The high school kid who volunteers at a homeless shelter and hopes it will help their college app is likely doing it both out of altruism and self-interest.
(Actually, the person who helps people because it feels good is also acting out of self-interest).
Given many ways to be altruistic, people will usually pick the ones that coincide more with their self interest. And in turn, self interest can warp a lot of the outcomes, even if people are trying to help.
Does that count, or is it axiomatic that for every person, the world is entirely just them and they have no concept of everything/anything outside themselves? I feel like this is probably only some people, and doesn't describe literally every person.
I retired from industry to teach high school.
A really big part of why I did this is because I wanted to help. I make basically nothing. There are many more personally lucrative things that I could do that help society and people less.
But there's millions of ways that I could help. I didn't maximize my impact, I don't think. I did one that was a confluence between altruism, feeling good to me, conferring other advantages, etc. In other words, altruism was not the sole factor in my decision -- just a very large one.
I'm not saying that to take away from it, but people do things to feel good, or because they get something out of it. Either way you are being rewarded.
This explains plenty of bizarre outcomes. I was speaking to a guy who worked at a food bank. They would take cash donations, buy food at full price at the supermarket, then have volunteers (in a paid for space) pack up boxes.
A more sensible route would be food vouchers. People can buy what they want, no money spent on rent, so more goes to those in need.
But donators want to feel they are donating food and volunteers, probably mainly the higher ups feel that all this unneeded machinery is 'productive' therefore more meaningful / they are in charge of actual people and a physical location which makes them feel important. Thus the inefficiency continues.
The trouble with food vouchers is that junkies trade them for drugs. Vouchers are more "liquid" than physical food.
It may happen on smaller projects with few users but not in meaningful large projects.
Building a brand doesn’t require submitting to someone else’s open source project. You can do the same thing by creating your own OSS project.
For a lot of them it’s probably a little of column A and a little of column B.
If people are submitting in their real name it’s more likely they’re building a brand. I also think it’s possible for someone to genuinely think they are helping without trying to build reputation.
Think about it from the perspective of a non-programmer, or even total non-technical person. Vibe coding to someone like that looks like complete magic. Suddenly to that person, a whole new world has opened up. Ideas, features, bug fixes they've always wanted but could never do now look possible. That particular group of people don't see it as spamming the maintainer, they genuinely feel like they're finally able to help.
They still don't have the skills to help
> they genuinely feel like they're finally able to help.
They can feel that but they aren't helping and they would understand that if they had the skills to help
yeah but, did they really?
All IMHO of course, but:
If they understand what they did, it follows that they understand someone has to approve/disapprove that contribution for it to land in the repo, and therefore, size their contributions accordingly to make reviewers lives easier.
If they do not understand what they did, they should not be attempting to land high-value high-complexity contributions yet; they should start with something smaller precisely so they can learn.
Edit: I realize I probably sound too grumpy about it, its just that they could be doing it in their own project, in their own repo, where they're free to go for anything they are comfortable with.