What is the point of being a toaster guru?

Question

Toaster

I often notice accounts with a contribution of a couple of thousand and the number of questions 5-10.
I have a question for you, the owners of such accounts. Why are you doing this? Why do you sit on the toaster for 5-6 hours a day? What is it all for? Stripes? Number? Self-realization? Idleness?
I can answer why I help people with answers. For me, this is gratitude for the fact that someone else helped me in due time, but you don’t ask anything. So what is your motivation?
Of course, I feel great about you and thanks to you the toaster is holding up, I'm interested in understanding this phenomenon.

Answer 1

1. Work on a personal brand: A high reputation in professional communities increases the attractiveness for employers.
   There are also fans of some technology who contribute to its development, promotion and popularization, helping others to understand it. But personally, I have not yet undertaken this, although there are thoughts.
   I check in every half an hour or so on average. If there is an interesting question, I can spend 10 minutes on it. Some people spend more time on smoke breaks.

Answer 2

If you believe some citizens, then this is all because such gurus are:
1) very smart chtoli,
2) nerds that women don’t give,
3) they don’t represent anything and only here they rub their CHSV.
But seriously, the “pumped” accounts on Toaster and GitHub have long allowed me to spend less time on interviews, not complete test tasks, and sometimes receive invitations to conferences.

Answer 3

1. Helping others is nice.
2. Charging for the mind.
3. Teaching other people is an important step in the development of both a professional and a person as a whole.
4. By helping others, you often learn new things, see old problems from a new angle, encounter new ones, and new ideas are born.
5. Some kind of communication on professional topics.
What for? You can simply subscribe to the technologies you are interested in and notifications of new issues will be sent to your mail. Although, I would add push notifications.
Nothing to ask. The only serious problems I face in projects are architectural tasks that require a whole range of knowledge. The algorithm for solving such problems has long been worked out. For smaller problems, there is also a solution search algorithm.

Answer 4

Why do you sit on the toaster for 5-6 hours a day?

About half an hour a day, or even less.
Reasons:
* I often get distracted from work to stretch my brain, especially while I have started some process, there are a couple of minutes - either tea or a toaster to look through.
* Interesting questions broaden your horizons
* I would like to contribute to the Russian-speaking Internet. A toaster is a very good option for a "lazy" contribution.
* There are few personal questions, because basically those who answer a lot are good at Google. Really, you know how to google - it's very difficult to come up with a question to which you yourself can not find a ready-made answer. And if you still find such a question, then on the toaster and on the stackoverflow, rarely anyone can help.

Answer 5

Likes. It's all about likes.

Answer 6

When you think you know everything, you go to the toaster, you start reading the questions and you realize that you don't even know half of it. When you start learning something new, you already know more. You learn to look for the answer on the Internet faster than others do.

Answer 7

You can make up many reasons, but in fact this issue should be dealt with by psychiatrists. No normal person would waste their time like that. You can safely consider everyone who has a rating above 1000 as crazy. No, of course there may be normal people among them - but this should be proved, for each person separately.

Answer 8

many reasons:
1. Helping others, of course
2. This is what helped me at the beginning of my career - I started working as a programmer and faced one kind of problems during it, while here people face a wide range of problems and tasks and at the beginning of my journey I this shaft gave development!
Yes, I opened a question, I don’t know the answer - I went to smoke manuals, read SO and google, opened the IDE and thought about what and how ... then I wrote the answer
3. Some way to remember (how the blog works), helping others remember it yourself, formulating thought ... Roughly speaking, you remember not 1% of information, but 3% :) :) :) approximately, but more at times for
sure talk about abstractions, about patterns
5. Helps in finding a job, not in all cases, but in some cases for sure
6. With a peculiarity I follow the new technology that I am studying, and I look at the answers of cool guys. There are about 20 people here who should be read apart from the questions, as the answer is approached systematically
7. Notebook - there is always where to turn to your own answers

Answer 9

“Freely you have received, freely give” (Matthew 10:8)
P.S.
There was a case when a person needed help so much that he risked giving rue. Helped. Moral satisfaction.

Answer 10

The best way to become smarter is to teach others (Evgeny Linsky). Have you ever thought about the fact that most of these people may be owners of a toaster?))

Answer 11

Well, for example, yesterday HR from Yandex wrote to me in a cart. She offered to be interviewed. I asked from where, I answered - I saw an active account on the toaster.

Answer 12

Man is a social being.
That is why we have stood out from the animals - that we convey our experience in a very voluminous way and devote a lot of time to this. This was the case even before the invention of the Internet.
This is built into psychology - people like to teach and instruct their own kind.
Some more, some less. But on average - a person (teacher) is always pleased.

Answer 13

At first it was just interesting to answer. It seems like a harmless enough and even useful way to procrastinate.
But the toaster makes me a little depressed, because there are a lot of elementary questions that are answered in the language/library/framework FAQ or in the first result of a Google search. I don’t want to answer people who didn’t bother to spend even 5 minutes searching for an answer on their own. This is a waste of time that harms all participants in the process. Therefore, I began to come here less and less.
But here on StackOverflow I have a decent score. And a couple of times I got interview offers because of my profile on SO. Unfortunately, apparently he is not high enough to be offered a job immediately without an interview.
But time has become less and less, and there are also problems on SO:
1) Questions are divided into elementary, as here, or so complex that it will take a solid part of the day to answer. Plus, most likely, someone will do it before you, and the one who asked the question will not bother to press the plus button in karma, all the more, mark it as a solution. You don't want to throw a lot of your time in the trash.
2) Fools looking for easy ways have also become aware that HR is looking for promising candidates on SO. Therefore, a lot of answerers divorced, who lead carpet answers to all questions in SO, without even reading the question to the end. The signal-to-noise ratio has deteriorated greatly.
In general, as soon as some metric appears, there are immediately those who want to tweak this metric in order to get some goodies with minimal effort.

Answer 14

Helping - I know. Knowing - I help.
The main feature of the service : a non-standard approach to solving a specific problem allows you to greatly shorten the path to achieve the goal in terms of actions, calculations and labor costs.

Answer 15

> Why sit on the toaster for 5-6 hours a day,
5-6 hours a day? Seriously?
In between times, scrolling through the news feeds to distract from current tasks, running through the toaster feed and answering one or two hooked questions is about 10-15 minutes at the most. Discharge for the mind of a kind.
I don't think gurus spend much more time.

Answer 16

Wow! And here it was possible to indicate contacts in the profile ?! Wrote)

Answer 17

5 - 6 hours? Oh well ... A maximum of two, and then, if you come across an interesting fat question that you want to give a long detailed answer - and these do not happen often, usually half an hour - an hour between solutions to other questions :)
Why:
Interesting. Sometimes you come across a question about which you can definitely say "I know everything about it" or "I know something about it that others do not know." In such cases, I usually try to share information.
This allows you to stay in trend, constantly update your knowledge - because for a complete answer you often have to find out some points yourself - and from time to time acquire new ones
. By the way, the gurus never aspired, do not aspire and will not aspire. By the way, my profile contacts are not filled :) On purpose.

Answer 18

I often notice accounts with a contribution of a couple of thousand and the number of questions 5-10.

well, not that often
- exercise for the mind
- interesting tasks
- change of activity
- image
- narcissism (I don’t want to admit it, but I probably have it)

Answer 19

People just like it)
First you answered, and then if you don’t know something, they will answer you.

Answer 20

Well, everything is quite simple.
I indicated that I was with NiNo, indicated my mail. From time to time, guys from the city come to me and offer certain communications, projects, and so on.

Answer 21

I can answer why I help people with answers. For me, this is gratitude for the fact that someone else helped me in due time, but you don’t ask anything. So what is your motivation?

And you think about how it would be if you were helped before the toaster, if you studied even before these our Internets. Or local networks. Or on the local forum.
Here, that's it!

Answer 22

I also have purely practical goals. I monitor the section of chats, video broadcasts and popular questions.
This is the search for new orders, and the search for ideas for startups.