognitive load that's related to the more common (boilerplate-ish) stuff. Now it's easier to think about more advanced stuff.

They probably actually read through their manuals, probing the problem and understanding what caused it and in the meanwhile learning a whole bunch of other stuff and not just fixing the current problem.

These days we fix problems without understanding what the problem is.