Helping

[DossarLX ODI]

Providing help to someone is a topic that’s been on my mind for the past few months during my spring semester and it’s making me wonder what some others think about the concept of providing help to someone that asks for it. I will illustrate two examples from my experience to spark some thoughts:

1.) In Bioinformatics, my professor was so vague and even had some incorrect information on his presentations that I always had broken code unless a very generous friend helped me. This friend not only gave me working code samples to learn from, but also fixed most of the bugs in my programs until the midterm (where I started doing most of the physical coding myself). However, you can see there was a heavy reliance on this person here, but at the same time no working solutions were posted after the due dates, so any person that wasn’t able to get a program working is left in the dark with broken code.

2.) Similar to the above except for an Assembly Language Programming class, one person in particular (let’s call him Joe here) requested help from me throughout the course. However, he did not check over the programs, I basically modified everything for him. He didn’t even have a working assembler. Worse, he didn’t even start the last IA32 assembly assignment until the very last day which I completed for him in 2 hours despite the assignment time being 3 weeks to finish. At the final, Joe had the audacity to ask me right in front of the class what his bomb number was and I risked getting a zero on the final. Obviously this person was a complete inconsiderate asshole who viewed the course as busy work.

In the first example, I see what it is like to ask someone else for help often but I did it with the intention that I wanted to learn and I didn’t want to be left in the dark just because some person thinks it’s ok to waste students’ money by saying a course is a “high level course” – not providing help. In the second example I can understand what it is like to have broken code that doesn’t work, but saying my name in front of everyone at the final exam aggravated me immensely.

Remember the above two examples are just examples of situations involving helping another person. There are many more that I would like the readers here to think about and share/give input on. What lines do you set for helping another person with something?

[___________]

I try to keep a low profile in classes, so that no one asks me for help. When someone does ask, I tell them (very briefly) what to do, and I don't say anything else. I come off as a jerk this way at times, but I don't get too heavily involved in other people's businesses (as you did with 'Joe') that way.

[Charu]

Oh, this is a good topic I think.

While there's good helping and bad helping, I think the bigger picture is people's benefit.

When you help someone, there's always a benefit involved. Doesn't matter what kind of benefit, could be a mental benefit or physical benefit. This is all fine and dandy because who doesn't love benefits; the feeling of accomplishment when you help someone, the happiness you feel when you finally understand something because someone nudged you the right way, the joy of getting something for little work when you know it takes hard work.

The evil part comes in when people love those benefits but show no compassion for the helper or to understand how they were just helped. It's these people that usually are greedy with anything they can get their hands on. In such, they have no remorse or pity for anyone but themselves.

I think once you see someone express themselves in this way, that's when you should cut ties immediately. It's just too bad that those people will go the lengths to try to get benefits from you that I believe some will go as far as threaten and harass you to give them the benefit.

...People are interesting...

[gold stinger]

I like to help people before they even need help, so they appreciate the assistance more rather than needing the help immediately, in a dire situation, and appreciating the fact that they were able to get it done on time / finish it before it became more of an issue. This is where the line of social impacts and business impacts in helping relationships stand, for me that is.

Sometimes it's better to let people deal with the consequences of letting themselves go, should mention for the youngkins out there that being paired up for a project by teacher/class vote/self-pairing doesn't include this, and goes more along the force of business impact over social impact.

Originally Posted by Charu

The evil part comes in when people love those benefits but show no compassion for the helper or to understand how they were just helped. It's these people that usually are greedy with anything they can get their hands on. In such, they have no remorse or pity for anyone but themselves.

Humans as a general whole aren't usually based on this unless they have a reason to be greedy towards it or have a reason to be stubborn for it. It's based off general social interaction and who engages first at what time. I learned this a lot while I worked my job while still going to school. If you offer to help someone without anyone else asking you to do so, and unexpectedly helping them, they will appreciate you that much more. If they come up to you directly, asking for the help, they are putting their business as their priority, otherwise, they would not engage in asking you for help. Therefore, business is appreciated more highly than the person helping you.

[andy-o24]

There is a fine line between helping someone and doing another person's work for them.

When it comes to coding things, which I have no experience with, I have a feeling it would be incredibly easy to just copy someone else's code and submit it as your own. Assuming your instructor doesn't take an ungodly amount of time looking at code submissions to assignments, the instructor wouldn't be able to recognize the exactness of the two submissions. Perhaps I am wrong, but I think that would be a tempting solution to finishing an assignment.

I like to look at helping from a mathematical standpoint by which I mean helping someone with their math homework. It is very easy if you are the helper to understand what it is the person you are helping is trying to do assuming you know the material. From here you can do two things: 1) Solve the problem or 2) Help them understand how to solve the problem and let them do the work.

If you choose 1, the person you are helping has two options. They can accept the work you've done and move on as if the problem is solved. Or they can ask you how you did it and then you move to option 2 inevitably. Obviously for the sake of the person you are helping, option 2 is better because you are helping to assure that person knows what they need to do to solve the problems they are given, but it is arguably easier and definitely quicker to just do option 1.

It is hard to help people and for some it is hard to ask for help. Like I said, you have to balance doing the work for them with actually helping.

-o24

[Cavernio]

The latter (#2 in the OP) idea of helping is how some people feel that they're doing the right thing by never helping people, and is, I think, a good example of how individual ideology actually has huge impacts on the social structure of the world we live in.