> What does being an SO contributor actually get you?
I had a reason to dive into obscure and esoteric corners of some languages/frameworks/toolkits. I practiced helping people with technical problems, which was likely a major contributor to getting my current job where developers also provide technical support to the customers (who are also software developers). Having this out in the open and being able to point at the fact that I was ranked in the top 100 contributors certainly helped.
However, things have changed since the early days, of course. Basic documentation and tutorials for programming languages and toolkits have become better overall, I'd say. We've got good centralized knowledge bases for certain topics, e.g. MDN where you previously would have had to piece together information from SelfHTML, W3Schools and other partially wrong sources, or go straight to the relevant specification (not for everyone, of course). Stack Overflow has become the repository of answered questions that is pretty searchable and there are a lot of questions that simply don't need to be asked again. LLMs have scraped SO, so ChatGPT and others can answer many programming questions fairly well (with the occasional hallucination or error).
By now I only rarely open SO anymore. But I go through different hobbies every few years anyway, and while I was still studying, I had the time, I learned a lot, and to this day I still like explaining things and helping others.
I had a reason to dive into obscure and esoteric corners of some languages/frameworks/toolkits. I practiced helping people with technical problems, which was likely a major contributor to getting my current job where developers also provide technical support to the customers (who are also software developers). Having this out in the open and being able to point at the fact that I was ranked in the top 100 contributors certainly helped.
However, things have changed since the early days, of course. Basic documentation and tutorials for programming languages and toolkits have become better overall, I'd say. We've got good centralized knowledge bases for certain topics, e.g. MDN where you previously would have had to piece together information from SelfHTML, W3Schools and other partially wrong sources, or go straight to the relevant specification (not for everyone, of course). Stack Overflow has become the repository of answered questions that is pretty searchable and there are a lot of questions that simply don't need to be asked again. LLMs have scraped SO, so ChatGPT and others can answer many programming questions fairly well (with the occasional hallucination or error).
By now I only rarely open SO anymore. But I go through different hobbies every few years anyway, and while I was still studying, I had the time, I learned a lot, and to this day I still like explaining things and helping others.