Ask HN: Best place to go for interactive programming help?

Sometimes I find myself stuck with a problem and I want to get some help with it. I'm an experienced engineer, with loads of smart coworkers, but I'm just not at the level of reaching out to them and asking them to spend their personal time seeing if they can spot an error in some side project code of mine. I'm not exactly looking for StackOverflow, at least not the current rat race of people trying to suck down reputation by answering questions first, etc.

Where do you all go for programming help? Do you just reach out to coworkers? Some generic IRC channel? Another code site? Is StackOverflow more helpful than I think it is?