Be selfish and go help someone
By: Adriano Carneiro
Tags: Software Development, Helping Others, Stackoverflow

Be selfish and go help someone

How helping others by sharing knowledge on StackOverflow was actually beneficial to myself

Like every other breathing software developer, I usually find useful answers to issues and topics on StackOverflow. So in 2011, I decided to get a little more involved and started not only asking questions, but also answering some.

Look, it’s great to help people and it seems noble but I have to admit that I did it for selfish reasons. Let me explain.

In high school, I joined a program where students with good grades would help tutor classmates that were struggling. Performing well in Math and Physics gave me confidence that I would be able to help my friends. However, I discovered early on that it would not be that simple: understanding something takes you to one level; applying that knowledge takes you further; however, explaining that knowledge, specially to someone who is already grappling with the concept, is at a whole other level. It forces you to gain new layers of understanding and new perspectives, even for the simplest concepts, so that you may be able to come up with a way to pass that knowledge on to another person.

So, years later, I knew that answering questions on StackOverflow would force me to up my game, hone my own skills and knowledge. So I got to it. I started being very active on SO, getting to a point where I would answer questions on a daily basis. That level of activity, as I expected, helped me understand the concepts better, helped me write better, helped me convey those concepts in a readable and helpful way.

After a few months, my level of activity slowly and steadily went down, as other challenges in life, family and work needed more of my time. However, I was glad I took the time to contribute: I had personal gain and my past contributions were still helping people around the world.

Fast forward to 2020, I have just noticed this:

My StackOverflow profile, mobile version

Even being barely active nowadays, my contributions are still being seen and up-voted, reaching 50K reputation and having impacted around 5 million people (according to SO). Sure, my contributions were not unique pieces of knowledge; most of them were about really simple concepts. They are not great pieces of literature, technical or otherwise. Also, there are some bad answers there in the middle. Nonetheless, I’m still glad I wrote them. They helped me build up my skills and knowledge, stepping stones in the process of trying to become better at those concepts and better at writing about them.

Throughout life, I have gained more certainty that, regardless of the context, helping other people is also a way of helping yourself. You even feel good when you go out of your way to help someone. It’s kind of paradoxical really; at times, it seems that the act of helping others can be a little selfish. Even as I write this, I think to myself “Sure I helped others but also look at all those random internet points on StackOverflow reputation!”

My wife always tells the kids that a fraction of your time can go a long way for others. More often than not, it costs very little to extend the hand to someone else, but your small effort contribution is usually of great aid to others. The funny thing is that once you put some help out there, it somehow comes back to you positively. For some reason (whatever you call it: God, karma or simply the intricate complexity of human interactions), once you give away some good for others, some other good inexorably comes back to you.

The skeptical engineer in me cannot always explain why this happens. However, the pragmatic engineer in me has acknowledged the fact that this happens. This is reproducible. Why wouldn’t one proactively generate positive reproducible results for oneself?

Thus, I am comfortable to encourage anyone: be a little selfish, do yourself a favor and help yourself by going out there and helping someone else. Others will be thankful. So will you.